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Helping Other Big Brothers Go High Tech
Dino writes "BusinessWeek has an interesting article about the export of high-tech equipment to China's security forces, and the dilemma that it creates. On the one hand, there is the desire to increase exports to a country with which there is a trade imbalance. On the other hand, we face a situation in which the technology can be used to track dissidents and unauthorized religions. Restrictions have been enacted since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre to prevent exports intended to the Chinese security forces. However, the restrictions have been applied narrowly, and effectively prevent only low-tech exports such as handcuffs, helmets, fingerprint powder, and tear gas, while DB software, two-way radios, DNA analysis gear, and video probes, are allowed."
They need to make sure blood on the bullet matches up so they don't bill the wrong family.
I hope high gas prices are depriving your children, you fucking dumbass.
I wonder this was just an innocent mistake or if the submitter intentionally reworded this to imply there are other big brothers we are helping. If so, let's see the evidence, otherwise this slight modification of text comes out of the pages of Animal Farm.
Hmm..
However, they do care about how they are are perceived to be acting because negative press can get in the way of other sales, so they might not sell to Chine etc if they think that might hurt selling to a more lucrative market. Don't for a minute confuse that with genuine ethical feelings though.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Another carrot proffered naively by the US in hopes that China will "come around" and re-evaluate its currency?
China still cool! So exotic and foreign, possibly with alternative philosophies I can adopt to rebel against my western upbringing. I'd love to visit it!
Selling the Chines databases and two-way radios is bad? I don't get it. Also, where does in the article does it even mention two-way radios, video probes or DNA analysis?
When I submitted the story, I put that in parenthesis at the end, but the editors decided it was unnecessary.
Can someone answer why Slashdot is so biased to the point of promoting these "unauthorized religions"? Especially in places like China?
Would these same people promote the same types of religions in the United States? How about the "David Koresh" religion, which was labeled as a cult. What about the Heaven's Gate cult in San Diego? Was that a valid religion too? Or were these two types of cults just another "unauthorized religion"?
The free market attitude is what dominates us policy(except for huge subsidies to oil companies, tax breaks to mega corps, etc...)
Profit will always trump most other ideals in business today.
All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and n
any human rights irrelevant.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
I am the submitter, and I copied the article's title from BusinessWeek as is, and put it in the subject field.
I just noticed that since you mentioned it.
I hope I'm not randomly selected at the airport to be searched with a video probe!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
.. someone else will... or china can make them for themselves much cheaper (I am surprised why they don't do that in the first place)
. . . nearly anything could potentially be used in the repression of free thought and free religion in China. Dealing with the Chinese at all, under any circumstance, could easily be construed as indirect support for China's totalitarian political infrastructure. Why split hairs over database software and DNA testing equipment? If you're going to be dealing with them at all, you've got to accept the risk that something you sold them might eventually be used to track down, restrain, or even torture a political dissident or practitioner of unsanctioned religion. It's China, what do you expect?
Besides, if American firms don't sell them what they want, they'll either buy it elsewhere or rip off a foreign design and make it themselves.
It is interesting how much we blast China for not giving freedoms to its citizens. Do not US citizens realize the same thing is happening to them?
What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and in the end lose his very soul?
If you need an argument against secularization of the culture (as opposed to the government), then look no further than capitalism completely unrestrained by any influence from the Protestant Christian tradition that gave birth to it.
Or, as the Communists used to say, "the Capitalists will sell us the rope we will use to hang them."
Really, is high tech scarier in the hands of China's gov't, or the USA's? I bet most people in the world think the American gov't
is pretty scary right now.
However, the restrictions have been applied narrowly, and effectively prevent only low-tech exports such as handcuffs, helmets, fingerprint powder, and tear gas
I'm sure that really makes a big difference. You know, since China is such a small country with few resources, there's just no way they could manufacture stuff like that domestically. Yeah, I know, it's the principle of it all (or, in other words, a bill a politician could sponsor to make them appear moral).
