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China Slams Clinton's Call For Internet Freedom
CWmike writes "China on Friday slammed remarks made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promoting Internet freedom worldwide, saying her words harmed US-China relations. Clinton's speech and China's response both come after Google last week said it planned to reverse its long-standing position in China by ending censorship of its Chinese search engine. Google cited increasingly tough censorship and recent cyberattacks on the Gmail accounts of human rights activists for its decision, which it said might force it to close its offices in China altogether. On Thursday in Washington, DC, Clinton unveiled US initiatives to help people living under repressive governments access the Internet for purposes such as reporting corruption. The US will support circumvention tools for dissidents whose Internet connections are blocked, she said. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu called for the US 'to respect the facts and stop using the issue of so-called Internet freedom to unreasonably criticize China.' China's laws forbid hacking attacks and violations of citizens' privacy, the statement said, apparently referring to the issues raised by Google."
i don't know if people are going to believe this (but i don't care) because i'm a "statistical sample of one", but there is empirical evidence (on a statistical sample of one - me) to suggest that real-time Internet Censorship operates in the United States on a level far more sophisticated than that of China.
when i was last in the U.S. i happened to be making enquiries about "knowledge-based" systems and about TETRA modems. unfortunately, the best "knowledge-based" software happens to fall into a category of tools (ontology classifiers for example) used and deployed by Intelligence Agencies; and unfortunately, the best companies that do TETRA also happen to do APCO P25 radios used by Police, Homeland Security, Airports, the FBI etc.
so there's little me, waving a red flag to a bull, and finding that web site browsing was behaving particularly odd. one moment web sites would be accessible and the next they would be offline.
i surmised that i was finding "stuff" that, embarrassingly for the people monitoring my internet traffic, they had never encountered before, never evaluated and so out of knee-jerk fear reaction slapped a block on it.
it also turns out that one of the companies i had found had _just_ been funded by InQTel.
it took some phone calls to stop the censorship.
so if you push the right buttons and wave the right kind of red flags, there's enough empirical evidence to suggest that the United States also performs Internet Censorship.
of course, nobody's told Mrs Clinton that, before she began getting righteous, which is very embarrassing for her and for the U.S. government she's representing. it also puts the comments made by the Chinese Government into perspective: namely that the Chinese Government know damn well that the U.S. Government also performs Internet Censorship; Ma Zhaoxu is simply calling things "as they are".
p.s. in replies to this, i don't want to see any messages saying "But That's All Irrelevant Because China Has A Bad Human Rights Record" to which the response is "Guantanamo Bay? remember that place?"
Like China is the only part of the world where censorship is in action. In the west we never heard about the US Black Fleet that was about to conquer Taiwan and got blown out of the water by the Chinese. That happened in 2003 and never hit the news nor the Internet. At least the part of the Internet over here. In China this is all well known. But over here the embarrassment for the USA would be devastating. Loosing a whole fleet to China, them walking away without a scratch, as if they had performed a show.
There is lots of stuff happening in the world that would embarrass the USA and the west in general. But none of it hits the news-stands over here. And where is that guy that transformed the good old telephone network to a high-speed digital IP-network? I worked with him at the time, till the USA threatened to nuke the Netherlands if he ever got a hand on his money. A nice personal message from then president Clinton.
Censorship in the west is way more severe than in the east. We just do not know what is not been told to us, but that does not mean that it did not happen. We are just not allowed to know. And are told that they are the baddies. But they saved the planet where the USA tried to destroy them. And that makes the USA look like a fool and, when everything comes out, the most hated country on the planet.
Ms. Clinton has great rhetoric, but its not supported by the facts.
We know damn well that the US censors the internet. It's written in the law, and with very harsh penalties for those who publish what the US doesn't want published. Even when individuals painstakingly obey the laws, the US government has been known to arrest people and put them in jail for a very long time, and has even sent agents to foreign countries to kidnap or attack American dissidents living there. I personally know of at least two cases.
Of course, the American public enthusiastically supports these actions against kind and gentle men who love children and are brave enough to say so publicly, just as the Chinese public enthusiastically supports the Chinese government's actions against "unpatriotic" Chinese who are brave enough to denounce corruption and attempt to improve their country. So it's unlikely that the average American will have the brains or moral integrity to even notice the hypocrisy in Ms. Clinton's remarks.
If they lived here they'd have the freedom to watch only Fox News.
You are lying about still being in China. Wikipedia has been unblocked for a LONG time now. I'm sitting here in my apartment in Beijing reading about Descartes on Wikipedia.
Also, the censorship aspect of Youtube and Facebook etc is a ruse. The main reason for them being blocked in protectionism. Control of information is a great secondary benefit. It's no coincidence that Facebook was blocked right around when it started gain traction outside of the US, including China, and several local sites here also began to pick up traction.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Some people cried tears when they listened to speeches of Hitler too. It's just cheap propaganda, Clinton only favors freedom for corporations, not for people.
How will she backpedal this time after we make menacing statements on how reliable we think T-Bonds are? How will Obama clean up her mess?
If you want to get real progress on the real issues between China and the United States (i.e. NOT HUMAN RIGHTS), keep Hillary out of it. We'd like to discuss and make progress on those issues but not when Hillary the irrational China-Hater is out there spewing garbage about "human rights".