China crisis is a TikToking time bomb As country after country bans TikTok from official systems, it’s fair to ask what’s so dodgy about a social network filled with dance crazes, makeup advice and cats. You can understand why selling the Middle Kingdom state-of-the-art EUV lithography gear might be a bad idea, but this? Is it the xenophobia China often blames for …
I think it's too one-sided and, to be honest, rather naïve.
"The NSA or GCHQ cannot compel cooperation - they can ask, but even so within limits"
They no longer have to. The big data gatherers such as Facebook Meta, Google and Microsoft are quite happy to supply, no doubt for the same reason that telephone companies in the EU are still very happy to comply with an intercept warrent: they get paid for it. Add to this the blatant disregard for privacy (coz' it makes moolah) and the creation of US laws that compel companies to provide data from any place on the globe (read: in total defiance of sovereignity of the jurisdictions in question, which is something that is apparently OK for the US but not in reverse) which legalises the breach in their own country and I don't think there is any valid reason to trust the US players either - and they truly are inside our systems.
It also shows a rather short memory. I have yet to see a Chinese company announce that they next security update (translated: you will HAVE to install it or your insurers will not pay for a breach) contains an audit for their old software, and for some reason people have already accepted their incessant collection of statistics that are none of their business. So far, the US is the only nation that has normalised spying on the planet as business as usual, while doing what their politics have now honed to a fine art: deflecting and pointing at someone else.
Before you think I'm a China fan, well, no, I think there are things desperate wrong there that they need to fix, human rights being but one of a long list. But I have noticed they're now used often to deflect attention from what other countries are doing, and I am sick of that sort of politics. Look at SVB - now it is all of a sudden possible to buy that bank, now it has caused damage to other economies. Not before, when it was actually needed to calm the markets.
Frankly, I don't trust anyone.
Did we ever really have human rights and freedom? I'm sure before technology governments had people eaves dropping in pubs or infiltrating dangerous groups that wanted to save beavers and stuff. The difference between the east and west is the east doesn't hide it.
What freedoms do we have and what have we lost? What freedoms did we get from winning the war? We stopped the Nazis which is generally considered a good thing (I completely agree) but the opposite happened. Technological advances in eaves dropping devices. Spy tactics. Covert surveillance. Our government at the time probably thought the Stasi were a good idea (they were Russian tactics used in East Germany btw for anyone a bit confused so not totally German, we indirectly helped introduce them.) Didn't really give us freedom though did it? Just many decades of debt like what Ukraine is likely to get after that's finished.
People talk about losing the right to protest. We lost that many years ago with the miners. It's now just illegal. Poll tax was an exception to the rule because it was going to hit too many people at once so we now we have council tax which is probably around what poll tax would have cost most people. Softly softly catchy monkey. They didn't even need to ban protests to be fair as no one can afford to protest that are the most likely to protest.
I remember when the internet started to get popular. They didn't waste anytime in controlling that and what do we have now? A corporate and government controlled behemoth of data gathering. It's all well and good having an internet but when you can't find anything it's not free and if you do you get flagged.
China is bad but at least it's honest about it.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree but I'm just saying it how I see it. 1984 is almost upon us. Which is funny when you think it was 1984 that the government introduced that very dubious telecoms law that allowed all the spying on us by them.
Did we ever really have human rights and freedom? I'm sure before technology governments had people eaves dropping in pubs or infiltrating dangerous groups that wanted to save beavers and stuff.
The difference now is technology allows you to hoover up ALL data and decide what to look for later, etc. In the past the limits of gov budgets meant they would struggle to keep tabs on more than a few thousand folks in total. Now it can be anyone's history and interactions up for inspection at the touch of a button.
And yet when there is some terrorist act almost always we find they were already a "person of interest" known to the authorities and so you have to wonder just how useful all of this state surveillance really is. For Google & Facebook, etc, it is useful as it makes money, they don't need any other reason to do it.
Good point but I think you missed the memo.
If you hoover up all that data you can then use that using ML to influence the way people think. That is the most powerful tools the governments now have and they are all at it. I'm not even good at stuff but I'm sure I could whack out a basic algorithm that looked for posts and responses on any website to start influencing people to think as others are thinking.
Lets not stay small scale there are billions of people in this world in many different cultures mostly using some form of social media or news media where they have access. Who is paying for that "free" social media? You think it's ads? Do people really think google makes it's money from ads?