Unfortunately far too many laws are created so politicians can simply be seen doing something. Sort of like in our town, where a lady was killed in a car accident a few years ago (because her cat was loose in her car and she was messing around with it and pulled out in front of a truck), so the town quickly changed the intersection to a 4-way stop. Now hundreds of drivers are inconvenienced daily just because the local government wanted to do something the newspaper could write about.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
while DB software, two-way radios, DNA analysis gear, and video probes, are allowed
And these items could also be very useful for disaster response and relief - in other words, humanitarian aid.
The poster seems to be struggling to make a political point where there is simply not enoungh evidence which clearly defines what these things will be used for.
Most American businesses do not give a damn about what happens in China. Look at Google. Its company motto was "Don't be evil". However, after going IPO and entering the Chinese market with a splash, the new motto is "What's a little evil among 'friends'?".
Like Yahoo and MSN, Google actively censors its web site.
The unserious comment:
Hey, why don't we sell them the FBI's security software? We can invade them while they're trying to click through all the error messages.
The serious comment:
This article is bait for all the foil hat wearers and doomsayers to come out of the woodworks whining about our governments and the governments of the world. Let's face it people. You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, you go earn your paycheck, and presumably you have enough free time to post on this website! What "civil liberties" are you lacking here? You have the freedom to whine about our government on Slashdot, and do you think the CIA is watching you for doing it? And so what if you are? Might as well make up conspiracies about religions that say "God is watching you!" God, Big Brother, what's the big deal? Just live your lives for goodness sake, go vote, and if you have a problem with the way things are run write a letter to your Congressman, then you'll KNOW someone in the government will be paying attention to your opinions. And if China wants to watch their people and put them under totalitarian government, it's not our job to police them.
In fact, let me try (with my limited vocabulary) to present you all with a little conundrum. Back in the Cold War, we were very set on "liberating Communist Russia", because we didn't like the way the people were being treated - in much the same way you are all complaining about China being treated. So our government began to take actions to stop Communism in all its forms, and men like Andrew McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover came into power, pioneering the "big brother" image of our government today, the same image that you're all complaining about.
So in essence, aren't you in support of forcing our "Democratic principles" on the Chinese nation, while arguing against what happened the last time we tried to do that? Do the ends REALLY justify the means? Should we be minding our own business and letting well enough alone?
I don't think it's as much offering China any carrots, as just bending over backwards to please the local big corporations. Wouldn't want to let ethical considerations get in the way of big campaign contributions, now would we? The US policy and politics of the new millenium have dropped any coherent planning or pretense of pursuing the interest of the country as a whole, and just focused on giving corporations anything they wish, even if it means shafting society as a whole to do that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
1.2 billion Chinese times maybe $0.24 per implantable RFID chip, and you're looking at $288 million is sales for the chips alone - just to chip the existing population. Add to this the cost of readers for the Police/Organ "Donation" Collection Squads, permanently installed gate-readers at transportation choke points, schools, and factories, and you are looking at some real money. Oh, and the technology needed to process this massive Ministry-of-Love style population control scheme will be expensive, too - database software, servers, fiber optic network hardware,etc.. Of course, living in China will pretty much suck even more than it does now - but, hey, corporations have to make a profit, right?
A cult is two or more people who believe in something you don't.
and it happens to be money.
What I really fear is the torture that Tibetans are going to endure before the Olympic games. They're gonna be looking for a platform and China is probably just gonna round 'em up.
Yet, the more you get China hooked on the milk from the capitalist tit the closer you are going to come to something resembling revolution and the ousting of Communism. It's moving pretty fast now.
Oh please. You can talk about companies all day, but all of the corporations in the world don't begin to measure up to what consumer whores regular citizens are. You know those hundreds of millions of people shopping at Wal-Mart? You think any of them know or care where their money is going. I'd wager on "no". Hell, Wal-Mart didn't have even a bump in their upward trajectory when they quietly dropped their "Made in the USA" schtick. People just keep buying, and buying, and buying...
And I'm not talking about Wal-Mart, I'm talking about every little thing that regular people buy every day. Hell, I've seen people beat the shit out of each other like animals so that they could save $100 on a laptop computer.
