
China Shows How Surveillance Leads to Intimidation and Software Censorship - DiabloD3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/china-shows-how-backdoors-lead-software-censorship
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rubberstamp
Government should be an organization serves people rather than trying to
control people and limit what people can say or do. If government try to do
such things, sooner rather than later, government will create dissent with the
people. Without a free society, we won't be able to be awesome. Government's
job should be to ensure that everyone gets their basic human needs/rights such
as good education, healthcare, maintain fair law and order etc. These acts
will create good citizens who will to do greater good for all of humanity.
Currently the situation is alarming in many countries including china, usa,
north korea etc. I think Croatia is a good model as they have a great society
as a result of good education system.

~~~
pixl97
>Government should be an organization serves people rather than trying to
control people and limit what people can say or do.

What if 55% of the people want to control and limit what the other 45% do and
say? It's never as easy as 'government should just do this' because a
government needs to have power to fulfill its mandate. Any concentration of
power can, and will be abused and there will be cycles of this occurring as
the society around it grows more and less apathetic to abuse of power.

~~~
quadrangle
Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. There's NOTHING about the concept of
democracy that requires majority-rule to be the way to run it. Majority rule
is the stupidest and most dangerous way to do any democratic decision-making.

Better options include consensus, multi-stakeholder representation (like
needing overall approval from many different groups within society for a
decision), and score voting (See
[http://electology.org/](http://electology.org/) for more on practical voting
systems).

~~~
purpled_haze
However you can work around consensus also by widespread manipulation,
coercion, and torture.

~~~
diyorgasms
And government will be irrelevant after the heat death of the universe. Of
course any system can be subverted. That doesn't stop some implementations
from being better than others.

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vicpara
I'm happy to see what happens in China because hopes are that this is a worst
case bound for what is going to happen in UK when secure connections will
become outlawed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption_ban_proposal_in_the...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption_ban_proposal_in_the_United_Kingdom)

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samstave
Check out this nightmare of a system China is implementing to use gamification
to control populations:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI)

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rashkov
Oh, my god. I've read about this before but that link really drove the point
home. What a dystopia we're headed for if this works out well for China, and
there is every reason to believe that it could. Thanks for sharing that

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JoeAltmaier
Oh its ok for corporations in the USA to do this to control purchasing and
marketing. But do it for some actual societal good and suddenly its (more)
evil?

I'm of two minds on this one. Gamification works in lots of arenas (from pizza
coupons to annual reviews). Why not social/public morals?

~~~
rashkov
I'm not sure how you can watch the parent's youtube link and still compare the
two. They are in different leagues altogether, in my opinion, so I'm finding
it hard to relate to your comment. I think it's also pretty hard to define
"social/public morals" in a way that is agreeable to most people. Would not
linking to tiananmen square, or discussing China's stock market slide be a
public good? Are you really comfortable with that kind of censorship?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Remember people are not mindless drones. These games are there to let you know
how you're expected to behave (like tax incentives, street signs etc). This is
different, sure. But not unprecedented.

~~~
rashkov
What's different, however, is the level of coordinated surveillance that
enables this scheme, as well as the centralized power of coercion that the
state yields. Ad-tech companies, financials, silicon valley data silos,
surveillance bodies, and most importantly the government are not legally able
to coordinate on a level that would allow let them baldly track your
purchasing history, your social media presence, as well as your private
communications and then assign you an aggregate score! Besides the legal
separation issues, their interests aren't nearly as aligned with each other as
in the case of China so there are some checks and balances. Then to take that
aggregate score and further coerce you by making loans scarce or jobs
unavailable is a whole other level. What we're talking about is a totalitarian
system of control over the population. Tweaked and targeted on an extremely
personal level, and leveraging social pressure and shame. Say what you will
about the malevolence of the US government and our capitalistic system but it
is simply incapable of this scale of totalitarianism.

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samstave
100% 1984 on steroids!

It's nuts - and this is what people should revolt against.

Fight club was a documentary :-)

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pixelcort
I wonder if steganography tools will become more widely used to avoid
suspicion from using normal VPNs and cryptography.

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lucastx
The Obsproxy and Pluggable Transports are kinda this, aren't?

[https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en)

> obfsproxy is a tool that attempts to circumvent censorship, by transforming
> the Tor traffic between the client and the bridge. This way, censors, who
> usually monitor traffic between the client and the bridge, will see
> innocent-looking transformed traffic instead of the actual Tor traffic.

[https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en)

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natch
Great article. If anyone from EFF is reading, the article has a typo in the
5th paragraph, Xighurs should be Uighurs.

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dannyobrien
Fixed. Thanks!

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erikb
China also shows how keeping a closed door to outsiders influence yields
having your own healthy market. I think there are few places left, where local
IT companies haven't been destroyed by google, facebook and netflix. China has
big businesses in all these markets. Stop always only highlighting the bad
things.