That's my opinion. Flame away. Once you control the masses you control everyone else. Anyone for some bread and circuses?
Does China hide it's laws? Does China hide it's social point system? Does China claim not to forcibly control it's citizens?
If you answered No to those 3 questions then it is. Not saying it's right in what it does but it doesn't hide it.
Do we hide our laws? Technically no but they are written in such a way for ambiguity? Do we hide a social point system? We don't hide it as such we just forget tell people how your credit score impacts so much of your life along with class. Do we claim not to forcibly control out citizens? Sure, if people think they are free try to criticise the people with the power or even have a protest now.
When the writer grows up and ventures abroad he'll learn that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, et al, are all "state actors" in that they hand over anything the Intel services ask for. Spying locally "prohibited"? Easy fix. GCHQ spies on Americans while NSA spies on Birts, etc, then send the intel across the pond. The naïveté of the article is embarrassing. The China bashing is standard El Reg..
Or, to summarize...
China wants to spy on everyone everywhere, and nobody has any recourse
The US already does, which you can legally challenge if you have a few million $$ and a few years to burn
The spy agencies of the larger EU countries are on various stages of wanting in while having more legal constraints (of varying effectiveness), and limited technical capability to do so.
It seems to me that there are 2 principles to follow in IT
a) subsidiarity - in politics this means decisions should be taken at the lowest possible level, ie as decentralised as possible. The IT equivalent is to do as much as you can yourself (eg home NAS vs cloud), or farm out to a local / regional provider rather than a global one. Use your local ISP as an email provider rather than gmail. Run your own datacenter or use a colocation facility rather than cloud, or if you have to use cloud use a regional provider. Buy network equipment from Nokia / Ericsson rather than Huawei / Cisco).
I know in some cases it's Hobson's choice, if all laptops and phones whatever their brand are made in China for example. But we do what we can, and even if it is a bit more expensive in $$ it's cheaper long-term when considering both security implications, and the downsides of Europe weakening economic power vs US and China
The NSA or GCHQ cannot compel cooperation - they can ask, but even so within limits.
Ah, you mean besides of doing illegal things, like f.ex. using NSO/pegasus on dissidents?
You are right that the Chinese have spying made legally non-optional. But telling us that the "west" is working under the rule of law is like burying you head in the sand. I don't trust east nor west with my data. Neither have proven trustworthy when push comes to shove.
The real difference is that telling this story in the west is less likely causing you to be thrown into jail or simply vanish mysteriously. However, there are very notable exceptions, effectively causing you to lose your freedom, when you publish illegal actions committed by the USA/NSA/CIA/etc.. As long as you only talk about illegal actions and don't actually document and prove them with real damning documentation, you are most probably safe in the west. Otherwise you will simply be jailed as a spy, regardless the illegality of the actions you exposed. In the Chinese rule you will simply cease to be and never to be talked about again.
The real difference is that telling this story in the west is less likely causing you to be thrown into jail or simply vanish mysteriously. However, there are very notable exceptions, effectively causing you to lose your freedom, when you publish illegal actions committed by the USA/NSA/CIA/etc.. As long as you only talk about illegal actions and don't actually document and prove them with real damning documentation, you are most probably safe in the west. Otherwise you will simply be jailed as a spy, regardless the illegality of the actions you exposed. In the Chinese rule you will simply cease to be and never to be talked about again.
That's very interesting. Can you provide a list of people who have been jailed for providing "damning documentation"?
Your implying that it's a large number, whereas the only example I can think of is Bradley Manning, whom as a serving soldier sent seven hundred and fifty thousand classified documents to Wikileaks, which appears a trifle indiscriminate for documenting specific actions, and so it can hardly be surprising that a serving soldier so comprehensively violating the rules around handling classified information ended up in prison for ~5 years.
I can't think of a single example of a civilian being jailed and would be genuinely interested to have a list.
He escaped mainly because he got other people to do the dirty work (Manning, for instance) and because he was clever enough to set up Wikileaks as a front for his illegal activities so it looked like he did it "for the benefit of humanity". IMHO, the only benefit for humanity he could offer would be washing more often, but we do suffer from a lot of people who are too easily pushed into unwarranted hero worshipping and then become blind to reality.
