Technology and information penetration in China will eventually force the Great Firewall of China to crumble and even lead to the political opening of the Chinese system, according to Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.

Schmidt, who stepped down as Google's CEO last year, remains the head of Google's board and its chief spokesman. He roams the planet speaking to audiences and exploring countries where Google could expand its operations. He has been called Google's "Ambassador to the World," a moniker he doesn't promote but doesn't dispute. He sat down for a long interview with The Cable on the sidelines of the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival last week.

"I believe that ultimately censorship fails," said Schmidt, when asked about whether the Chinese government's censorship of the Internet can be sustained. "China's the only government that's engaged in active, dynamic censorship. They're not shy about it."

When the Chinese Internet censorship regime fails, the penetration of information throughout China will also cause political and social liberalization that will fundamentally change the nature of the Chinese government's relationship to its citizenry, Schmidt believes.

"I personally believe that you cannot build a modern knowledge society with that kind of behavior, that is my opinion," he said. "I think most people at Google would agree with that. The natural next question is when [will China change], and no one knows the answer to that question. [But] in a long enough time period, do I think that this kind of regime approach will end? I think absolutely."

The push for information freedom in China goes hand in hand with the push for economic modernization, according to Schmidt, and government-sponsored censorship hampers both.

"We argue strongly that you can't build a high-end, very sophisticated economy... with this kind of active censorship. That is our view," he said.

The Chinese government is the most active state sponsor of cyber censorship and cyber espionage in the world, with startling effectiveness, Schmidt said. Google and Beijing have been at odds since 2010, when the company announced it would no longer censor search terms on Google.cn and moved the bulk of its Chinese operations to Hong Kong. That move followed a series of Gmail attacks in 2010, directed at Chinese human rights activists, which were widely suspected to be linked to the Chinese government.

More recently, Google has taken an aggressive approach to helping users combat government cyber censorship, by doing things such as warning Gmail users when Google suspects their accounts are being targeted by state-sponsored attacks and telling users when search terms they enter are likely to be rejected by Chinese government censorship filters.

Schmidt doesn't present Google's focus on state-sponsored cyber oppression as a fight between Google and China. Google's policy is focused on helping users understand what is happening to their accounts and giving them the tools to protect themselves, he explained.

"We believe in empowering people who care about freedom of expression," he said. "The evidence today is that Chinese attacks are primarily industrial espionage.... It's primarily trade secrets that they're trying to steal, and then the human rights issues, that obviously they're trying to violate people's human rights. So those are the two things that we know about, but I'm sure that there will be others."

Google still has hundreds of engineers working inside China and maintains a rapidly growing advertising business there. But the Chinese government is likewise doing a lot to make using Google difficult inside China. There are weeks when Gmail services run slow; then mysteriously, the service will begin running smoothly again, Schmidt said. The Chinese censors sometimes issue punitive timeouts to users who enter prohibited search terms. And YouTube, which is owned by Google, is not visible in China.

"It's probably the case where the Chinese government will continue to make it difficult to use Google services," said Schmidt. "The conflict there is at some basic level: We want that information [flowing] into China, and at some basic level the government doesn't want that to happen."

Meanwhile, Schmidt has been circling the globe looking for ways to expand Google's outer frontiers. His last international trip took him to four conflict or recently post-conflict states: Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, and Tunisia.

"I've become particularly interested in the expansion of Google in sort of wacky countries -- you know, countries that have problems," he said. "You can't really know stuff unless you travel and see it. It helps with your impressions and your judgment."

Schmidt believes that smartphone technology can have a revolutionary effect on how people in the developing world operate and he is researching how smartphone use can help fight corruption and bad governance in poor countries. He also sees Google's expansion into the emerging markets as a timely business move.

"The evidence is that the most profitable business in most countries initially is the telecom sector.  The joke is that you know the Somali pirates have to use cellphones, and so the strongest and most fastest-growing legal business in Somalia is the telecom industry," he said.

The revolutions of the Arab Spring show that open information systems can encourage and enable political change, according to Schmidt.

"I think that the countries that we're talking about all had very active censorship regimes, and they failed to censor the Internet. They wired the phone systems, the television was controlled, the newspapers were controlled; it was very hard to find genuinely new dissident voices except on the Internet. So you can think of what happened there as a failure to fully censor, and so it's obvious why we feel so strongly about openness and transparency," he said.

Unlike in China, Google has taken a more active role in other parts of the world by developing tools to spread information that could be used to foster more active democracies, such as with its project to organize and disseminate election information and political candidate data in places like Egypt.

"We're helping with the elections. So we're trying to help them with getting information to the candidates, and these are countries where Google is central to the public sphere," Schmidt said.

Google is also expanding its role in compiling data on government actors and their actions to aid people in the fight against corruption, but here Schmidt warns that only when there is a legal system to prosecute bad actors will this data be transformative.

"You need the data, and then you need somebody who's willing to prosecute the person who lies," he said. "All you have to do is have the information and then the penalty that has to be applied in a fair way, and it would change these countries dramatically."

Information is not enough to topple regimes, but in the end, regimes that fight the openness of information are doomed to fail, he said.

