At his confirmation hearing Thursday, Secretary of State-designate John Kerry addressed how he views Internet-based threats, echoing comments made by current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the day before at a House hearing on the Benghazi incident. Read More

Ben Scott, one of Hillary Clinton's former innovation advisors at the State Department, has joined the New America Foundation. Scott will be based in Berlin, where he is currently a visiting fellow at the German think ... Read More

We all know that the Internet has transformed the way that the United States conducts diplomacy, and the way that it views national security, but where should we look to find evidence of this? This is the wide-ranging subject matter of a new paper published on Tuesday by Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. The paper provides a round-up of some of the major turns of events between 2005 and 2011 in the realms of Internet governance, the development of online public diplomacy at the State Department, the evolution of the Internet-fueled Arab Spring, and the establishment of the shadowy U.S. Cyber Command in Fort Meade, Maryland, among other things. Read More

In an executive order signed Sunday and released by the White House on Monday as President Barack Obama spoke at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial in Washington, D.C., the president called for financial restrictions on entities involved in the disruption, monitoring, or tracking of computers and networks by the Syrian or Iranian governments. The order would block property in the U.S. owned by people involved firsthand in network tracking and disruption, as well as people who provided technology, finances or expertise. It calls out Syrian and Iranian Internet service providers by name, but may be inclusive enough to cause problems for the Swedish telecommunications supplier Ericsson, which has supplied Syrian telecommunications firm Syriatel, said the Electronic Freedom Foundation's Jillian C. York. Read More

The State Department on Friday started promoting a new cartoon it created highlighting Iran's online system of censorship. It started promoting the video on Twitter in English, Chinese, Farsi and Arabic with the hashtag ... Read More

The State Department is in the final stages of creating an online portal to help Indian-Americans donate to non-government entities in India. Read More

Tomorrow, State Dept. spokeswoman Victoria Nelund will take questions chosen from those posed on Twitter using the #AskState hashtag. It's a first for State, although as Alex Howard notes the department has a history of investing itself in engagement over Twitter. Read More