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Google Moving PRC Records Out of China
Lam1969 writes "Google says it is moving search records out of China and back to the U.S. to prevent the Chinese government from accessing them, reports Computerworld. Additionally, the company will let Chinese users know when search results are being censored. According to Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, 'Some of the people want to query about democracy, but most of them just want to know about their pop stars.'"
What were the records doing in China in the first place?!?
Maybe they should be moving the US records into China, given all the crap with the DOJ recently. That would actually be a pretty good swap, moving the US records into China and the Chinese records into the US.
'Some of the people want to query about democracy, but most of them just want to know about their pop stars.'
:)
Sooo... They're like your average American then?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Nothing for you to see here. Move along.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Oh, wait. Now that Google is big like MS, there is nothing they can do to get the approval of this community.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
the data is really safe, since we've seen in the past weeks how this administration is really focused on internet privacy...
Jeeez
It is interesting that an American company are moving data out of China,
in order to make it inaccessible to Chinese law.
At the same time American (and some other countires) law is assuming more
global coverage.
Actually, no. We don't believe anything we hear, but we do believe everything we see or read, including your comment.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
That's a good gesture on their part, but I have to wonder, couldn't the Chinese government just snoop on data going into and out of google and collect that same search data themselves?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
how can they know that the records won't be forced to be released in the US... I think it'd be best to go somewhere like switzerland, then it'd be safe, no one ever asks questions there
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
And will Google kowtow to that demand, or depart the largest potential growth market in the world these days?
I do think the "Google has 47,000 other search results to your query, but to comply with laws, we have removed them from the results we're showing you" is a nice little thing though...we'll see how long that lasts.
You took the words right out of my mouth, good post.
PS - Time to update your sig, the base Mac mini is now $600. And STILL worth not having to un-fuck some crappy Dell every time you go home to see the folks.
I'm pretty sure this google news is just a reannouncement, since privacy protection seemed to be the intent from the beginning--but they certainly did a horrible job on the PR...
/. front page stories about Yahoo! being evil, but the google ones have been just great!
On the other hand, from what I hear, Yahoo! is still busy cooperating with China and landing dissidents in jail by releasing their "private" information. I must have missed the constant stream of
Remember people, Do No Evil is a marketing slogan, nothing more.
back to the U.S. to prevent the Chinese government from accessing them
Yeah, great idea - Because, y'know, the "land of the free" would never try to force Google to turn over its search records. And certainly never for something as frivolous as trying to further the religious agenda of right-wing crackpots... Oh, I mean "democracy". Slip of the tongue there, please ignore it.
So will we hear tomorrow that they've moved all search records involving porn to Japan, to protect them from the US government?
May I suggest that they move their records out of the US and into the Bahamas, and re-incorporate there so they will not be obligated to show their search records to the US government.
But if the chinese made them censor their search before they could bring it to China, whats keeping the government from requiring Google to keep their records in China if they are to be allowed access?
I'll fill this in later
The difference is, some of the Chinese people want to query about democracy
Whereas Americans just want to know about their pop stars
Google's "goodness index" has clearly taken a hit with their widely-seen-as-lame attempts justifications of their money grab by claiming "trickle down" democracy/press freedom in China. This latest action of throwing a few symbolic "do good" crumbs to those who point out the obvious hypocricy in Google's being in China at all, is calculated to raise the public perception of google's actions by 6 to 8 percentage points, according to marketing surveys and regression analyses done jointly for google by Forrester Research and McKinsey and Co.
So, is it true that Google isn't (officially) offering Gmail to Chinese internet users? If that is indeed the case, I heard it's because they want to avoid being put in the position of being asked to hand emails over to the government. Can you confirm?
Do not Evil. Google can remain golden even though it is a public company. Kudos to Google!
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
They should move the US records to China to prvent the US government from accessing them...
Find coupons in Greeley
Which is where?
Wouldn't the government of China already have access to this same information through other sources? Presumably if they have physical access to the cables, they should be able to sniff out whatever is going through. (or check ISP records).
Also, instead of *moving* the records to the US, why didn't google just stop storing the search records so they wouldn't exist in the first place?
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
Additionally, the company will let Chinese users know when search results are being censored
I thought they already did... No?
Be nice. The guy/gal might have been a Chinese government stooge, or simply someone too frightened to write the truth for fear of 10 years incarceration for simply objecting to an overhand communist policy.
You have to remember that the words of those "behind the curtain" need to be put into context... Tow The Line
or... else..... bang.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
Good job.