"The worst case scenario is the citizens have enormous information and the government is completely unresponsive. That would be Iran, for example. At some point, that's unstable," said Schmidt. "At some point, it gets worse ... but before they overthrow the current leader, they have to have the information to do that. That's why transparency matters."

The congressional drive to update a 1948 law on how the U.S. government manages its public diplomacy has kicked off a heated debate over whether Congress is about to allow the State Department to propagandize Americans. But the actual impact of the change is less sinister than it might seem.

On May 18, Buzzfeed published a story by reporter Michael Hastings about the bipartisan congressional effort to change the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 (as amended by the Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987). The story was entitled, "Congressmen seek to lift propaganda ban," and focuses on the successful effort by Reps. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) and Adam Smith (D-WA) to add their Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 as an amendment to the House version of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act.

The new legislation would "authorize the domestic dissemination of information and material about the United States intended primarily for foreign audiences." The Buzzfeed article outlines concerns inside the defense community that the Pentagon might now be allowed to use information operations and propaganda operations against U.S. citizens. A correction added to the story notes that Smith-Mundt doesn't apply to the Pentagon in the first place.

In fact, the Smith-Mundt act (as amended in 1987) only covers the select parts of the State Department that are engaged in public diplomacy efforts abroad, such as the public diplomacy section of the "R" bureau, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the body that oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other U.S. government-funded media organizations.

Implementation of the law over the years has been selective, haphazard, and at times confusing, because even State Department bureaus often aren't sure if they have to abide by it. The Thornberry-Smith language is meant to fix that by applying Smith-Mundt to the entire State Department and USAID.

The Defense Department, meanwhile, has its own "no propaganda" rider, enshrined in the part of U.S. code that covers the Pentagon, and that is not affected in any way by either Smith-Mundt as it stands or by the proposed update now found in the defense bill. The only reason the Smith-Mundt modernization bill was attached to the defense bill was because that bill is one that's sure to move and Congress hasn't actually passed a foreign affairs authorization bill in years.

"To me, it's a fascinating case study in how one blogger was pretty sloppy, not understanding the issue and then it got picked up by Politico's Playbook, and you had one level of sloppiness on top of another. And once something sensational gets out there, it just spreads like wildfire," Thornberry told The Cable in an interview today.

He said the update for Smith-Mundt was intended to recognize that U.S. public diplomacy needs to compete on the Internet and through satellite channels and therefore the law preventing this information from being available to U.S. citizens was simply obsolete.

"It should be completely obvious that a law first passed in 1948 might need to be updated to reflect a world of the Internet and satellite [TV]," he said. "If you want the State Department to engage on the war of ideas, it has to do it over the Internet and satellite channels, which don't have geographical borders."

Salon writer Glenn Greenwald interviewed Smith Tuesday and wrote a story questioning whether the law would allow the State Department to try to influence American public opinion though "propaganda." He noted a press release on the Thornberry-Smith legislation which complained that Smith-Mundt had prevented a Minneapolis radio station from replaying VOA broadcasts to Somali-Americans to rebut terrorist propaganda.

Thornberry's response was to say that the 21st century media environment is already so diverse and open that opening Americans' access to one more source of information, State Department-produced news and information, was not likely to propagandize American citizens.

"It makes me chuckle. This is not 1948 when everybody was tuned to a few radio stations and the fear was that the information we were sending to Eastern Bloc countries was going to affect American politics," he said. "The idea that the State Department could be so effective as to impact domestic politics is just silly. This gives Americans the chance to see what the State Department is saying to people all over the world."

In fact, advocates of the bill tout the issue of transparency and oversight of U.S. public diplomacy as one of the main benefits of the new bill. Previously, oversight of State Department public diplomacy efforts abroad was done by an advisory commission inside the State Department that was shut down last year, while Congress and the media has little to no direct access to the material.

Thornberry said that domestic dissemination of the material will actually increase the transparency and oversight of U.S. public diplomacy by laying it bare for Americans to chew over.

"If all these bloggers see the State Department trying to influence something domestically, they will be the first to raise the alarm," he said. "It is always going to be true that you have to look at the effectiveness and truthfulness of the content of the information. But it would no longer be against the law that the American people can see it."

Matt Armstrong, who was the executive director of the State Department's advisory commission on public diplomacy before it got shut down because Congress declined to reauthorize it, explained on his Mountainrunner blog that Smith-Mundt was designed by a Cold War U.S. government that simply didn't trust the State Department to talk directly to the American people.

"The Smith-Mundt Act is misunderstood and often mistaken for ‘anti-propaganda' legislation intended to censor the Government. The reality is the original prohibition on the State Department disseminating inside the U.S. its own information products designed for audiences abroad was, first, to protect the Government from the State Department and, second, to protect commercial media," he wrote.

In an interview today, Armstrong pointed out that the Thornberry-Smith bill explicitly notes that two existing provisions of Smith-Mundt, both of which would remain intact, address concerns that the State Department might overreach in trying to influence Americans. Section 1437 of the existing legislation requires the State Department to defer to private media whenever possible and Section 1462 requires State to withdraw from a government information activity whenever a private media source is found as an adequate replacement.

He said the law as it stands is just not working and doesn't make a lot of sense. "When Cal Ripkin or Michele Kwan go to China, Americans aren't supposed to know that they went or what they did there. In addition, virtually anything that's on a U.S. embassy website is off limits," he said.