I come from a country which is a bit more dry and moderate about the whole hero thing, and if you remove that shine there isn't much left to admire, more the reverse. This chap abused the asylum process, and should have been booted out of his embassy hiding spot a lot earlier.
As for the rape incident, I am left wondering why the victims asked for him to have an STD test. Anyone with any decency would have done that immediately, so I have my suspicions about (a) why the victims asked and (b) why he refused. We'll never know - the victims can't open their mouths without getting buried in virtriol by the starry eyed fans and Assange obvioulsy won't be keen to share his own data, only other people's data is fair game..
/cynic
There was also that woman with the improbable name… Victory Lap or something. Who was basically jailed for whistleblowing.
Problem is, these are the ones we know about.
Just like Bertrand Russell’s teapot, there are likely ones who have been put away -or even been done away with- that we just don’t know of… but since the trust has already been broken so many times we can easily believe it to be the case.
Our lot are the lesser of two evils… barely.
Reality Winner? She wasn't whistle-blowing government criminality. She leaked counter-intelligence on Russian election meddling. Arguably it *was* in the public interest but at the same time if 'Top Secret' means anything at all there has to be a process for enforcing that in the general case. We can't know the consequences of the leak but typically when you're doing counter-intelligence there are very good reasons you don't want the enemy to know what you know about what they're doing (remember the thing where the Dutch AIVD got pissed because the Yanks bragged about them watching Cozy Bear's CCTV and so on).
Reality leaked intel to the press directly of course but indirectly Russian military intelligence got to know about it: She leaked counter-intelligence to the enemy the intelligence was about.
I'm not saying what happened is totally right. It's a complicated area. But by the same token it certainly wasn't 'evil'. She's out now anyway, 3 years inside with the world on pandemic-pause outside for large parts of it was pretty wrist-slappy in the end.
*ahem* Pegasus *ahem*
Let's have a quick look at the mess in Spain:
PM and some government officials were found to have been spied with Pegasus. This is currently under active investigation. Morocco is the more likely suspect.
At the same time, Pegasus was also used against top Catalan political leaders. No investigation is being carried on, mostly because more than likely Spain itself is to blame. Even last week almost no government representation bothered to attended to meetings with EU representatives from a Pegasus investigative commission.
We can't trust China, that's for sure. Neither we can't trust western countries if spying fits their interest. And fits everyone's.
There may be no investigation of the alleged Catalan/Basque spying in Spain but the EU is investigating, the media in Spain are covering it, and you're talking about it here. This is democracy and rule of law in action. It doesn't mean every single time someone commits a crime they go directly to jail but it does mean there's social pressure created which could prevent a repeat, lead to legal reform, sway elections, and so on. In China there wouldn't be so much as an umbrella opened.
Compare this to the case where a certain billionaire said publicly that government is meddling way too much or something similar and believe it or not he disappeared completely for weeks and then announced that everything is fine and he will be stepping down.
"There’s no equivalence here between the East and West, no two sides of the same coin. The difference is the extensive legal framework protecting Western citizens and companies from state security overreach."
It is just the legality of it that's different. Both East and West will still spy on it's people, it's just the East do it knowing you know they do it - the West do it pretending you don't know and none of it ever happened.
It is just the legality of it that's different.
No, it's the practicality of it that's different.
Both sides spy, on each other as well as on people of targeted interest within their own borders.
You make it as difficult for the opposition to spy on you as possible, while doing your best to spy on the opposition. This is simply part of making it difficult to spy on us.
Or wiping out a commercial competitor that western companies can't otherwise compete with. One or the other.
"This is simply part of making it difficult to spy on us. Or wiping out a commercial competitor that western companies can't otherwise compete with. One or the other."
Why not both? That's a win-win, right? It's not like the Chinese can retaliate or spy on us in any other other ways, is it? </sarcasm>
Its not the spying, its the consequences of what you do that differ.
Sure democratic countries vary in how free and open they are, and all have limits on what it allowed (otherwise it is anarchy/failed state time) but if you don't grasp the difference then try visiting Russia and criticising Putin (jail or falling from a high window seems common outcomes), visiting China and trying to discuss Tiananmen Square, or Thailand and insult the king.
Our politicians and their policies are far from perfect, helped by idiot voters of course, but we have a great deal of freedom on simple things like ridiculing them.
Hey could you tell me what you're entertained by when looking at the firmware of a Chinese phone? I own a Chinese phone, I have Linux, and I've looked at the firmware. What am I supposed to be entertained by?