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themodelplumber
My local IT companies seem to do fine...can you explain?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Among your local IT companies is there a search engine more popular than
Google? A social network more popular than Facebook? A shopping site more
popular than Amazon and eBay?

For better or worse, the economic and political restrictions China enacted
allowed for local companies like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (makers of WeChat)
to utterly dominate the Chinese market. Those same companies are now pretty
much the only competitors that can match the American giants I mentioned
before. In this area, this was a big win for China - both for companies and
customers (money made stays in the country).

~~~
themodelplumber
> For better or worse, the economic and political restrictions China enacted
> allowed for local companies like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (makers of
> WeChat) to utterly dominate the Chinese market

Well, that's the problem and the solution, as you hinted. At worst, the US
giant Google is equivalent to what China has done. At best, it's better,
because the US government didn't have to meddle quite so much to force such
growth to occur.

So I don't really see how Baidu is some terrific example of IT flourishing. If
anything, Google, Facebook, and the companies that will follow their
inevitable fall are noteworthy.

And if you don't like Google, you have alternatives for every one of its
services. Same with Facebook. Really viable alternatives, too.

~~~
erikb
You don't have much understand of how power works, do you?

The typical Silicon Valley start-up has more money than some of the most
successful, long standing companies in other countries. Skilled people from
other countries will move to the US, because they can get sometimes up to 10
times their usual pay for the same job (and maybe still get less than local US
engineers). On the other hand other countries get mostly US losers as expats
who can't make it at home and basically live off being born with white skin
and having a US passport.

So now that all your smart engineers are gone and you know you don't have
enough money to get them back, what are you going to do to compete with the US
company? Blocking off your market is one of the few successful strategies (and
actually accepted amongst educated people).

China did it and some regard they have quite a good chance to end up on top of
the US one day. I'm thinking just about all the new mobile technologies that
get much faster adoption in a people that is more willing to experiment with
new stuff and basically grew up with mobile internet.

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Sven7
The EFF can be a lot more constructive if it didn't spend its time, separating
the reasons for censorship from the consequences of censorship, and acting as
if the relationship between the two is non-existent.

All the EFF ends up doing is sounding like a propaganda wing of the state
department.

There is a reason Obama has to meet with the Tech Industry to talk about the
spread of ISIS and other forms of lunacy on the networks. There is a real need
for control rods. And our tools are useless. That's the reality.

~~~
rms_returns
> All the EFF ends up doing is sounding like a propaganda wing of the state
> department.

However they end up sounding, the reality won't change that covert
surveillance is not good for a country and its citizens.

> There is a reason Obama has to meet with the Tech Industry to talk about the
> spread of ISIS and other forms of lunacy

I'm tired of repeating this, but show me one incident, just one where
government surveillance has helped stop a terrorist attack and I'll be all in
for your surveillance. The reality is that the terrorists of Paris attacks
used plain-text SMS to communicate, which shows how ineffective our
intelligence systems are.

All that is going to happen with covert surveillance is just more harassment
of innocent citizens. What's the guarantee that the agent doing the
surveillance is honest and sincere and won't take undue advantage of the data
gathered from surveillance?

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fossuser
I think Mass Surveillance is a bad idea, extremely high risk and the potential
for abuse is high. I also think that it consolidates too much power in one
place which is dangerous for the future and the secrecy is a big problem.

That said there is an obvious use for it in helping stop attacks and
pretending there isn't is weird to me.

> show me one incident, just one where government surveillance has helped stop
> a terrorist attack and I'll be all in for your surveillance

Whether or not these exist they're likely to be classified, it's possible
attacks have been stopped - the classification of information makes it hard to
know.

Though mass collection can help, if you have intel of suspicious people you
could look through the entire history of their communication - see what
they've been saying and to whom. When you newly learn that a person is a part
of ISIS (for example) you can look through their entire communication stream
retroactively. Since the attackers are not always that sophisticated (they
used SMS in Paris like you said) you can potentially learn a lot of
information by doing this (their network, maybe plans).

They're posting videos of themselves on youtube showing off weapons and
locations - I suspect there's a lot of information available in their
communication that's useful for stopping attacks. It's a tool you would
obviously want if you had to do the job.

That said I think the secrecy is dangerous because it prevents the public from
being able to determine what level we'd accept (and legal recourse against
abuse). It also is more likely to encourage abuse and since James Clapper lied
to congress about it we can't trust the organizations that have tasked
themselves to do it.

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newjersey
> When you newly learn that a person is a part of ISIS (for example) you can
> look through their entire communication stream retroactively.

The problem is the same can be applied to {{political_opinion}} such as
$has_been_to_rally(tea_party) or $is_member(nra) or $has_donated_to(aclu).
Then, tptb can glean through all the past records of anyone who is starting to
gain momentum (and trust me we all have broken laws one way or another if we
look finely enough).

My argument against a surveillance state is not based on whether it can stop
acts of violence but rather my question is "at what cost?"

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fossuser
I agree with you and I think that's a better argument.

The 'it's not effective anyway' argument always struck me as wrong.