The discussion over Smith-Mundt is further distorted by a lack of understanding about what public diplomacy is and when it crosses over into "propaganda."

"Let's face it, it is impossible to communicate and not influence.. The idea here is that U.S. public diplomacy is not based on lies," said Armstrong. "There's this misconception that public diplomacy is propaganda. Propaganda is a lie, a deception, or intentional ambiguity, none of which can be lead to effective public diplomacy by any country, let alone the U.S."

Of course, the State Department's Public Affairs bureaucracy, which speaks to Americans every day in various forms, is capable of "propaganda," but is not covered by Smith-Mundt. The Cable asked State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland at today's press briefing if State supported the Thornberry-Smith legislation.

"We have long thought that aspects of Smith-Mundt need to be modernized, that in a 24-7 Internet age it's hard to draw hard lines like the original Smith-Mundt [Act] did in the ‘40s," she said.

We then asked Nuland whether the State Department has any intent to propagandize American citizens.

"We do not and never have," she said with a smile.

Libya's interim Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the State Department Thursday, but let's hope he didn't check the State Department's website, which still has Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi listed as the head of the country.

Sure, the Arab Spring must keep the State Department web teams busy with revisions, but Qaddafi has been dead for months now. You wouldn't know that by reading the State Department's website, though, as it still shows the all-green Qaddafi flag on its Libya page and refers to Libya as the "Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya." The Libya page was last updated in July 2011, after NATO forces had begun attacking Libya but before the Qaddafi regime fell. (And yes, the State Department gift shop still sells flag pins with the old Libyan flag juxtaposed with the stars and stripes.)

Clinton celebrated the new Libyan government in her remarks after her meeting with Keib.

"Just think, this time last year, the United States was working to build an international coalition of support for the Libyan people, and today we are proud to continue that support as the people of Libya build a new democracy that will bring about peace and prosperity and protect the rights and dignity of every citizen," she said.

"We've seen progress in each of the three key areas of democratic society -- building an accountable, effective government; promoting a strong private sector; and developing a vibrant civil society. And we will stand with the people of Libya as it continues this important work."

Clinton lauded Libya's new election law and endorsed the goal of holding constitutional assembly elections this June. She praised Libya's increasing oil production and acknowledged the country still has a ways to go in the areas of border security, integrating militias, and working toward national reconciliation.

Keib thanked the entire Obama administration "for having been a tremendous support and for their strong leadership in supporting the Libyan revolution," and asked Clinton for help in retrieving the billions that Qaddafi is thought to have stolen from Libya and returning it to the Libyan people.

"In the past year, the dynamics between the U.S. and Libya has been dramatically transformed for the better," he said.

On Wednesday morning, Keib met with President Barack Obama and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon at the White House. He spoke at the U.N. Security Council in the afternoon and attended a dinner at the official residence of U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, sharing a table with actress Angelina Jolie and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Keib said Thursday he was not aware of any training camps in Libya for Syrian rebels, as the Russian government has alleged exist, but said he supports the Syrian opposition and formal recognition of the Syrian National Council. Libya has pledged $100 million for the Syrian cause.

Clinton said the Libyan National Transition Council (NTC) could be a model for the Syrian opposition.

"[The NTC] presented a unified presence that created an address as to where to go to help them, a lot of confidence in their capacities on the ground, their commitment to the kind of inclusive democracy that Libya is now building," Clinton said. "And we are working closely with the Syrian opposition to try to assist them to be able to present that kind of unified front and resolve that I know they feel in their own -- on their behalf is essential in this struggle against the brutal Assad regime."

And Clinton was quick to mention that she raised with Keib the issue of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 108 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the U.S. desire to see the convicted plotter Abdelbaset al-Megrahi returned to prison.

"You know where I stand. I believe that Megrahi should still be behind bars," she said. "We will continue to fight for justice for all the victims of Qaddafi and his regime. And in this particular case, the U.S. Department of Justice has an open case, and it will remain open while we work together on it."

Looks like the State Department hasn't solved its Internet problems yet; the Foggy Bottom headquarters is experiencing another major systems failure today.

"IRM IT teams report internet connectivity has been lost at numerous Washington D.C. metro locations and at overseas posts," read a memo sent to all State Department employees on Monday morning by Ronnie Hartwell at the Information Resource Management (IRM) bureau. "IRM's firewall management staff is aware of the outage, and is working on the issue."

This is the State Department's second massive Internet SNAFU in as many months. In early September, many diplomats and bureaucrats were left without connectivity for most of a day when several bureaus and a chunk of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's staff were cut off from their State Department e-mail accounts.

We're told that e-mail and internet outages have been a problem for a while now, but have been increasing in recent weeks.

State Department spokespeople didn't respond to e-mails seeking comment, for obvious reasons, and phone calls seeking comment have also not been returned.

UPDATE 3:30 PM: Apparently the problems have now been resolved and according to a new note to employees, "all users are able to access the internet."

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) was entangled in a computer hacking scam that targeted international affairs experts and showed evidence of originating from China.

