Daily Archives: February 15, 2006

Chinese chickens — contd.

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There’s a wonderfully ironic blast in Good Morning Silicon Valley today about the Chinese censorship issue. Here’s a sample:

Given a choice, representatives of four big tech companies probably wouldn’t be spending the day sitting in front of a congressional panel getting their eyebrows singed by accusations that they consort with torturers. But there they sat today — the crash-test dummies sent by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco to take the hit for their employers’ concessions to repression as the price of doing business in China — as Rep. Tom Lantos, ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee, unloaded on them: “Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.” And Republican Rep. Chris Smith, chairman of the House subcommittee on global human rights, produced a quote that should be engraved on the entrance of every stock exchange: “Cooperation with tyranny should not be embraced for the sake of profits.”

The responses from the witnesses was [sic] familiar: The “lesser evil” argument (Google’s Elliot Schrage: “The requirements of doing business in China include self-censorship — something that runs counter to Google’s most basic values and commitments as a company. … [but Google entered the market believing it] will make a meaningful, though imperfect, contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China.”) and the “little us” argument (Yahoo’s Michael Callahan: “These issues are larger than any one company, or any one industry.’ … We appeal to the U.S. government to do all it can to help us provide beneficial services to Chinese citizens lawfully and in a way consistent with our shared values.”).

For Rep. Smith, that just doesn’t cut it. “It’s an active partnership with both the disinformation campaign and the secret police, and the secret police in China are among the most brutal on the planet,” he said. “I don’t know if these companies understand that or they’re naive about it, whether they’re witting or unwitting. But it’s been a tragic collaboration. There are people in China being tortured courtesy of these corporations.”

I particularly liked the headline on the piece: “But we’re only giant, powerful tech companies … how could we possibly make a difference?” And the phrase “crash-test dummies”. Must make a note of it. Might come in useful sometime.

Quote of the day

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We partly didn’t know what it was, and certainly what the press said it was wasn’t what we thought it was, but even what we thought it was we didn’t end up doing all of that.

Bill Gates, explaining to the Financial Times why his ‘Hailstorm’ project (in which users were going to entrust their personal data to Microsoft) bombed.

Gates was speaking to the RSA Security conference about a new Microsoft desktop security program which would protect people from phishing scams and eventually make Internet passwords passé.. Meanwhile, in another part of the forest on the same day, Microsoft released seven new security patches, including two rated “critical” for its products, and then had to fix one of the fixes after it failed to install correctly. Verily, you could not make this stuff up.

Chinese chickens coming home to roost in Washington

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The NYT has an interesting report on the fallout in Washington of the capitulation of Yahoo, Google, Cisco and Microsoft to the requirements of the Chinese regime.

Now the companies are being pressed in Washington for fuller answers about their business practices in China and the implications for human rights. That pressure will escalate today when the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations questions officials of the four technology companies, along with other witnesses critical of their activities.

The subcommittee’s chairman, Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, plans to introduce legislation by week’s end that would restrict an Internet company’s ability to censor or filter basic political or religious terms — even if that puts the company at odds with local laws in the countries where it now operates.

Mr. Smith’s legislation, called the Global Online Freedom Act, however, would render much of what the Internet companies are currently doing in China illegal.

Among the act’s provisions is the establishment of an Office of Global Internet Freedom, which would establish standards for Internet companies operating abroad. In addition to prohibiting companies from filtering out certain political or religious terms, it would require them to disclose to users any sort of filtering they undertake.

Separately, the State Department announced the formation of a new Global Internet Freedom Task Force yesterday, charged with examining efforts by foreign governments “to restrict access to political content and the impact of such censorship efforts on U.S. companies.”

I bet those pesky Chinese are quaking in their boots.

The NYT report also has some interesting further information about the extent to which Yahoo has compromised itself:

The company, which has been providing Web services in China since 1999, has been criticized for filtering the results of its China-based search engine. But its bigger problems began last fall when human rights advocates revealed that in 2004, a Chinese division of the company had turned over to Chinese authorities information on a journalist, Shi Tao, using an anonymous Yahoo e-mail account. Mr. Shi, who had sent a government missive on Tiananmen Square anniversary rites to foreign colleagues, was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Last week, Reporters Without Borders, a group based in Paris, revealed that a Chinese division of Yahoo had provided information to authorities that contributed to the conviction in 2003 of Li Zhi, a former civil servant who had criticized local officials online. Mr. Li is serving eight years in prison.

Academic development

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The diversification of British universities continues apace. First there was Oxbridge, plus Durham and a couple of ancient institutions in Scotland. Then there were the dissenting academies like UCL in London, and the “redbrick” (municipal) universities. Then there were the “plateglass” universities established after the Robbins Report in the 1960s. Then came Polytechnics (which have mostly morphed into universities). Now comes an entirely new classification — the “rackety” universities, described by Lord Carlisle, the government’s independent reviewer of terror legislation, in evidence to the Commons home affairs committee yesterday. Discoursing on the threat posed by radical imams to impressionable young British muslims, he said (according to the Guardian):

If you talk particularly to young female students in the larger, more rackety universities, there is a degree of concern expressed about some societies where women are excluded and where there might be radicalisation.

Two questions: (a) what, if anything, does this mean? (b) What are the criteria by which anxious parents would be able to rank an institution on the rackety scale?