This is probably the absolute best of a really bad situation.
In both cases, there are people who simply refuse to believe that any of it happened, all the media reports and direct testimonies notwithstanding.
FIX AUTOPR0N!
Mod this guy up its totally true considering the news lately with the DoJ.
Pete/Petri "damn, my chainsaw is clogged with 1's and 0's again." --clyde
'Some of the people want to query about democracy, but most of them just want to know about their pop stars.'. Is this supposed to be a joke? Google more and more is falling astray. The fact that they are taking this corrective action is _NOT_ a good sign.
Wow. You wrote so much, yet said nothing. Kudos.
No, they can make something cute and cuddly like the ipod ..then they'll get fanboys.
.. they make their opinion of it and rationalize it. Rather than the rationalize/weigh evidence and then form an opinion.
It's why rabbits aren't eaten. Do u think chickens tase any better than bunny rabbits? Once people like something
Why are they keeping records in the first place?
... What does any of that mean?
If you have anything to actually tell us, maybe that would be informative and useful, as opposed to levelling accusations of ignorance at your entire audience, which is mostly just... annoying.
What do you know that we don't? And why does that matter? Why did you even bother to post?
Google should make some artificial island or buy Midway from the US.
-=[ place
That Offtopic mod point was well-spent. Hope you get your points back real soon, mod - you're making sure we see the best of Slashdot.
Sigh... Karma to burn (not really).
That's not really true. Visit China and you'll quickly realize everyday life there is much like it is here. No one's going to care if you, a private nobody, post a pro-democracy message to Slashdot or even run around the streets of Beijing yelling about Falun Gong.
Frankly, and not to troll, but I'm not sure whether the Western conception of freedom is categorically superior to China's. In fact, not only are taxes in China much lower on average, I'd also wager the authorities there are less likely to take an interest in your personal doings than their American counterparts are. At least, until you rise to prominence in the opposition--and certainly, that's something that ought to change. But to picture China as some kind of oppressive Big Brother-ish society is about as far from the truth as possible.
all they have to do is install packet sniffers at every demarc, or at every neighborhood uplink system. Can't be THAT hard. Google must've pulled a page from Sun Tzu, hehe.. Sure, we'll move the SEARCH data to the US you effing congressional NITWITS. But, did you EVER top to think China STILL WILL get those records, by keyboard, cpu, machine, user and neighborhood.
b rowse_frm/thread/b676a1ccffcbba/f8bad2cf57790dea?l nk=st&q=Does+democracy+contribute+to+stability%3F& rnum=1#f8bad2cf57790dea
e _frm/thread/bd2532046d91308c/5083b3ad03cac598#5083 b3ad03cac598
I imagine China will start biometric tagging of citizens who want to surf. No need tagging all 2 billion, just the ones who surf. But, how diff will that be from US in the good 'ole U.S. of A. being carnivored and mutually echeloned (yeh, I KNOW their public names changed....)?
(But, in the mean time, China needs to make sure they aren't ensnared in some bullshit war over oil.
Does Democracy Contribute to Stability?:
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.china/
And Iran and Europe need to watch their backs, too:
Why bush Is Demonizing Iran:
http://groups.google.com/group/europa.union/brows
Peace...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
if Google didn't keep search records traceable to a user at all. That would save them a lot of legal hassles, too.
Employ me to look after them on site :-)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
pwned by teh fark cliche...
That's why Google and any other marketing/data aggregation firm will continue to collect records. Assuming they honestly "de-identify" or "anoymize" the end user from the samples of data and information, they will have BEELIONS of pieces of stuff to sell to other US-based companies vying and trying to gain insight into the mind of the average Chinese consumer, maybe to eventually turn them into PROsumers.
But, OTOH, if Google *were* to stop collecting or storing the search data, the US govt would get pissed and slap them with "aiding the demise of democracy".
BUTTT, I suppose Google could come up with a new irreversible meta tagging that reduces the end data to a meaningless pile of bit and bytes by using the queries only long enough to bring back a page and then automatically dump the initial strings that caused the query to be returned as a page to the user..
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Who's the idiot who keeps posting dupe tags on non-duped stories? There should be a kind of meta-mod on tags.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I thought they were already displaying if the search was censored or not.
This sentence offends me the most. If "searching for pop stars" is stated as a fact, then its ok. However if this is given as a rationale to filter democracy search results, I can't think of a more stupid and offensive reasoning.