"On August 2, 2011 a small number of people received a phishing email referencing a recent CNAS report. The email came from an AOL email account that has no association with any CNAS network," CNAS external relations director Shannon O'Reilly said in an e-mail Friday afternoon. "We wish to assure users that the phishing email did not come from CNAS nor would CNAS ever ask for password information."

CNAS is a Washington think tank founded by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Kurt Campbell and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. After Campbell and Flournoy entered the Obama administration, they handed over the reins to current CEO Nate Fick and President John Nagl.

The e-mail was sent to people "associated with political and international affairs," according to Mila Parkour, an Internet security expert who analyzed the hacking attempt on the blog Contagio. The e-mail asked the target to log into Gmail via an embedded link. If the target did so, their passwords were stored and their Gmail accounts began to be monitored from an unknown location.

The style of the attack is called "phishing," an attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity.

Government officials and international experts have been the targets of phishing attacks for years and the threat comes from many countries, but Defense Department officials have admitted that the great majority of cyber espionage attempts against the U.S. government come from China. Some officials believe these attacks are carried out with either the explicit or implicit permission of the Chinese government.

There's no way to be sure, but Paul Roberts at the Threat Post blog reported that there are some similarities between the CNAS-related attack and other Chinese cyber espionage attempts.

"Attackers accessed the account using TOR (The Onion Router), so it's unclear where they accessed the account from," he said. "However, other aspects of the spear phishing attack bear the telltale signatures of a China-based operation, including the source IP of the phishing e-mail, which traces back to Taiwan, and the attackers use of Foxmail to create and send the phishing e-mail -- a common trait of China-based spear phishing attacks."

Last January, several U.S. government officials received an e-mail from "dorsetttr1@state.gov," which turned out to be a fake State Department e-mail address. That email was crafted to look like an interagency communication over a U.S.-China joint statement ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Washington.

"This is the latest version of State's joint statement. My understanding is that State put in placeholder econ language and am happy to have us fill in but in a rush to get a cleared version from the WH they sent the attached to Mike," the fake e-mail said.

If the recipient clicked on "the attached," his system would be compromised. One U.S. official told us that a similar gambit was attempted during the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last June.

The latest attack had the subject line, "CNAS Report Calls Declining Satellite Capabilities National Security Concern." That refers to a recent CNAS report that is actually quite interesting and can be found here.

Meanwhile, think tankers and officials around Washington are surely changing their Gmail passwords today and CNAS is warning that this won't be the last fishy phishing e-mail to hit the Washington foreign policy community.

"This incident is illustrative of a growing trend in which users are contacted by what appears to be trusted individuals or institutions in order to acquire sensitive information," O'Reilly said.

Foggy Bottom is flat out denying a British news report on Sunday that said State Department money would be awarded to the BBC to combat Internet censorship around the world.

"The BBC World Service is to receive a "significant" sum of money from the US government to help combat the blocking of TV and internet services in countries including Iran and China," the Guardian reported.

In fact, State has not yet made any decisions on how to spend the $30 million of congressionally appropriated money for fighting internet censorship that is sitting in its coffers. The BBC World Trust Service is just one of the 61 organizations applying for the funds, but has not gotten any approval or grants.

Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Michael Posner called the Guardian article "inaccurate and misleading."

"The BBC World Service Trust has indicated its intention to submit a proposal to the State Department in the area of Internet freedom, as part of an open and competitive solicitation, but we have not yet received this proposal or made any funding decisions," Posner said in a statement.

He also said State has no intention of announcing the awarding of the funds on May 3, Press Freedom Day, as the Guardian article alleged. Our sources said that proposals are due on March 31; the following week, evaluation panels will meet to go over the proposals and make decisions. 

On Capitol Hill, there's a bipartisan push to make sure most of those funds go to the U.S. government funded Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking her to immediately transfer no less than $8 million of the funds to the BBG.

Lugar is concerned that America is falling behind in the public diplomacy competition to countries that are expanding their external media operations, such as China.

"In the same way that our trade with China is out of balance, it is clear to even the casual observer that when it comes to interacting directly with the other nation's public we are in another lop-sided contest," Lugar wrote in a recent report (PDF).

In Senate testimony earlier this month, Clinton agreed.

"We are in an information war, and we are losing that war," she said. "I'll be very blunt in my assessment. Al Jazeera is winning. The Chinese have opened a global English language and multi-language television network. The Russians have opened up an English-language network."

The House's version of the temporary funding bill for the rest of fiscal 2011 calls for $10 million to be transferred from State to BBG toward this effort; the Senate version of the bill calls for $15 million. Aides on the Hill told The Cable that if a significant portion of the funds don't end up in BBG hands, Lugar and other lawmakers will get deeply involved in pressuring State to rethink its decision.

"Given the recent language included in both House and Senate continuing resolutions, the State Department's inability to see the Congressional handwriting on the wall on this issue is nothing short of breathtaking," a GOP Senate aide said.

Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher is recovering after she underwent a successful cancer surgery earlier this month and hopes to return home by Christmas, according to a State Department official in her office.

"Undersecretary Tauscher underwent surgery to treat esophageal cancer earlier this month and her doctors consider the surgery a success," the official told The Cable. "She and her family appreciate everyone's support and prayers."

