US Gov't Pushing News Through China's Great Firewall

eldavojohn writes "The US government's Broadcasting Board of Governors has revealed in a completed FOIA request the development, testing and planned use of Feed Over E-mail (FOE) to push news through China's firewall. This FOIA request (PDF) indicates that the US government is interested in making sure Chinese people receive up-to-date news, and it wants to expand the arsenal of anti-censorship tools (for news at least). The FOE project is GPLv3 and maintained by Sho Ho of BBG."

Comments

OSS propaganda is good?

[Nikker]

Does making it FOSS make pushing one countries point of view make it right?

Re:OSS propaganda is good?

[RightwingNutjob]

OK, let's get this out of the way: if a private citizen advocates for 1) freedom of expression 2) accountability of governments to their citizens and 3) some other basic human rights, and sets up a FOSS software project to advocate these things to people living under statist governments, is it good? If his government does the same thing, is it bad? It's the messenger AND the message that distinguishes good from bad, not just a question of who's doing the talking.

Re:OSS propaganda is good?

[nurb432]

To hell with China's rights as a sovereign nation, we are the good guys, we know best. If they did that to us,we would be up in arms ( and rightfully so ), lets hear it for being hypocrites. Go team!

Re:OSS propaganda is good?

[houghi]

With the government you nowadays have to think if that is ALL they want. It is the same one that is looking at the Internet Kill Switch.
For all I know, they do it as some sort of test.

Re:OSS propaganda is good?

[phoomp]

Exactly my thoughts: at the same time the US government is looking for ways to help Chinese citizens bypass Chinese censorship, the US government also looking for ways to be able to censor US citizens.

Re:OSS propaganda is good?

[phoomp]

Censorship by the American Government isn't that far fetched of an idea ... if you take the blinders off for a moment. What if the Internet Kill Switch proposal goes through, something happens to make the US government decide to disconnect Americans from the Internet and China offers a tool to help Americans reconnect to the 'Net?

Re:OSS propaganda is good?

[RightwingNutjob]

If indeed it came to that, I don't think anyone would be terribly offended. In fact, I'm pretty sure the citizenry would be dealing with more immediate problems should the federal government decide to through the First Amendment out the window like that.

Re:OSS propaganda is good?

[sznupi]

Yup, luckily we have Free Speech Zones / cages!

Re:OSS propaganda is good?

[evilviper]

The US government has done a good job, for a very long time, of producing reasonably unbiased news reporting. In fact it may well be the only country where the government funded news media is prohibited from broadcasting to its own citizens, specifically to prevent the temptation of political manipulation and interference from becoming too great.

Go right ahead and be righteously indignant, but we all know the track record of the two countries involved, and its hardly debatable whos interests are more in line with the Chinese peoples.

Re:OSS propaganda is good?

[mikael]

It sounds like something out of the 1980's internet . Back then, many corporate websites didn't have high-speed T1 lines, let alone broadband to access gopher, ftp or USENET. Workers were lucky to get a 64-kbit ISDN link to serve an entire office block. The solution to downloading large files, was to send a Email request to an server, which would in turn ftp the relevant file, chop the file into little chunks and uuencode them to you by E-mail. It would be up to you to reassemble them or to use a suitable E-mail client to do it automatically for you.

Bring this technique up to date with today technology, and you would either having a mailing list or an E-mail server that could receive requests. In return, these would send out mail attachments comprised of the requested contents as encrypted zip files.

F.O.E.

[Emperor BMA]

> The FOE project is GPLv3 and maintained by Sho Ho of BBG.

Even in your internets... FOE

Isnt it ironic.

[unity100]

that american govt is so sensitive about freedom of information of chinese people, whereas trying to censor/suppress anything that wikileaks discloses about american government, to american people ?

question was rhetorical. it is ironic.

Re:Isnt it ironic.

[russotto]

that american govt is so sensitive about freedom of information of chinese people, whereas trying to censor/suppress anything that wikileaks discloses about american government, to american people ?

Is the US government soliciting and obtaining Chinese government classified documents and then broadcasting their contents worldwide? No, they are not. There's no irony or hypocrisy here. Give the Devil his due, why don't you?

Re:Isnt it ironic.

[poity]

I'm trying to understand you, unity100. I know you support Wikileaks as I do, but do you also support this initiative that targets Chinese people?
Also, the appropriate word is "hypocritical". Of course, that would require the US to actively censor what its citizens can access in the name of "social harmony" as China does.

Re:LOL

[hedwards]

That's not really a problem. I know that it's popular to claim that consumer spending is important, but that's only in countries like the US where we're pillaging foreign countries for wealth, what little work is left tends to be service sector. An ideal economy would be balanced such that there's as much being produced as there is being consumed and that increases in efficiency would lead to decreases in actual work done.

This is a bit simplistic as it doesn't account for trade and that it's more efficient to raise somethings in say New Zealand and ship them to the US than it is to produce them domestically.

Re:A more direct approach

[XiaoMing]

Yeah! If they don't, they obviously know what we'll do for situations like that. I mean, just look at Egypt!

I hope those Chinese bastards at the top of the chain of command are ready for all the "No comment" and "We are watching the situation evolve" statements that they can handle. Especially the ones that are managing the $900B in U.S. Debt.

Granted, I shouldn't forget that Egypt isn't even going to the extremes of censoring the internet, all they did was turn the whole thing off.

What about...

[thestudio_bob]

I wonder if they're pushing WikiLeaks?

The only problem I have with it

[Opportunist]

The problem I have with the US's zeal to "export democracy" is that they go so overzealous with it that there's now a shortage of it at home.

Or

[Stargoat]

Or you can just use Alta-Vista or any other not-so-well-known news provider. That's what I did last time I was over there, in China that is. I was reading a lot of African newspapers online as well.

All it requires is a little imagination people. These are dullard Communists who specialize in IT who set the Great Firewall up.

Waste of US tax payer money

[hackingbear]

They had "success" in testing simply because nobody is using this. There are thousands other ways to do the same if only you and the few recipients know the route. Chinese government does not worry the information getting it, today you can read CNN or many other English sites in China unrestricted; they worry the information being spread to wide population and cause social unrest, like in Egypt. If it can ever be popular among to millions of people, say a lot more than the number of people using proxies or reading English news over there, they can find way to shut it down and it will be shut it down.