From all the whining that goes on here, you would think that the entire population of China is yearning for democracy and searching for any anti-government information, when in fact, people there don't care as much about democracy in China as much as people here do.
Fact is, their authoritarian government is doing a good job at improving their economy and therefore quality of living, so why would they want to change things? People here only see what they get from the media, and what they get from the most vocal protesters. But ask most people in China, and democracy isn't on the top of their list. It seems "Human Rights" and China is just a case of our "social crusader" culture we've developed here. We would do more good by focusing on internal issues in our own country such as racism, stereotypes, and discrimination.
So, is it true that Google isn't (officially) offering Gmail to Chinese internet users?
I use Gmail. I live in China. I can access Gmail using their webmail or POP3 services. Can also sign up for Gmail from within China. Most Google services are tied to google.com, opposed to google.co.uk or google.com.cn. I access mail from Gmail.com as I use the personalised homepage at google.com/ig.
I can confirm you heard wrong.
About friggin' time, Google. About time.
> 'Some of the people want to query about democracy, but most of them just want to
> know about their pop stars.'
That sounds just like New Zealand.
I don't need to see some complete politically motivated garbage. We get it, man. You hate the president. We don't, however, need to subject slashdot to this ridiculous hyperbole and completely unintelligent rhetoric that is entirely flamebait.
No rational comparison can be made even from Gitmo to what China does.. for instance.. to Tibet. This is total non-intelligent political flamebait.
First, the records were there to begin with just because it's practical. Why keep the records across the world and waste bandwith any time you need to access them. However, moving them to US is a good step.
I assume that Google will hand over the records if asked for them, because they do have to follow the law. However, by removing the records they can actually make public the fact that they are being asked for them. The Chinese goverment can't send in someone to the data center to secretly copy the data. They have to announce it, (or at least demand the data from Google, who can then announce it). That is the first step in getting rid of this kind of abuse. When people are AWARE that their government is actually doing this stuff, when they are AWARE that someone is actually getting the records of their searches, at that time some people will stop rationalizing ("oh, well maybe they get the records, maybe they don't) and maybe they'll do something about it.
Google will also let people know that their data has been censored. That is also an important step in getting rid of censorship. When one KNOWS that there is SOMETHING more out there, they will be a bit more resentful about the censure and a bit more curious about the truth. That is the way to fight censors around the world.
TANSTAAFL
because they won't be kicked out of the market or otherwise sanctioned. The same is not true of the PRC. The Chinese government can kick them out at will, and probably will not hesitate, after they can still use MSN or Yahoo.
I just *knew* google was planning to launch a music service!
Lindh voluntarily placed himself in Afghanistan fighting American forces. That's hardly kidnapping!
Is America not supposed to defend itself against acts of treason?
Besides, Lindh was never in Gitmo, AFAIK... he was tried and sentenced in the US.
Pardon my cynicism, but on the internet, and especially on sites with more or less anonymous commenting, you can claim to be anyone and get away with it, because everyone will just take your words for granted. So I find that I have reason to doubt the AC's claims of being Chinese. Yet I still find it rather ironic that he got modded down for telling the truth: most of the people commenting here don't actually know a shit about what's really going on in China -- or in any other foreign country, for that matter.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Google says it is moving search records out of China and back to the U.S. to prevent the Chinese government from accessing them
That's a joke, right? For all we know, the US government is trying to get a hand on their search records, not the chinese one. How about moving them to Canada or some other still-free country?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
1. Google starts doing business in a foreign country
2. US government complains when Google helps with cencorship
3. Google takes data from PRC to the US
4. Data from the PRC becomes subject to US Patriot Act like all other friggin' data.
5. Profit????
I sure as hell don't think they should be importing any more data into the US than they need to. That bloody evil Patriot Act seems to automatically give them extra-territoriality over everything in the friggin' world.
They're pulling it into the US to keep it from the Government of China. but then the Americans have it pwn3d! They'd sure as hell flip out if any other nation did the same thing to them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Methinks those in greenhouses should cast no stones:
from op-ed published on the WSJ
http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/nj04_smith/op edgofa.html
Do No (Online) Evil By Congressman Chris Smith March 2, 2006
American people are deeply troubled to see U.S. technology and know-how used by repressive regimes in China and elsewhere in the world to cruelly exploit and abuse the citizens of those countries. While the Internet has opened up commercial opportunities and provided people all over the world with access to vast amounts of information, in China it has also become a malicious tool -- a cyber-sledgehammer of repression in the hands of the government.
