“Access to technology is good for the social fabric of the state and therefore the national security of the U.S.,” said independent Internet researcher Collin Anderson Thursday during a panel discussion hosted by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute.

“The reality is in most of these states, control of information is fundamental to political repression,” Anderson said.

The institute’s paper on how to ensure the free flow of information globally, released Wednesday, also argues that limited or outdated U.S. sanctions policy actually can unintentionally aid restrictive governments.

Personal communications technology, including hardware such a cell phones and software such as anti-virus protection he said, should be treated as protected exports.

Open access to technology allows for the exchange of ideas and facilitates social and political organization, agreed Danielle Kehl, policy program associate at the Open Technology Institute, a think tank dedicated to the open access to technology.

“Often when people start to talk, they want change,” Kehl said in an interview. When citizens organize, they are better able to put pressure on restrictive regimes to implement change.

The institute research showed that some U.S. policies get in the way of the U.S. open-technology message. For example, popular web services and educational tools such as Khan Academy block users originating from sanctioned countries, said Kehl, a co-author of the paper.

Blocked access to American products can send a negative message to citizens and stir up anti-U.S. sentiment, Kehl said. Governments of those countries subject to U.S. sanctions – Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, and North Korea – use that to their advantage.

“Inadvertently blocking access to those tools works against us,” Kehl said.

The U.S. implemented a trade embargo on goods, technology and services with Sudan in 1997, a move that has had hurt the U.S. image in that country. “The message they get is that U.S. government does not like them,” Kehl said.

“Sanctions policy always needs to be looked at and reformed. We support access to information in sanctioned countries as a principle, but the barrier tends to be that sanctions are so complicated,” said Ian Schuler, panelist and founder of the New Rights Group.

Furthermore, when tools such as American-made antivirus software are blocked, citizen technology is vulnerable to the viruses repressive governments use to limit access to information and violate citizen cyber security, Anderson said.

Groups such as the Syrian Electronic Army, Iranian Cyber Army and cyber jihadists in Sudan are “state-sponsored actors that are using the disconnect between technological security and the user as a way to round up political dissonance,” he said.

In Western countries, laws such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act and the Wiretap Act allow for use of surveillance technology, but as regulated by civil rights and stringent legal compliance, said Michael Gershberg, of the law firm Steptoe & Johnson LLP and an author of a chapter on surveillance technology in the book “National Security Law in the News.”

Western information technologies are not subject to the same regulation abroad, Gershberg noted, and can fall into the hands of authoritarian leaders – risking, for example, human rights abuses that are difficult to prosecute.

Besides its benefit to citizens of those repressed countries, access to technology also opens the way for U.S. companies to do business in countries with restrictive governments, panelists said.

Dealing with sanctioned countries, however, “requires substantial expense for companies in terms of compliance programs,” according to Brad Brooks-Rubin, an attorney who specializes in trade sanctions and exports controls.

Perceptions of the drone program are shaped by the media, whose access to relevant information is limited, according to a recent National Security Law Journal-sponsored panel of journalists and scholars at George Mason University.

U.S. targeted drone strikes resulted in the killing of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud was in October. Source: flickr

“The reporting environment is shaped by secrecy and paranoia,” said Tara McKelvey, a panelist and BBC national security reporter. The Obama White House, McKelvey said, values secrecy more than previous administrations.

McKelvey has written extensively on the questions surrounding the legality of targeted drone killings and noted the difficulty in obtaining information. For example, gaining access to Creech Air Force base in Nevada, where remotely piloted aircrafts around the globe are controlled, is nearly impossible.

Targeted drone killings have resulted in the deaths of wanted terrorists across the world, notably and recently of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud in October.

Such high-profile killings demand media attention, panelists said.

“Even the congressional intelligence committees, which exist to be told about these secret programs, had to fight to get a temporary look at the Justice Department’s legal opinion justifying, for example, the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the only American who has been deliberately targeted and killed,” said Scott Shane, a New York Times national security reporter.

Shane has questioned the administration’s claims about drone program for years. He and colleague Charlie Savage filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit with the Justice Department to obtain a 2010 document from the Office of Legal Counsel that discusses the justification for targeted killing of Americans, NPR reported earlier this year.

The panelists also noted that the drone strike program lends itself to an asymmetrical advantage if there is not adequate media attention —the fighting is not human-to-human but rather seductively billed as using pinpoint precision and not involving U.S. troop casualties, thus it is able to change the nature of warfare.

James Carafano, a national security and foreign policy expert at The Heritage Foundation, a conservation think tank, said there is not much need for debate over the drone program as long as the use of force is proportional to the task and as long as civilian lives are spared.

“This technology absolutely fits totally and cleanly and easily under the existing laws of land warfare, which derive from a just war tradition, which we’ve been working under for centuries,” Carafano said.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the New America Foundation estimate that there have been 3,149 drone-related fatalities in Pakistan since 2004—and that high-profile targets accounted for 49 fatalities, or less than 2 percent, but deaths of children have amounted to 175, or 5.6 percent.

The cost in civilian lives is cause for concern, and the government needs to be more transparent if it wishes to have the support of the American people, the two journalists said.

A July 2013 poll by the Pew Research Center revealed that 61 percent Americans approve of the use of drones, and among the 39 countries surveyed, that number was the second highest only to Israel, which, along with China, is the only other country in the world with a drone program.

“We’re beginning to have the debate that, as a reporter who advocates for the freedom of information, I would have thought that we’d want to have some time ago,” Shane said.

One solution to provide more oversight that was posed during the discussion was the creation of a robust Inspector General’s office specifically assigned to the drone program, which would audit the program and report its findings. “That is great idea,” McKelvey said, adding later that such oversight would help hold the government accountable.

“I want people to know about what the program is,” McKelvey said.  “I want government officials to think about what they’re doing.”