Or is it that you're just making stuff up and trying to scare monger people into anti-Chinese opinion like the rest of your article? Does the State Dept pay the Reg per article or is it like a package deal?
"The difference is the extensive legal framework protecting Western citizens and companies from state security overreach. Imperfect and constantly stretched as it is, the law is on our side."
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!
Yes, the UK is supposedly not allowed to spy on its own citizens. Same in the US. But there is nothing preventing them setting up in each other's countries (Menwith Hill, anyone?) then exchanging data.
(Whataboutism follows)
All of our tech titans are provably collecting way more personal information across the board. And yet this isn't spying because those are not the government. The article stokes the reader's fear that "they" are up to no good which is anti-foreigner rhetoric. Citizens and companies are grouped in the same clause which subconsciously links companies to "us". This is classic fear mongering tactics. What the article fails to mention is what measurable harm is done, instead it is assumed that letting others have control is implicitly wrong. Is that true for you, dear reader?
So when the UK supreme court rules that GCHQ et al spying is illegal, but that they can continue doing it anyway and no person will face prosecution, I should feel warm and fuzzy inside because I'm protected from government spying.
When the US government has laws that force any US company to give any data to the US government, and a similar 'not allowed to tell anyone its happening' clause applies, I feel warm and fuzzy inside again.
The blurriness of the distinctions here challenge all attempts at credibility. 'But we're the good guys' doesn't cut it.
Our government doesn't care to protect us. They just don't want anyone else fleecing their flock. Feds have been caught red handed with mass surveillance on all of us. They use direct connections to phone companies to gather all they want. Currently, Meta is handing over data on people discussing abortions to their states. No search warrants required. Has FISA ever turned down a request anyway? Stingrays(and their replacements) being used illegally without accountability. More than 50 years of privacy violations and no right to privacy added to the Constitution. Even rolled back the one precedent we had and still no protections.
It doesn't have to be this way, but we've accepted it. Fighting corporate spying would slow innovation. There would be fewer billionaires. They have already bought our government. Excuses to lay down and become the product they want us to be.
The vast majority of the people on Tiktok have about as much to fear of the Chinese government spying on them as they do from all the vast personal info that Google and Meta collect from them using those apps.
Of course if you work in a particularly sensitive industry where the Chinese gov would be interested in your activity then I would be concerned and remove Tiktok or other Chinese apps from your devices, but I would also recommend removing Facebook and Google to. As I have no doubt that the Chinese government has operatives working in those western organisations as well.
As to the successive governments around the world who are now only just banning Tiktok on government devices, they should be asking why they were allowing social media apps on them in the first place, whether they be Chinese or otherwise.
If China controls Tik Tok then they control the algorithm that determines what content appears on the feed of its users. Go look at the percentages of millennials and especially Gen Zers who say they get "all or almost all their news" from social media.
They don't need to elevate crazy stuff from the fringes to do this, just picking and choosing from mainstream sources to get stuff that more closely aligns with China's positions serves their interests. They could censor things they want to censor, by making sure that jokes about "Winnie the Pooh" don't get spread around, while boosting stories about Chinese scientific advances, attempts to negotiate "peace" in Ukraine, etc.
That's where the danger lies, not in knowing how many how to apply makeup videos your 22 year old daughter watches in a month. But if she sees a lot of favorable stories for congressional candidate A (who just happens to have more moderate views on China) and a lot of unfavorable stories for congressional candidate B who is more of a China hardliner, that can matter at the margins. Sure, the majority of people are pretty set in what party they are going to vote for but there is always a persuadable middle so if they can peel off a few percent from candidate B over to candidate A that could swing the election and China has one less hard line voice against them when stuff like a Tik Tok vote comes to the floor.
The difference is the extensive legal framework protecting Western citizens and companies from state security overreach.
As far as I am aware, I have exactly zero legal protection from the US, UK or any other foreign governments state security apparatus.
I am not resident in the country or visiting, and I am not a citizen. I am not protected by their constitution.
That means (afaik) the US govt in particular, is totally unrestricted in spying on my communications, and in misusing that information.
As "advancing the countries economic interest" was included in the NSA's mission, I have always assumed that commercial espionage is a large, or the largest, part of what they do.
"The Fiscal Year 2022 budget appropriation included $65.7 billion for the National Intelligence Program, and $24.1 billion for the Military Intelligence Program."