When Internet use started to become widespread in China, brave citizens took advantage of this new method of communication to spread information by email about human-rights abuses issues and government corruption. The Chinese government responded with an immediate crack down. To date, an estimated 49 cyber-dissidents and 32 journalists have been imprisoned merely for using the Internet to spread information critical of the Chinese government.
I was recently on a news program talking about Google and China and was asked, "Should businesses be tasked with promoting democracy around the globe?" My response is that we are asking the wrong question. We ought to be asking whether businesses should help repressive dictatorships by partnering with, and providing tools to, a corrupt and cruel secret police, and by cooperating with laws that violate basic human rights.
In the case of China, there's clear evidence that U.S. technology companies are collaborating with a brutally oppressive regime in decapitating the voice of its dissidents. In 2005, Yahoo's cooperation with Chinese secret police led to the imprisonment of cyber-dissident Shi Tao. This was not the first time something like this had happened. Yahoo also handed over information to Chinese authorities on another of its users, Li Zhi -- who was later sentenced to eight years in prison for "inciting subversion." His only "crime" was to use online discussion groups and articles to criticize official corruption.
By using a combination of technology and an estimated force of 30,000 cyber-police to monitor, filter, and block critical content the Chinese government prevents its people from having access to uncensored information on political and human-rights topics. They only see what Big Brother allows them to see. Women and men are going to the gulag and being tortured as a direct result of information handed over to Chinese officials. These are not victimless crimes. We must stand with the oppressed, not the oppressors.
On Feb. 15, as chairman of the committee in the U.S. House of Representatives that oversees global human rights and international operations, I led a hearing to examine this problem. The hearing, which lasted more than seven hours, raised more questions than it answered. I was surprised when Yahoo's witness wouldn't reveal how often or under what circumstances the company provides private information about its customers to the secret police and whether any effort is made to ascertain what actions are taken by police based on this information. Yahoo didn't even seem to be curious whether any of the many journalists and other cyber-activists incarcerated in the laogai (Chinese prison camps) are there on account of information the company provided to the dictatorship.
Similarly, Cisco's witness failed to provide any real insight as to how Cisco's incredible technology is being used by Chinese police thugs to find, capture, convict, jail and torture both religious believers and human-rights advocates. My committee then heard from Harry Wu, a 19 year survivor of the laogai, who told us that Cisco was training the secret police in how to use its technology to identify dissidents -- so making it even harder for those who criticize the Chinese government to evade capture.
Why doesn't Google just buy sealand and be done with it?
Start their own (non-evil of course) country.
Or maybe Pitcairn, but I don't think the internet connection is as good.
---
I type this every time.
Yes, I know it's possible, and Google's probably not doing anything to prevent it--but is Gmail for Chinese citizens Google-sanctioned or -encouraged? I'd like to understand why the Economist, the Times , the BBC, Red Herring , and others are reporting that Google's withholding Gmail from China. No cheap shots please.
Here are my personal observations from spending 1 month in China back in 1997. The thing I remember most from my trip to China is the bodycount. I've never seen so many corpses lying around on the streets anywhere as I did on an early morning busride from Qufu to Jinan. I saw the remains of over 30 (we stopped counting at 30 .. there were more) fatal vehicle accidents which ranged from cars and trucks hitting each other, pedestrians, bicyclists, immovable objects, and a donkey in one case. It was explained to me that the drivers in that particular area (province?) feel they conserve gas by driving without their headlights on at night (which I observed). I also noted in this area there generally weren't street lights.
A train ride from Qufu to Xi'an was also noteworthy in that our train apparently struck someone. The train came to a stop with the body right outside the train car behind mine. I watched in amazement as about 6 Chinese officials (I'm calling them officials because they appeared to be wearing uniforms) got off the train and stood around the body kicking/prodding it. They eventually (after about 5 minutes) dragged it onto the middle of the set of train tracks alongside ours, got back on our train and we continued on our (less-merry) way.
A taxi ride to get to a train station in Tsingdao resulted in police action against our taxi driver. While enroute, our taxi driver was waved to the side of the road by what appeared to be a police or military officer. The officer-type walked over to our cab and started arguing with the taxi driver. The driver pointed back at us. The cop-type person reached up and pulled the taxi sign off our driver's roof and started walking away. Our driver got out and went walking after the officer, at which point the officer turned around, drew his firearm (some kind of short-stock ak47 looking machinegun thing) and pointed it at the driver. My friend and I exited the cab and went running for the train station which was in view down the street.