If the Senate is able to ratify New START by Christmas, as Vice President Joseph Biden is promising, that would be a nice coming home present for Tauscher, who has been a key member of the Obama administration team involved in the negotiation and ratification of the treaty. Tauscher was diagnosed with an early stage of cancer of the esophagus in July. Since then, she underwent full courses of radiation and chemotherapy before having surgery to remove the tumor in early December.

A former Congresswoman from California, Tauscher influenced the arms control debate and led efforts to revamp ballistic missile defense plans at the State Department and as chairwoman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee.

A close friend of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Tauscher received credit for restaffing, reorganizing, and revamping State's arms control bureau which Obama administration officials say was neglected during the George W. Bush administration.

Meanwhile, her chief of staff Simon Limage has been promoted to deputy assistant secretary of State for nonproliferation programs in the bureau of international security and nonproliferation (ISN). There he will report up to the acting assistant secretary Vann Van Diepen. Limage has worked for Tauscher for 10 years, the last two as her chief of staff in her Congressional office and at State.

Tauscher's new chief of staff will be Wade Boese, who was already working in the arms control bureau as a special assistant. Boese joined the staff in September 2009. He previously spent years at the Arms Control Association and worked for Lee Hamilton on the Strategic Posture Commission.

Best wishes to Tauscher for a full and speedy recovery from all of us here at The Cable.

In a one line tweet, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) came out in support of the New START Treaty with Russia Friday.

"Senator Collins announces support for new START treaty," her twitter feed read Friday morning.

In a statement set to released Friday, Collins said the administration had sufficiently addressed her concerns about Russia's tactical nuclear weapons, which are not part of the New START treaty.

"The New START represents a continued effort to achieve mutual and verifiable reductions in nuclear weapons," Collins said. "As the Ranking Member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, I support the President's commitment to reduce not only the number of strategic nuclear weapons through the New START treaty, but also to reduce, in the future, those weapons that are most vulnerable to theft and misuse - and those are tactical nuclear weapons."

That brings the total number of Republican senators who have clearly stated their support for the treaty to two. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) has been working hard to get the treaty ratified for months.

But there are other signs Friday that more and more Republicans are getting ready to vote in favor of the treaty. Sen. John McCain, in a speech at the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) Friday morning, said he hoped New START could be debated "next week."

"My colleague Senator Jon Kyl is doing a tremendous job working with the administration to resolve the issues associated with nuclear modernization. I've been focusing my efforts on addressing the key concerns relating to missile defense. And I think we are very close," McCain said.

That matches what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told The Cable last week -- but it does not match Kyl's most recent statements. Kyl continues to say that there isn't enough time to debate and ratify the treaty this month, given that the tax issue remains unresolved.

One scenario that would push consideration of New START until next year is that the treaty could be brought up for a cloture vote, and then fail to win enough votes to close off debate. This could occur if many GOP senators are unhappy with their ability to bring up amendments, for example, leading them to vote against cloture even though they support ratification of the treaty.

This possibility would allow the administration to say they tried and were stifled by intransigent Senate Republicans. However, it would be a pyrrhic victory - wasting floor time during the lame duck session, and leaving the treaty to an uncertain fate during the next session of Congress.

So all eyes are on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), the same guy who reluctantly brought the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal to the Senate floor Thursday knowing full well the cloture vote would fail, and Kyl, who the treaty supporters are hoping will finally show his cards.

If Kyl is ultimately determined to not strike an agreement this month, the question is whether the administration's intensive effort to find 8 or 9 GOP votes willing to buck their Senate leadership has paid off. As of right now, they've only got Lugar and Collins for sure.

UPDATE: The other Maine Senator, Olympia Snowe, also came out in support of the treaty Friday, kind of. She said her support for moving the treaty this year was was contingent on allowing "sufficient debate and amendments."

Collins' full statement after the jump:

Read on

Score one for Warsaw. President Barack Obama promised Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski on Wednesday that Poland would be admitted to the State Department's visa waiver program, a concession to Poland that also fulfills a key GOP senator's demand for his vote to ratify the New START treaty.

Poland, which is the only member of the 25-country "Schengen area" not able to travel to the United States without obtaining a visa in advance, has been petitioning the administration to let it in the program for a long time. After neighboring countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, and Latvia entered the program, the Poles finally got a promise from the Obama administration that they would work with Congress to make it happen.

"I am going to make this a priority," Obama said, sitting alongside Komorowski. "And I want to solve this issue before very long. My expectation is, is that this problem will be solved during my presidency."

So did Obama just promise to get it done before 2012 or 2016? That's unclear. But it is the strongest statement from this administration yet about the issue.

"I am well aware that this is a source of irritation between two great friends and allies, and we should resolve it," Obama said. "The challenge I have right now is that there is a congressional law that prevents my administration from taking unilateral executive action. So we're going to have to work with Congress to make some modifications potentially on the law."

"I take these declarations with good faith," Komorowski responded. "I feel simply committed to say that Polish public opinion completely does not understand why all the neighbors of Poland, the neighborhood of Poland, can use the Visa Waiver Program, and we can't."

The Obama administration has overseen a rough patch in U.S.-Poland relations. After being hailed as a leader of "new Europe" by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and being promised missile defense installations by President George W. Bush's administration, the Poles watched with alarm as the United States shifted its focus  toward Russia after Obama was elected.

