Massive New Internet Surveillance in the Works in China

Yesterday Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deep Links blog posted a detailed report on new Chinese domestic surveillance software. O’Brien reports:

The Chinese Ministry of Industry and IT’s announcement that all PCs sold in China must include government-approved filtering software is a profoundly worrying development for online privacy and free speech in that country. While the application, “Green Dam Youth Escort”, claims to only block pornographic sites, the access to a home computer such filtering software requires means that it could also have the power to conduct all sorts of other surveillance and control — far more than China’s current monitoring and blocking systems at the ISP level permits.

On present day operating systems, government-controlled software that are granted such admin rights would be able to collect IM and email conversations, install keyloggers, relay microphone and webcam recordings. It could prevent or detect the use of web proxies (the primary method of Chinese citizens seeking an uncensored Internet), and scan for privacy-protecting software like Tor and PGP. Business users of Chinese PCs will be vulnerable to state-sponsored corporate espionage. Foreign users of computers in China will be unable to guarantee the security of their communications.

…

But until now, such software has relied on duping its users as to its function or on the poor security of their operating systems. “Green Dam Youth Escort” will allow the Chinese state an automatic foothold on every Chinese PC, installing their own code remotely through automatic upgrades.

O’Brien notes that the movement of this spyware will be dependent in part on the extent to which American tech vendors agree to allow it. Dell, who was under fire yesterday from Credo Action for their assistance in Chinese government censorship, seems hesitant to install this spyware as-is and wants protections that it’s only for porn and can be disabled by users.

Stories like this are important because like China’s shutting down of Twitter and censorship of news sites around the Tiananmen Square anniversary, it’s yet another example of how scared the Chinese government is of their citizenry and what they are reading. These are hallmarks of a totalitarian society and should be massive warning signs for both Western technology companies who are considering working with them and Western governments who seek to prioritize economic relationships over advancing freedom and human rights. But this is simply unacceptable behavior for a government that aims to be a respected member of the global community and as long as it continues, China should be condemned.

Dodd Filling In

The New York Times has a very interesting article today about the impact Senator Ted Kennedy’s absence from the Senate for health reasons is having on the process towards landmark healthcare reform. What’s especially important to note is that reform is moving forward in Kennedy’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee because of the work of the number two Democrat on HELP: Chris Dodd.

Mr. Kennedy’s close friend, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, who is the No. 2 Democrat on the health committee, has taken on the main role. He is supported by the leaders of three health care “working groups” that Mr. Kennedy created in November, which is when he tapped Mr. Dodd to be his “chief deputy.”

Mr. Dodd met with Mr. Kennedy about the health legislation and had dinner at his home on Sunday. Mr. Kennedy is also in touch by phone with President Obama.

Mr. Dodd, in a conference call with reporters, said he was holding out hope for Mr. Kennedy’s return. “My hope is he’ll be back at any, any one of these days,” he said.

“There is also a spirit he brings to, a dynamic that is hard to quantify,” Mr. Dodd said. “And so, he’ll be missed when he’s not there. But my hope is that he will be back as frequently as he can to play that role.”

What’s interesting about the Times piece is that it’s on a subject that seems to largely be ignored by the press: the functional impact of Senator Kennedy’s battle with brain cancer and how Senator Dodd has stepped in to ensure that healthcare reform moves forward at full speed. Dodd has not received any noticable credit, either in the DC press or back home in Connecticut, for the yeoman’s work he’s doing to guarantee we get major healthcare legislation authored and passed.

Yesterday Dodd penned an op-ed in the New London Day in which he described his vision for HELP’s healthcare reform legislation and the importance that any healthcare bill include  a public health insurance option.

This week, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee will put forward a historic health care reform proposal. As a senior member of that committee, I’ve been asked by its chairman, Sen. Edward Kennedy, to help lead these efforts, working with President Barack Obama and our congressional colleagues.

For me, the bottom line is that we need to preserve the ability for people to choose their own doctors, hospitals, and insurance plans. If you like what you have, you can keep it; if you don’t, you’ll finally have affordable options available to you. In my view, that must include a public health insurance option in addition to private options.
Almost equally as important, the bill must drive down costs for families, businesses and government alike. The Council of Economic Advisers just found that if we shave a mere 1.5 percent off the growth of health care costs each year, families will have thousands of extra dollars in their pockets to spend on a down payment for a first home or to send a child to college. Small businesses, which pay higher premiums than larger businesses, will have more affordable choices they need to compete and innovate. Reducing costs is absolutely essential to getting our economy back on track.

Thirdly, we need to expand coverage. Eighty-six million Americans go without coverage at some point every year; millions more live in fear that they may lose their job and with it their health insurance. Failing to cover everyone costs the average family in Connecticut $700 every year.