I admit that most of these impressions I was left with were formed through a haze of not being remotely able to speak/parse/understand the Chinese language, but I'm certainly of the impression that actions speak louder than words. I have a slew of pictures and other impressions, but these are definitely the strongest. Its been 9 years since then and I remember the whole of the trip as if it were yesterday. While you would be hard-pressed to convince me to return, I am glad I went.
"Some of the people want to query about democracy, but most of them just want to know about their pop stars."
How naive (or disingenuous). Maybe more people would want to know about subversive subjects if they weren't afraid of being ratted out.
That's a good point that people often tend to keep forgetting. Most of the searches in China (as well as the rest of the world) is about everyday things. So let's look at Google's SafeSearch that filters out dirty words and pictures. That's a form of censorship. It's a form of censorship that most people don't care about (because a lot of the time, your average suburban Internet user will not be searching for porn, and for people who are searching for porn, it doesn't take long to learn that there are much better ways to find stuff than search engines). It's also a form of censorship that the user can easily turn off. In the case of google.cn, people "turn it off" by simply using google.com, which is unfortunately slower and less reliable, but that's no fault of Google's--blame the Great Firewall for that. In fact, if a user wants to use a Google Account to associate personal information with search histories or to use anything else that Google Account offers, the user is automatically redirected to google.com. And in the case of SafeSearch, I would imagine that a part of the motive would be to comply with US government rules about obscenity and stuff. So, except for the filtered material being politically controversial, just how is this different from SafeSearch?
If Google was *really* interested in making profit, then it would have launched everything in China (I'd imagine that they'd love to take a nice healthy bite out of Yahoo Mail, for example) and not just the search engine. But they didn't do this...
One is the one that speaks English and is the one that you describe.
The other speaks Arabic and has completely different content.
Ask the folks at the BBC-based one. They'll go to great pains to separate themselves from "the other".
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Bush "demonizing" Iran? I think Iran's president is doing a good enough job of that himself, he doesn't need Bush's help.
They could start by warning people from Germany, France and Switzerland that they censor their results:
n G=Recherche+Google&meta=n G=Recherche+Googlen G=Recherche+Google&meta=
http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=stormfront&bt
http://www.google.de/search?hl=fr&q=stormfront&bt
http://www.google.ch/search?hl=fr&q=stormfront&bt
This is not an insult, but you can tell a slashdotter has watched too many action movies when he wants companies to do their work in good old Switzerland, where "no one ever asks questions". For God's sake it's not cocaine money we're talking about.
If you can't put files in the U.S for fear of Big Brother, then uh, dang we're screwed. or something.
Why do companies like google want to keep data about queries that includes IP addresses, times ..etc. I mean, query history is understandable as a R&D thing, but why all the sneaky stuff? It would save them a lot of time running around trying to find a country that DOESNT behave like big bro.
Solution: call a press conference, announce a party, burn all records ceremonially in party and use it as marketing move. It would kick behinds, I tell you.
How about an abandoned oil platform in the middle of some ocean? They could call it GCountry and declare it an autonomous country or principate with their won rules.
Why in the hell are search record being kept in the first place?
Why aren't search records being destroyed immediately?
No, China would never do something like that. What kind of fucking bubble world do some of you idiots live in?
He's not saying that China wouldn't do that. He's saying that they physically can't do that to people living in the U.S., while our own government can. Therefore it's safer to have U.S. search records located in China.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Why do they keep search records at all?
I mean, how does "being big brother" equal "do no evil"? Just because they dont anybody ELSE what they know about you?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
You aren't actually comparing privacy rights in the US and China and equating them... I can't be actually reading this.. and seeing other people modding it up as actually informative.
Think about it for 2 seconds. Yes, China has a horrible track record for human rights. So it makes sense to move search records out of China so that they can't be used by the Chinese government to snoop on people. Now, while the U.S. is not nearly as bad as China in this regard, it still makes perfect sense to move U.S. search records out of the U.S. government's reach so that they can't snoop either. We've seen recently that the government's respect for privacy rights is dwindling constantly, so why wait until things get really bad? Nip it in the bud.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
these papers are simply stating that there are no blogspot.cn or gmail.cn. google are not hosting any services in china that hold user information. blogspot.com and gmail.com (and yes, google.com) are accessible to chinese users (depending on the mood of the great firewall) but, being hosted in the united states, are not subject to chinese internet content provider rules.
google.cn is an attempt by google to provide less sensitive information to chinese users more reliably by working within the great firewall, and abiding by chinese rules. no services that google cannot ethically operate by chinese rules are being hosted within china.
