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Bio
Jared Cohen
Jared Cohen is the director of Google Ideas, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the co-author (along with Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt) of The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. Previously, he served as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff and as a close advisor to both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.
Cohen has conducted research in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and throughout Africa. As part of his research, he has interviewed members of Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and the Taliban. He is the author of the books Children of Jihad and One Hundred Days of Silence. He co-authored (with Schmidt) "The Digital Disruption: Connectivity and the Diffusion of Power," which appeared in Foreign Affairs just a few months before the Arab Spring. 2013's The New Digital Age offers a vision of our increasingly interconnected future, answering the question of how everything in the physical world will change over the next decade as five billion new users enter the digital world. Among Cohen's additional publications are Diverting the Radicalization Track (Policy Review), Iran's De Facto Opposition: Youth in Post-revolutionary Iran (SAIS Review), and Passive Revolution: Is Political Resistance Dead or Alive in Iran (Hoover Digest).
In 2011, Vanity Fair named Cohen a member of the "Next Establishment," The Washington Post and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government named him one of six "Top American Leaders," and Foreign Policy listed him as one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers." He was named by Christian Science Monitor as one of the "Top 30 Under 30"; named by Business Insider as one of the "20 Brazen Young Professionals to Watch"; selected by the Huffington Post as one of "100 Game Changers"; and chosen by Devex as one of the "40 Under 40." He also won the 2010 and 2011 Tribeca Film Festival Disruptive Innovation Awards for his intervention in Iran's Green Revolution and most influential article of the year, respectively. He has been awarded the Secretary of State's Meritorious Honor Award twice, once by Condoleezza Rice and once by Hillary Clinton.
Jared Cohen currently serves as a member of the National Counterterrorism Center's (NCTC) Director's Advisory Board. He received his BA from Stanford University and his M.Phil in international relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah. ARPANET's purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. As the network quickly expanded, academics and researchers in other fields began to use it as well. In 1971 the first program for sending e-mail over a distributed network was developed; by 1973, the year international connections to ARPANET were made (from Britain and Norway), e-mail represented most of the traffic on ARPANET. The 1970s also saw the development of mailing lists, newsgroups and bulletin-board systems, and the TCP/IP communications protocols, which were adopted as standard protocols for ARPANET in 1982–83, leading to the widespread use of the term Internet. In 1984 the domain name addressing system was introduced. In 1986 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET, a distributed network of networks capable of handling far greater traffic, and within a year more than 10,000 hosts were connected to the Internet. In 1988 real-time conversation over the network became possible with the development of Internet Relay Chat protocols (seechat). In 1990 ARPANET ceased to exist, leaving behind the NSFNET, and the first commercial dial-up access to the Internet became available. In 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public (via FTP). The Mosaic browser was released in 1993, and its popularity led to the proliferation of World Wide Web sites and users. In 1995 the NSFNET reverted to the role of a research network, leaving Internet traffic to be routed through network providers rather than NSF supercomputers. That year the Web became the most popular part of the Internet, surpassing the FTP protocols in traffic volume. By 1997 there were more than 10 million hosts on the Internet and more than 1 million registered domain names. Internet access can now be gained via radio signals, cable-television lines, satellites, and fibre-optic connections, though most traffic still uses a part of the public telecommunications (telephone) network. The Internet is widely regarded as a development of vast significance that will affect nearly every aspect of human culture and commerce in ways still only dimly discernible.
The point of this is that social networking / info sharing technology puts regime shaking power into the hands of the masses, who figure out how to use it in much the same way that water figures out how to flow down a hill. The implications are scary for governments that seek to repress and censor their citizens in an effort to maintain control among the elite, but promising for societies that thrive off of the innovation that comes from democratic freedom.
It's cool to see this young guy from the State Department is being allowed to develop this concept as part of his diplomatic duties. It's more progressive a stance that one would expect from any government. It's a sign of hope for the U.S.