I know that Senator Dodd would want nothing more than for his dear friend Ted Kennedy to be healthy and driving healthcare reform himself from the HELP committee. But Dodd’s leadership in his absence has been tremendous and it’s good to finally see it recognized, if even in passing, by the Times.

I think a landmark piece of healthcare legislation that includes a public health insurance option will pass this year. And when it does, its passage will only have been possible thanks to the hard work and dedication of Senator Chris Dodd to improve the lives of all Americans by ensuring they have the healthcare they need and deserve.

CT Senate Vacancy Bill

Today’s Hartford Courant editorializes in favor of the recently passed bill by the state senate that would require that there be special elections – and not appointments by the Governor – to fill Senate vacancies. This would be a great step forward for democracy in Connecticut and the legislation is a model that would surely be useful for other states. This year alone we’ve seen appointments fill vacancies in Illinois, New York, Delaware, and Colorado. Not having elected officials be replaced in an election is fundamentally flawed, as it introduces power politics to what should be the decision of the citizenry.

What makes this legislation especially important is that it realigns the political dynamic in Connecticut. Currently Jodi Rell is the state’s Republican governor, but there are huge Democratic majorities in the state senate and assembly, as well as a full Democratic House delegation, Democrat Chris Dodd and Connecticut for Lieberman Joh Lieberman (who now caucuses with Democrats). Lieberman has been talked of as a possible person who President Obama might consider for nomination to an ambassadorship or cabinet level position. While I wouldn’t necessarily like Lieberman in the cabinet, I’d be all in favor of him serving as ambassador to Israel or something similar.

In an email, quoted with permission, Charles Monaco (aka tparty of My Left Nutmeg) gives the rundown of what will likely happen to this legislation:

Rell will veto it, but if the override vote goes the same way as the original vote did, the senate vacancy bill has the votes for an override. And then perhaps Obama can appoint Lieberman Ambassador to Get The Fuck Out of the Senate.

I hear the Department of Complete Fucking Political Irrelevancy is a great place to work too.

Heh, indeedy.

…Adding, the numbers in the CT Senate are not certain for a veto override. The bill passed 21-12, but three Democrats missed the vote. It would depend on how those senators vote.

Kristof: Prolong Dictatorship!

Any reader of this blog knows that I think New York Times columnist Nick Kristof is one of the most intellectually dishonest and profoundly unserious members of the American press who write with any regularity on China. That’s why I found it quite surprising last night to read Kristof’s column on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests. Kristof was the Beijing bureau chief for the Times then — something I did not know — and was covering the protests. His retelling of the protests and the zeitgeist in Beijing in 1989 is powerful and it seems Kristof is walking down what for him is a rarely walked path: criticizing the Chinese government and ruling Communist Party. Of course I was wrong to get excited about the first half of his colum, as what followed in the second half was Grade A wankery.

I saw it coming when I read this line:

One stocky rickshaw driver had tears streaming down his cheeks as he drove past me to display a badly wounded student so that I could photograph or recount the incident. That driver perhaps couldn’t have defined democracy, but he had risked his life to try to advance it.

Yes, because obviously an uneducated worker in a totalitarian state has no idea what democracy looks like. No idea what his basic rights are or why it is fundamentally wrong for a government to respond to mass protest by rolling out armed troops and giving them the order to fire on peaceful students. How could this man possibly know that a government must be accountable to its people and not the other way around? Naturally Kristof’s column only got worse from here.

So, 20 years later, what happened to that bold yearning for democracy? Why is China still frozen politically — the regime controls the press more tightly today than it did for much of the 1980s — even as China has transformed economically? Why are there so few protests today?

One answer is that most energy has been diverted to making money, partly because it’s a safer outlet. One of my Chinese friends explains that if he were to protest loudly, he might be arrested; if he were to protest quietly, it would be a waste of time. “I may as well just spend the time watching a pirated DVD,” he said.

Another answer is that many of those rickshaw drivers and bus drivers and others in 1989 were demanding not precisely a parliamentary democracy, but a better life — and they got it. The Communist Party has done an extraordinarily good job of managing China’s economy and of elevating economically the same people it oppresses politically.

Living standards have soared, and people in Beijing may not have the vote, but they do have an infant mortality rate that is 27 percent lower than New York City’s.

Kristof apparently was the lone member of the press who covered the lesser-known Tiananmen Square protests for government action to increase infant mortality that faced a brutal crackdown leaving hundreds dead in June of 1989.