You can't post and moderate in the same discussion. It wasn't him.
Whoops! We just knocked over your oil platform, didnt know it was not abandoned.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I think it is a wise idea and you have to applaud Google for it.
a mm.pdf ). Why would China care about records when their legal system doesn't require them for conviction? For that matter of fact, we are told that they have a whole core of expert hackers monitoring the Internet; you don't think it's THAT hard for one of them to match a email address with a ip address?
Search engine company records are incredibly dangerous, the equivalent of bomb grade nuclear material for an economic war. Google needs to move them to a "money haven" country where there is a reasonable chance of them being protected. One of the islands, perhaps, definitely NOT Switzerland. It's been years since records there have been safe from political pressure.
The money haven's are protected against pressure by the simple fact that you could indict most of the ruling and/or criminal classes/ multinationals of the planet (all countries) if their confidentiality was breached. It is in noones interest to open up their records.
But this action by Google is not relevant to privacy protection from China. If you understand China, you would realize that there is something extremely fishy going on with the whole Senate Committee/China incident that led up to this. China is appearing to behave like an American stereotype of Chinese government, not the realities.
While the stereotype is that the Chinese government is this big well oiled machine that tries to controls the lives of everybody, the reality is that it is less coordinated than most governments, as evidenced by their non existant legal system. (see http://www.icgg.org/downloads/contribution10_schr
The reality is that China is really ruled by a collection of political/social groups (old boy networks) and when you see one of these requests for information, it is far more likely that it is one groups attack against another, not the central governments attempt to supress dissidents. (sorta like republican/democratic infighting, sui generis and in spades since China effectively has millions of political parties/interest groups)
The central government simply doesn't have the bandwidth to handle anything but the most extreme cases, it is mostly concerned these days with trying to maintain even a semblance of control of the country. The Chinese aren't a meek people, a recent attempt to build a small powerplant on some farmlands lead to a major riot. And the only reason for building that powerplant was for the benefit of the people who were rioting!
There are considerable indications (and more has been turning up in the past few days) that the whole privacy rights issue that lead to the senate hearings was blown out of porportion as part of a competitive intelligence operation directed against Google by one or more of their competitors and that everyone involved was being spun.
You hear a lot these days about terrorist transcending national boundaries. What you don't hear is that every other non governmental group seems to have done the same. While competitive intelligence operations are a normal part of business in America, the recent trend to involve foreign governments in what are essentially private fights is very disturbing.
However irrelevant governments may be in the age of multinationals, they still control the use of physical force and the welfare of their people, and the potential for disaster is immense. In the economic history of the world, this blurring of lines between public government/economic warfare issues and private/business issues has happened many times, and the results have never been positive for any of the parties involved.
The recent DPW ports issue is an example of this. No matter what side you are on, the fact is that it is tearing America's political system/government apart and causing enormous damage to America's interests in the wider world.
A few years back I was working for a large U.S. automaker (commonly known by a two letter acronym) and we tried for over a year to get a definitive legal opinion as to whether we could take information regarding Chinese citizens outside the borders and into our offshore datacentre. Seeing as how we couldn't get that opinion, we left some data onshore - which made a mess of my infrastructure design!
or "Chinese communist". Never forget.
Uh.... they do. Look at the bottom of the page.
En réponse à une demande légale adressée à Google, nous avons retiré 3 résultat(s) de cette page. Si vous souhaitez en savoir plus sur cette demande, vous pouvez consulter le site ChillingEffects.org.
That's the same notice they put on when the results on their US site are censored, except translated into French.
Google actually fought to be able to say that they were filtering results to the end users. They weren't allowed to originally.
Hmmm... Pie...
Last time I checked, the number of omitted results weren't displayed on Google.cn. (unlike when searching for racist material on Google.fr or Google.de, or DMCA-challenged stuff in the US).
So users of Google.cn don't have any idea of the *scale* of censorship that's being apllpied to their results. I think that's a very important component of providing any transparency to the censorship.
I think this is simply a show for the US congress. Does anyone seriously think Chinese government actually care where google put its records when they ask for it? Google China will be operating under the Chinese law and Chinese laws are flexible. How does moving the records away from China make a difference?