The Poles publicly support the U.S. "reset" policy with Russia, reasoning that improved U.S.-Russia relations increase stability for the entire continent. But privately, they have felt neglected and still smart from what they see as the Obama administration's poor handling of the decision to scuttle missile defense installations planned for Poland and replace them with other types of military cooperation.

But Obama has an ulterior motive in moving the visa waiver program forward unrelated to improving U.S.-Polish relations. As The Cable reported, Sen. George Voinvovich (R-OH) offered to trade his vote on the New START treaty in exchange for this concession to Poland.

Voinovich argued that the Poles had increasing doubts about their relationship with the United States, due to the Russian "reset" policy and New START, and therefore needed to be reassured with the visa action. But Polish Foreign Minister Radislow Sikorski said last month, and Komorowski affirmed today, that Poland supports the ratification of New START. They think the visa issue should be addressed on its own merits.

"Poland supports and fully accepts the aspiration for the ratification of the new START because we believe that this is the investment in the better and safer future, and this is also the investment in the real control over the current situation," Komorowski said.

"You have to have the confidence but you also have to verify, because then, perhaps at the end of the process, we will also push the reset button [with Russia], after 1,000 years of our history," he said.

Entry into the visa waiver program is an issue of national pride and international respect for Poland. The technical reason Poland couldn't enter the program was because the rate of refusal of its citizens who apply for visas to the United States was over 10 percent. In other words, too many Poles were judged by American consular officials as a risk for overstaying their visas and becoming illegal immigrants.

Poland is now under the 10 percent threshold -- but the standard was dropped to 3 percent last year after the Department of Homeland Security failed to meet its own deadlines for an unrelated biometric security program.

So exactly how did Komorowski approach Obama on the visas? "I want all Poles and Polish-Americans to know that President Komorowski raised this issue very robustly with me," Obama said.

We're told by a source who was inside the room that Komorowski didn't make a specific demand, but simply told Obama that this was a very important issue to him and the Polish people, and that  all items of cooperation were on the table between the two allies. .

Obama was joined by Ambassador to Poland Lee Feinstein, who has been dealing with the issue in Warsaw. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs also attended.

Even if the ratification vote on the New START treaty happens this year (as the White House wants) as opposed to next year (as GOP leadership is pushing for) there are some senior senators who are flat out opposed to the agreement, including Senate Intelligence Committee ranking Republican Kit Bond (R-MO).

"I rise today to express my strong opposition to the administration's New START Treaty," Bond said in a statement submitted to the Congressional Record on Nov. 18. "I do so after great deliberation and after initial disposition to support the treaty because of the generic importance of these types of treaties for our Nation. But with what I have learned from classified intelligence information, I cannot in good conscience support this treaty."

Calling the treaty "oversold and overhyped," Bond argued that while the U.S. would have to reduce deployed arsenals under the treaty, the Russian would be allowed to increase arsenals because they are currently below the treaty's maximum allowances. He also railed against Russia's unilateral declaration that it would withdraw from the treaty if they view U.S. missile defense plans as upseting strategic stability, calling the Russian statement "pure and simple manipulation."

Most significantly, Bond claims that based on classified intelligence reports that he's seen, the treaty does not permit adequate verification activities needed to make sure the Russians aren't cheating. All verification activities have stopped since the old treaty expired Dec. 5, but the new proposed verification measures are somewhat different from the ones that lapsed.

"As the vice chairman of this committee, I have reviewed the key intelligence on our ability to monitor this treaty and heard from our intelligence professionals. There is no doubt in my mind that the United States cannot reliably verify the treaty's 1,550 limit on deployed warheads," he said.

He accused the Russians of cheating on previous arms control treaties, including the original START, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, and Open Skies. "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me," he said.

Other senior Republicans, such as Sens. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), John McCain (R-AZ), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have said repeatedly that they are not against the treaty but have concerns that they want to work out before they can offer support. Bond, however, made it clear: As far as he's concerned, the treaty is beyond repair.

"Unfortunately, New START suffers from fundamental flaws that no amount of tinkering around the edges can fix. I believe the better course for our nation, and for global stability, is to put this treaty aside and replace it with a better one."

The U.S.-Russian "reset," meant to repair relations between the two former rivals, has been led by U.S. President Barack Obama and his counterpart, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The White House sees the reset, along with its key deliverable, the New START nuclear reductions treaty, as part of its effort to strengthen Medvedev's credibility within the Russian system, as opposed to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Vice President Joseph Biden spoke of how New START fits into the administration's drive to empower Medvedev at a small roundtable on Nov. 20 with a group of foreign affairs columnists, including your humble Cable guy.

"I do believe that there is a play here," he said. "Medvedev has rested everything on this notion of a reset. Who knows what Putin would do? My guess is he would not have gone there [in terms of committing to the reset], but maybe."

Russia experts aren't so sure that passing New START would strengthen Medvedev's position vis a vis Putin. Most of them believe that Putin was, is, and will likely remain the more powerful of the two Russian leaders.

