"The man who saved Iran" might be the most hyperbolic thing blogged about Jared Cohen this summer, but not by much. The huzzahs that greeted the news that the 28-year-old State Department staffer called on Twitter to delay a service blackout during the height of the Tehran street protests threatened to obscure the true complexity of Foggy Bottom's new, technology-enabled approach to diplomacy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of it herself in a commencement speech at Barnard College on May 18. "With social-networking tools that you use every day to tell people you've gone to get a latte or that you're going to be running late," she said, "you can unite your friends through Facebook to fight human trafficking."
And in her agenda-setting July 15 speech to the Council of Foreign Relations, Clinton reiterated, "We are working at the State Department to ensure that our government is using the most innovative technologies not only to speak and listen across borders, not only to keep technologies up and going, but to widen opportunities, especially for those who are too often left on the margins."
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