by Keith Locke
In breaking news Google has just announced on their blog that they may very soon close down their operations in China.
Why? Because a few months ago they discovered that an attack from a location in China had been launched against their corporate infrastructure.
The aim of the attack was to pull information about the emails sent and received by Chinese human rights activists using gmail. Google’s investigation into the attack also uncovered other monitoring of Chinese human right activists through gmail.
In response Google has stated
“We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results….
we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”
While the news of further attacks on Chinese human rights activists’ privacy are distressing it is heartening to see Google taking such a brave position. In the course of my own work I frequently deal with Chinese human rights activists or Falun Gong members who have come to New Zealand fleeing persecution in China.
They seek my help with issues such as gaining residency (or refugee status) and getting their family members safely out of China. They often tell tales of shocking violence and persecution – torture, arrests without trial and harassment of family members.
It is time that governments around the world were brave enough to take a similar stance to Google and condemn the Chinese government’s infringements of human rights.
Published in Environment & Resource Management by Keith Locke on Wed, January 13th, 2010
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on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
They have more than ever strict watch on even everyday business and have policy to persecute anyone and everyone who seems to have an opinion which ‘might be’ different from the governments’.
China is being run the dictator way and this is the way it will continue doing so. It has big business and political might and no one country can challenge its ‘internal’ ways of working.
This way the Chinese government works thus making it more centered dictatorial and non responsive.
What if all the foreign business leaves China? Chinese government then would lay the blame on US and its discriminatory policies.
They even have home prepared replies and logic to convince and ’shut up’ their masses or else they too would go the falun gong way.
Wake up China, the sun rises in the sky and not in some government office.
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Then I am looking forward to reading that Google is pulling out of New Zealand after news that New Zealand Human Rights Activists (and everyone else) will have their email scanned by Echelon styled ‘data dictionary’ parsers… Google wont want to participate in the cell phone network as that is tracked and traced too. Although, the New Zealand Government could use as it defence that Google set the bar when they arbitrarily removed from the cloud, Google’s ‘mildgreen.blogspot.com’ containing more than a thousand social comments much of it inconsistent with dominant political ideology.
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All the change involves is the “system” is required by law to have the ability to track all of a targeted individuals communications and allow access to this (historic record) more easily than before (and with less ability for any questioning of this process and with less accountability to anyone with a role to protect the human rights and civil liberties of the person being surveillanced).
Of course it can be argued that if China had this capacity they would identify democratic (human rights) activists as threats to their regime and surveillance them – but they would already have human rights and democracy on their own keyword search surveillance systems.
So I guess in the end, it’s not about the capacity of “government” to surveillance, it’s about who they choose to surveillance and for what purpose. But the ability of government to surveillance society more easily is of itself changing the balance of power between government and people in our democracies and thus changing the society in which we live for the worse (said to be the price we have for security – but in an age where there is growing fear of middle class awareness about their becoming part of the underclass with the development of global elites holding a huge share of the worlds wealth, one wonders if democracy is itself in a state of managed change towards the China model).
One day the Chinese communist government may one day rule China through a form of parliamentary consent (where opposition to their government is still suppressed) and “by this time” this may be closer to the form of government we have in the West than we would like to think.
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I’ve seen the price list on wikileaks
Although perhaps the chinese government wanted so much data that they couldn’t afford it, or who knows…
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After all, the USA with its’ Patriot Act requires all telecommunications (landline, mobile and internet) within the USA to be available for intelligence agencies to scan – bit harsh of Google to complain about China, when their own jurisdiction back home is far more intrusive, far more dictatorial, and surveilling most of the citizens of the USA to a very much higher degree than was ever permissable before 2002.
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Google is more corrupt than a boatfull of Lawyars
and accountants
take ‘alf the effin world with ‘em…
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“I have never known the chinese other than as pragmatic honest traders…”
A problem that we encounter at work is electronic components being supplied to us which have all the correct markings from the approved manufacturer, but the quality isn’t as good. Perhaps the writing is slightly blurred or the wrong colour. On investigation, we find that the components are fakes, with inferior performance and more likely to fail. It can be hard to identify just where these came from but the Asian region in general is usually implicated and often there will be at least one Chinese person or company that is implicated or at least has turned a blind eye.
Trevor.
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http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article16486.html
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But to cite the inside rogue op line, everytime something like a hacking or a 9/11 occurs, is why a person would have to handle themselves “pravda” (to mock themselves before others did).
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However, google will soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different. Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties.
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When you consider the emerging business opportunities in China, Google of course would love to be in the middle of this growth. That being said, their presence may have chipped away at the image that Google wanted to project to the world. Still at the end of the day, Google is a business that pays close attention to public opinion and how that opinion could affect their future business. One only need take a quick look at the China based search engine Baidu.com to see how much money is at stake. Baidu is one of hottest traded stocks around.
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