Remember, the only reason these companies are here is because people keep buying stuff from them.
...in which the technology can be used to track dissidents and unauthorized religions.
We'd best be careful, here. Until recently ( 6 or so years?), we were falling behind in tracking our own dissidents and non-christians.
But we're beginning to catch up, and this congress will soon put in place means so that we can get around those pesky laws/regulations which prevented us from doing this in the past.....
I really disagree that supression of religions is something that the Chinese government does wrong. You only need to look at at America with its far greater level of violence to see that religion can bring a society to its knees. Or Zimbabwe, with its great religious tolerance record. Religious tolerance is an inadequate measure of freedom in a society. Iran is also a society with great religious freedom, where Muslims can practice their faith without limit. Is that a society that should be emulated?
Religious freedom is the worst idea that has ever existed.
Buy chinese goods, sell goods to chinese, make both economies interdependant. Make wealthy people in China, make the middle class grow. Leaving them poor and uneducated is surely not the way out of the dictatorship.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
What about the comapnies who help the US governement spy on their people? Are the bad, or are they patritic?
I don't have a problem with anybody selling anything to China. I do have a problem with the Chineese policy and politics and I would love to see an embargo that forbids any country doing business with that country.
Yet an emargo needs to come from the country, not from the company.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Actually, I somehow doubt that China or any other country is 100% composed of 100% sane and wise people, who'd _never_ be fooled by a cooky New Age cult. It's the kind of "in the Orient they're wise and do _everything_ better" idea that got us saddled with cooky pseudo-oriental cults in the west in the first place.
People are people everywhere. Some people are disillusioned and at a "well, _is_ there a higher meaning to this shit?" point, and thus easy prey to anyone who wants to sell them some fruitcake meaning to it all. And there are plenty, ranging from ruthless sociopaths with no scruples to forward their own goals (be it wealth, glory, or seeing how many people can they convince to commit suicide) to genuine schizophrenic fruitcakes, who'll come up with such a "meaning to it all" to sell them.
And if you study the history of religions in Asia, they have _millenia_ of ridiculous religions behind them. It's not all Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Hinduism in their past. They had murderous cults, sex-obsessed-to-the-extreme cults, etc, just like the rest of the world.
And in some parts of Asia they still do. There are recent events like some Indian peasant family torturing and murdering a neighbour's child and IIRC drinking his blood, just because some tantric guru told them that that it's required for some magic spell that will make them finally have a child of their own. How's that for a cooky religion you wouldn't want in your back yard?
(No, I'm not saying that India as a whole is like that, or anything racist. Just that, as I was saying, people are people everywhere. They have their gullible idiots too, just like Europe or America have theirs.)
So, basically, yes, I fully convinced that China too must have a bunch of cooky cults too. They're not the ones that make the headlines (Falun Gong is more covered in western media than some new age cult with 12 members total). It probably isn't even the reason why China persecutes all "unauthorized religions" indiscriminately. Etc. But I do believe that they too must have their new age fruitcakes. They're just humans, that's all I'm saying.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Maybe? in what world you people live? As for the GP's other Big Brothers, excuse me, wasn't Saddam Hussein a former ally of yours?
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Ok, end the import of all shirts from China which have at least one button falls off the first time you wash it. That alone will solve the trade imbalance.
Increased trade with China is a good thing for China, the chinese and the rest of the world. It creates a wealthy middle class who are no longer reliant on the government and who will want more political influence on how they are governed. This will have a far larger impact on the political reform than isolationism, which simply cements dictatorships in place.
Deleted
I visited China wearing a t-shirt with a map of the region we were visiting (China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan), but Taiwan was colored as a separate country. I was quickly hunted down by Chinese guards/soldiers at the airport and told to take my shirt off, turn it inside out, and leave it in my bag for the remainder of my stay in China.
Shoebomb jokes aside, that's ridiculous. Sure, the US gets pretty weird when there are big scares (red scare(s)), but don't compare it to China.