Kristof asks “Why are there so few protests today?” First, Kristof is clearly unaware of the country that he is writing about. Earlier this year The Strait Times reported on the number of mass protests in 2005:  “China’s Public Security Ministry reported 87,000 mass incidents in 2005, up 6.6 per cent over the number in 2004, and 50 per cent over the 2003 figure.” To put it differently, in 2005 in China there were on average of 238 mass protests every day. What Kristof likely means, though his word choice does not make this clear, is why are there so few protests of the scale of Tiananmen that garner international attention? That’s a much harder question to ask, but I would hazard that the Chinese government has learned how to stifle these protests, detain dissidents, and jail advocates for democratic reform prior to any boiling point. Tiananmen Square is surveilled by countless video camera, armed guards, rooftop sentries, and undercover security officers. There have not been protests there on this scale because China has created the ultimate security state where the government monitors and restrains its citizenry dramatically.

Not all is sweet: The environment is a catastrophe, an ugly nationalism is surging among some young Chinese and even nonpolitical Chinese chafe at corruption and at Web censorship (including the blocking this week of Twitter, Flickr and Hotmail). Balancing that, their children now get an education incomparably better than in earlier generations — better overall than many children get in the United States.

When you educate citizens and create a middle class, you nurture aspirations for political participation. In that sense, China is following the same path as Taiwan and South Korea in the 1980s.

Yes, except that on the same timeline of censorship and political repression and economic liberalization, South Korea and Taiwan actually became vibrant democracies. On the same scale, China became more repressive and less free for political discourse.  While the governments of Taiwan and South Korea moved intentionally towards democracy, the Chinese government has deliberately stopped political progress.

Some of my friends are Communist Party officials, and they are biding their time. We outsiders also may as well be similarly pragmatic and patient, for there’s not much we can do to accelerate this process. And as we wait, we can be inspired by those rickshaw drivers of 20 years ago.

Kristof’s closing line really gives away his bias. The outside world – governments, the media, people of conscience – really should just keep our mouths shut and not do anything to unwind 20 years of silence and repression in China for those who seek democracy. We cannot do anything about the jailing of political dissidents, nor the deliberate steps towards eradicating the culture and thus political legacy of Tibet and East Turkestan. We cannot do a thing when it comes to stopping the persecution of people for their religious beliefs, be they Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, or practioners of the Falun Gong. There is simply nothing to be done about the Chinese government shooting Tibetan refugees as they try to flee to Nepal or India. How can the global community possibly stop the Chinese government from using secret trials to sentence dissidents to long prison terms for thought crimes, let alone stop killing cell phone networks, internet access and popular online communities every time a politically threatening anniversary arrives (See Wired’s reporting on this for more)?

Kristof preaches complacency and do-nothing-ism. Leave the Chinese government to its own devices and all will be alright in the end. Sure, they’ve had two decades to listen to the wills and desires of Kristof’s ignorant rickshaw driver, but maybe in another twenty years they’ll magically decide to listen to the sentiments of the populace forty years prior.

Unfortunately what Nick Kristof does is ensure that his readers will continue to ignore the moral imperative to help people achieve freedom and democracy. The Tiananmen Square protests are one of the great inspirations of nonviolent political action in pursuit of freedom, a symbol for the best of what we can do for our beliefs akin to the work of Gandhi, Otpor, and the work of the Dalai Lama. When Kristof looks at this heroic activism, his response that we should all do nothing is simply bizarre. It is thoroughly disappointing that the editors of the New York Times continue to allow Kristof to write about China, as this sort of writing will someday be a monument for how Western passivism in the face of the Chinese economy lead to the prolonged tenure of a totalitarian government.

“What Being A Dissident Means”

I missed this earlier, but the New York Times also has short op-eds from a number of critics of the Chinese government, including the Tibetan writer, poet, and dissident Woeser. She writes:

China is not as open politically today as in 1989. The atmosphere in the 1980s felt freer — it was suffused with an enthusiasm for culture and ideas, with people craving and absorbing new thoughts. Although China has made enormous economic strides since then, it still insists on an authoritarian political system. This doesn’t mean that there are no avenues for an exchange of views.

To be a dissident is to express oneself publicly and engage actively in a civic discourse. For me, I blog, write books and reach out to the Western media. I began blogging in 2005. My blog has been hacked and shut down by the Chinese. Now I’m on my fifth blog. Of course, the Internet is also a double-edged sword; the dictatorship can use it to serve its purposes, sometimes as tool to hunt down dissidents.

I am a Tibetan, and my voice belongs to Tibet. Almost all of the official Chinese narratives implicitly or explicitly advance the control of my people and my land. When I see my people silenced, wrongfully arrested or persecuted, I turn to the Web to speak out for those who are voiceless. In changing China, the Internet is also changing Tibet and its connection to the world.