Biden acknowledged that nobody in Washington, including himself, really knows what's going on inside the Kremlin between Medvedev and Putin, but he truly believes that a stronger "reset" policy, which includes ratifying New START, is good for Medvedev -- and a stronger Medvedev is good for U.S.-Russia relations.

"The centerpiece of where Medvedev is, is this reset. And [START] is the crown jewel inside that reset, because it wasn't Putin pushing this, it was Medvedev," Biden explained. "I'm not suggesting that if START fails, all of the sudden we're back in a Cold War with Russia. But I am saying that the things in the margins that make a big difference right now might be different."

Biden pointed to what he characterized as "unprecedented" Russian cooperation on Afghanistan and Iran as areas where the reset policy has advanced U.S. interests, and which could be jeopardized if New START fails.

But Russia experts from the left and right agreed that the idea of a rift on foreign policy between Medvedev and Putin is often exaggerated in Washington, and that Medvedev isn't likely to have pursued the reset without Putin's agreement. But they also agreed that Putin's likely return to the presidency in 2012 spells trouble for the U.S.-Russia relationship.

"We have a tendency in Washington to see a mortal struggle over the strategic direction of Russia between Medvedev and Putin that simply doesn't exist in reality," said Samuel Charap, fellow at the Center for American Progress. "However, the implications of a return to the presidency for Putin are serious and significant in a negative way for the U.S."

As president, Putin did engage in arms control agreements with the Bush administration, including signing the 2003 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), known as the Moscow Treaty, which would be nullified by New START. But Putin also left office with a bad taste in his mouth regarding arms control deals with Washington, after the Bush administration unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty..

Charap said it's wise to have a "healthy skepticism" about Biden's notion that there are real differences on strategic questions between Medvedev and Putin. "I cannot imagine that major strategic decisions of national import are taken by Medvedev without the consultation of Putin," he said.

Whether or not Putin would be more or less amenable to New START, the Obama administration shouldn't be trying to play the murky game of internal Russian politics, other experts said.

"It's a dangerous path to go down to try to split Medvedev and Putin," said Alexandros Petersen, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. "Although focusing on Medvedev seems to have produced some dividends, we should not be under the illusion that we can elevate Medvedev to be the principal decision maker, because he will never be as long as Putin is around."

"I don't see any evidence to show that there's a split between Medvedev and Putin on this issue," Petersen said. "They actually agree on this issue, which is that they are willing to cooperate now but they will take any opportunity to get out of their responsibilities while holding the U.S. to their side of the agreement."

In an interview with Foreign Policy, Russia's former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, who served under President Putin, described the Medvedev-Putin relationship as that between "a boss and senior assistant who temporarily occupies the position of president of the country."

When asked if he thinks Putin will run for president in 2012, Kasyanov said, "I wouldn't say ‘run,' just step in."

President Obama is personally committed to pushing for a Senate vote on the New START treaty during this lame duck session of Congress. But he's going to Europe tonight, so he's ordering Vice President Joseph Biden to make it happen.

"As Senator [Harry] Reid said yesterday, there is time on the Senate calendar to get this treaty ratified this year. So I've asked Vice President Biden to focus on this issue day and night until it gets done," Obama said just before he met with top Cabinet officials and pro-treaty senators at the White House Thursday.

"It is a national security imperative that the United States ratify the New START treaty this year, he said. "There is no higher national security priority for the lame duck session of Congress. The stakes for American national security are clear, and they are high."

The president also appealed to the spirit of bipartisanship that has led to unity in support for many, but not all, past international arms treaties.

"As Ronald Reagan said, ‘we have to trust, but we also have to verify.' In order for us to verify, we've got to have a treaty," he said. "And if we delay indefinitely, American leadership on nonproliferation and America's national security will be weakened."

What Obama didn't explain was how the administration intends to convince the Senate GOP leadership to agree to a vote this year. Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has said he doesn't think there's enough time this year to finish work on the treaty, and 10 incoming Republican senators wrote on Thursday that they deserved the opportunity to weigh in after they are seated next year.

When asked whether he thought the treaty would pass this year, Obama simply stated, "I'm confident that we should be able to get the votes."

The meeting included Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA), ranking Republican Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright, James Baker, and Henry Kissinger, former Secretaries of Defense William Cohen and William Perry, former National Security Advisor Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright, and former Sen. Sam Nunn.

Obama's full remarks after the jump:

Read on

Whether it's Chinese hackers breaking into the Gmail accounts of leading dissidents, or Russian hackers sniffing around the Pentagon, the cyber wars are heating up. Barack Obama entered office vowing to wage them more effectively than ever before.

"From now on, our digital infrastructure -- the networks and computers we depend on every day -- will be treated as they should be: as a strategic national asset," Obama said in May, "Protecting this infrastructure will be a national security priority."

So, is the United States finally getting its act together?

The short answer is yes, but there's much more to be done, and the Obama administration's first-year efforts have been undermined with infighting, sudden resignations, and some confusion about who is doing what. The administration has vastly increased the resources dedicated to cyber security, completed a full internal review, and moved to reform the bureaucracy. But there are still large gaps between the level of the threat and the government capability to meet it, as the actors inside the system jostle for positioning and power.

