
U.S. Tech Giants Are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State - gambler
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/11/china-surveillance-google-ibm-semptian/
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saagarjha
What exactly has Google, IBM, and Xilinx given Semptian? The only thing I can
find is that they are all collaborating on POWER through the OpenPOWER
foundation? Specifically,

> Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable
> computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.

This means little to nothing: pretty much every company in the field is doing
this. Here's a list of current members:
[https://openpowerfoundation.org/membership/current-
members/](https://openpowerfoundation.org/membership/current-members/). This
is a pretty large list.

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yorwba
Related previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20433311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20433311)

~~~
saagarjha
Honestly, this just makes the story's credibility even worse: the author is
just picking a foundation with a lot of members and linking all of them to
authoritarian regimes by virtue of having one or two members who may be
helping government surveillance.

~~~
ijpoijpoihpiuoh
This raised the question in my mind: is the author being dishonest, or does he
just have a different perspective and different values than me? Or
alternately, have I not thought through my own values sufficiently to see that
I should expect the same outcome as he does?

If I assume the author is being honest, the rationale must be something like
this. The Chinese government is a serial human-rights violator. Most recently,
it has been known to put people into reeducation camps on the basis of having
a minority religious affiliation, but that's just one of many examples.
Companies ought not sell to or provide services for human rights violators.
This restriction should apply transitively as much as is reasonably possible.

Now, given that there is a company in this foundation that is working with the
Chinese government, it is reasonable to anticipate that the efforts of the
foundation would benefit the Chinese government. Therefore, all of the other
companies that are participating in the foundation are tainted by
transitivity. They should either oust the one company working with China, or
else themselves leave the foundation.

I'm not sure where my agreement with this author breaks down, but it is
somewhere before his conclusion. For me, the big question is how open
standards and software jive with this transitive interpretation of moral
responsibility. Anyone working on OpenCV or TensorFlow is working on something
that could reasonably be anticipated to assist the Chinese government in the
repression of its citizens. Same goes for anyone who publishes in the ML
space. But I think the idea that one should not do these things is absurd, so
I think a line needs to be drawn somewhere, and that line is far short of
Google's or IBM's participation in this foundation.

That said, I think I could be convinced that companies working mainly with the
Chinese government should not be allowed to sit on the foundation. But I'm not
sure even of that.

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4gotunameagain
Maybe a basic question, but wouldn't most of this be defunct in the age of
https?

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jeffk_teh_haxor
This just seems like investment in open infrastructure? Any tool can be used
for evil. Are contributions to the Linux kernel, then, a kind of contribution
to the surveillance state?

What a ridiculous criticism. The media hysteria is boiling over in completely
nonsensical ways.

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umanwizard
This is a stretch, IMO.

Tl;dr: Google and IBM collaborate on the Power architecture, which is widely
used in scientific computing. One of the other companies collaborating on it
is a Chinese company that sells chips to the Chinese state among other
clients.

By this sort of Kevin Bacon logic you can basically tie anyone to anything.

~~~
traderjane
> The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with
> the aim of trying to “drive innovation” — has set up a collaboration between
> IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together,
> they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers
> to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.

I think in order to satisfy the Intercept's perspective, the US would have to
technologically starve China.

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smacktoward
The 21st century version of _IBM and the Holocaust_
([https://ibmandtheholocaust.com/](https://ibmandtheholocaust.com/)) is being
written right before our eyes.

~~~
forgottenpass
_reposting a dead reply to this comment_

ataturk 7 minutes ago

>That's how I see it. In 2005 I worked at a tech startup that was building out
surveillance camera networks for Australia to spy on its rail system. I was
aghast and the enormity of the project and how much money was involved and
that was 2005. That project ultimately failed, but later ones of course have
proceeded.

>Ethically, I don't get how we are doing this to ourselves. The bar has to be
raised as far what is acceptable here. Otherwise, why did we fight two world
wars? Why did we fight a Cold War against this kind of collectivism? We
already know it's rancid. The level of freedom of the average Chinese citizen
is horrifying. Do we want that for our children? Or are we going to fight for
a better world? Tech has to lead the way and not just go there for profit. We
have to be better than that.

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olliej
I’m of the opinion that US Companies (or companies operating in the us)
selling software/hardware that is designed for the purpose of violating human
rights or the terms of the US constitution should be taxed at 100% of their
international profits.

If you don’t believe the human rights or the US constitution are of any value
you shouldn’t get to use those protections to profit. Move your company to
China or wherever, and operate in the constraint you enforce on others.

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cronix
What if those same companies are helping to power the NSA illegally collecting
and storing data on Americans without a warrant? Is that different to you?
Where in this Constitution you elude to does it permit that? I can show you
precisely where it doesn't...

~~~
olliej
No. But it's also illegal for them to do that, and it's disgusting that the
elected officials of the government continue to allow it to do so.

Of course it's also only able to do it because for-profit companies are being
paid for their assistance. I would argue that makes them criminals (knowingly
aiding a criminal attack), and as such they should be charged with those
crimes. The US government basically pleads sovereign immunity to violations of
its own criminal attacks on US citizens, so charging the companies that
assists them with those crimes, and also removing their profit motive, would
hopefully kill off the NSA, ICE, and the DHS's continuous violations of the
constitution.