"I have exactly zero legal protection from the US, UK or any other foreign governments state security apparatus. I am not resident in the country or visiting, and I am not a citizen. I am not protected by their constitution."
Exactly right, and largely true for every country. Your (democratic) sovereign state protects you within your borders and you are subject to the law of the land, wherever that might be. The problem comes for undemocratic governments (Russia, China,... there are many), which do not protect their citizens within their own borders. They do not support the rule of law.
Supreme Court not interested in hearing about NSA's super-snoop schemes. Warrantless data harvesting, you say? Feds have their secret reasons and we're OK with that
Secret Service, ICE break the law over and over with fake cell tower spying
Ex-Meta security staffer accuses Greece of spying on her phone
Is China doing evil? Yes, of course. But there should be no complacency when looking at what happens in the so-called "free" side of the World
People are right to fear their own government. But for China and the free world, it is not even close.
Here in the free world, there is a distinction between what a government does and what it is legally permitted to do. In China there is no rule of law. Politicians are the law. So if you want to protest your government by holding up a blank piece of paper in public, you disappear.
"Cao Zhixin (曹芷馨) received a Master’s degree in history at Renmin Univ., was working as an editor at Peking Univ Press when she was taken away by police after attending a “Blank Paper” protest at the Liangma Bridge in Beijing.
https://www.nchrd.org/2023/03/cao-zhixin-曹芷馨/
vs.
In the US, the government is subject to the law, all laws must follow the constitution and you cannot (legally) be denied your constitutional rights. This allows you to drive by a cop and give him the finger without the fear of being arrested.
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/15/703665710/police-officer-cant-pull-over-driver-for-giving-him-the-finger-court-rules
The US has a constitution that protects its citizens from its own government, enshrining the right to certain freedoms and inalienable rights, which now includes giving a cop the bird. Dream on Chinese citizens, though I fully support their struggle for freedom.
The US government's collection of private data without a warrant issued by a judge is generally not admissible in court. The laws and constitution help inhibit this from happening, but surely some actors do it anyway. And when it happens, when your constitutional rights are violated as a private citizen you have redress through the courts.
The Reg articles you reference give the very examples you are looking for of people not being complacent. A sitting US Senator was investigating the CBP, and private citizens suing the government to protect our rights. In the US, the federal agencies are part of the executive branch (the president is their boss) but their operational rules (laws) are created by congress, and the legality of the laws is determined by the independent judiciary.
What you say may perhaps apply to US citizens , but it doesn't when you are not one. We in the EU are spied by the US and there's nothing we can do about it. Thanks to Max Schrems, there's a fight ongoing so our data are not at the disposal of all US agencies as they are for now thanks to the Cloud Act, but it's still going on. I don't feel better if I'm spied by the US instead of China.
That's right, some people tries to counter the actions of our governments or governmental agencies, but for one discovered, how many stay in the dark and continue still today?
As I said, there's no doubt China is evil, but we cannot be complacent with the mass surveillances put in place in the Western World.
Well that's ^^^ a good start. Yes, I know that there are many other ways of spying and social media companies still have evil means of tracking, but it cuts out a big chunk of easily spyable-on data.
Worries me that many people actually use social media for news. Holy crap.
@Rupert_Goodwins
Quote: "...That state is betting the rest of the world is hungry enough for cheap tech..."
Sorry....no betting required! From 1995 to the present, China GDP has increased seventeen times.....that's not 17%.....it's 1700%. (Compare UK GDP growth: about 200%)
......fueled by western demand for "cheap tech"......you know......cheap manufacturing at Foxconn......huge profits in Cupertino.
You might even suggest that this fuss about TikTok is of the West's own making!
And you might even start to wonder whether there are larger threats emanating from the same cause.......namely the hollowing out of technical knowledge in the West.....since none of our manufacturing is done at home, and all of our universities depend on paying students...............from China!!!
TikTok.........yup.....a problem.......but not THE problem!
Interestingly apt article on Al Jazeera today.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/3/28/bid-to-ban-tiktok-raises-hypocrisy-charge-amid-global-spying
The issue of rendering - kidnapping - suspects in lands outside US law should be very, very concerning. At least the US is conflicted over what powers the various law enforcement departments have, rather than just having a free hand to disappear its own citizens as we see in some states.
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