"This administration has paid more attention to the problem than any proceeding administration, but they're just at the starting point so we'll have to see how it all fits together," said James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Any discussion of Obama era cyber policy has to begin with the Defense Department, the part of government with the most resources, the most vulnerable assets, and the most power and influence over the issue. Leading that effort politically is Deputy Secretary Bill Lynn, who is not well known as a "cyber guy" but has taken a personal interest in the issue and is extremely active. As the most senior government person with direct involvement, he gives DoD top cover and profile, and is also heavily involved in the creation of DOD's new Cyber Command, which will be based at Fort Meade, the home of the National Security Agency, expected to open soon.

Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, will lead the Cyber Command, assuming he gets confirmed by the Senate. When that happens, almost all of DoD's cyber resources will fall under his purview, greatly increasing the already hefty cyber portfolio he had at NSA, which houses the government's most secret cyber warriors, the guys who go on offense against international threats.

Also crucial to mention is Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former commander of Strategic Command, where many cyber attacks are defended. Cartwright has been talking about what he calls the "dysfunctional" U.S. approach to cyber security for years and he's regarded as a smart, independent, and important voice inside the Pentagon.

The non-military networks, which DoD doesn't control, fall to the Homeland Security Department, which has had a rough time on cyber policy in its first years. When DHS's cyber czar Rod Beckstrom resigned last March after only a year, he blamed the NSA in his resignation letter for not cooperating with him and seeking to hoard the issue inside DOD.

DHS is also supposed to be forging the relationships between the the government and private corporations to share info on cyber attacks. That initiative is led by Deputy Under Secretary Phil Reitenger, who works under Rand Beers and is aided by former Office of Management and Budget official Bruce McConnell and Rear Adm. Mike Brown.

Outsiders lament that Reitenger, a former Microsoft executive, has announced no real policy on the issue and few public-private partnership exist. Google is working on cooperation with the NSA, but some observers believe companies are wary of linking with DHS because that department is so dependent on contractors, which might be sharing intel with their competitors.

McConnell provides DHS with a valuable link back to OMB, a link the DHS folks will need if they plan to fund their expansion of cyber efforts, which could include 1,000 new cyber personnel. Brown, who is expected to move at some point over to the new Cyber Command, is credited with greatly improving the management of the effort at DHS but is not really a policy guy, per se.

Over at the White House, the president finally named Howard Schmidt as the new cyber coordinator in December after reportedly offering the position to over two dozen people who turned it down. Schmidt, the holder of two degrees from the University of Phoenix,is said to have lobbied hard for the job. Bush holdover Melissa Hathaway, who led the Obama administration's review, had been expected for the role, but quit the administration shortly after the review came out.

Insiders said that Hathaway had personality clashes both with her staff and with the administration, leading them to tell her she would not be appointed, which prompted her resignation. "She talked herself out of the job by fighting with everyone," one insider said.

One Bush era holdover who is still on the job is Schmidt's deputy Chris Painter, who was acting coordinator after Hathaway left. A former Los Angeles criminal prosecutor, Painter became famous when he brought down notorious cyber hacker turned consultant Kevin Mitnick. Painter also worked at the Justice Department, giving him a great sense of the legal issues involved in cyber security.

Painter's other claim to fame is his work with a cyber official everyone praises, the FBI's Sean Henry. The pair took the initiative to build bilateral agreements with a host of countries to allow cooperation on investigating and prosecuting cyber crimes. Henry is also said to have brought the FBI's cyber operation into the 21^st century and was recently promoted to head up the FBI's Washington field office.

Other notable Obama-era cyber officials Vivek Kundra, the Federal Chief Information officer, Robert "Bear" Bryant, the cyber counterintelligence guru who runs the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, who leads a nation-wide cyber recruiting effort, and the State Department's Chief Information and Security Officer John Streufert, who is credited with reducing cyber risk by moving State towards a paperless cyber system so that files could be updated in real time.

There are reports around Washington that the White House is taking the news of China's intrusion into Google seriously, convening high-level meetings to take the hardest look yet into the vulnerability of American government and corporate assets to Chinese government cyber espionage.

And what is the State Department doing to confront the Chinese government on a diplomatic level? Apparently, discussing it over some dim sum.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley proudly announced at Wednesday's press conference:

"We have had a discussion today here in Washington with officials from the [Chinese] embassy. We raised the issue. And as the secretary said, it is a serious issue. You know, the incident raises questions about both Internet freedom and the security of the Internet in China. And we've asked them for an explanation."

The sharp State Department press corps pressed Crowley for details about the meeting. That's where his story unraveled a bit.

How many State officials met with how many Chinese officials? Apparently one of each; Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Shear met with the Chinese DCM. And did the meeting happen at the embassy or at the State Department? Neither.

"It might have been at lunch," Crowley said, inspiring a round of laughter by the reporters. It's not clear even whether the lunch was about the Google attacks, or if it just came up.

Still, there are signs that the State Department is planning to take the Chinese to task over the incident. Today there are reports that State will send a formal protest to Beijing about it (State didn't respond to requests to confirm).

And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will give what is being billed as a major speech on "Internet freedom" on Jan. 21. A State Department official previously told The Cable that the speech was going to be about innovation on the Internet. Clinton dined with Google CEO Eric Schmidt just last week, but State isn't saying whether they are coordinating their response.