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“Whistleblower welcome in China”
- shawnz 13y agoMisleading title: this appears to be an opinion article about why the Chinese government should grant him asylum.
- teawithcarl 13y agoIt's an official (propaganda) editorial, from the highest level. Many of the top foreign journalists in Beijing tweeted this official post.
- eupharis 13y agoLooks like Snow isn't being extradited. Xinhua is the official press agency of the state. Editorial or no, this didn't get posted without the state's nod. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency
- betterunix 13y agoI cannot be the only one who found this line to be amusing: "Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn."
- Zigurd 13y ago#leastuntruthful
- Pherdnut 13y agoI don't think I would want to be an ex-NSA agent with "asylum" in Russia or China right now or at any time in the near-future.
- teawithcarl 13y agoAgreed - very dangerous for Snowden to be in China, considering that torture is routinely used in interrogation.
- cft 13y agoMark my words: by 2041 china will be a freer country than the United States. It is already economically freer in the free economic zones such as Shenzhen.
- tptacek 13y agoWhere by "economically free" we include such freedoms as "ability to deploy child labor", "ability to pay workers below subsistence", "ability to create the equivalent of company towns", "ability to dump toxic waste into rivers", "ability to blot out the sun with airborne waste", and "availability of vast pool of rural poor workers". And by "free" we specifically ignore "can be imprisoned indefinitely for belonging to the wrong religion", and "police officers can arrest and sentence you to a year in prison without the involvement of a court or even a prosecutor". Every time someone says something like "China is [or will soon be] freer than the US", what they're really saying is "I don't read, but I'm happy to divide the whole world into two sides: whoever supports my current biases, and whoever doesn't".
- clicks 13y ago> Where by "economically free" we include such freedoms as "ability to deploy child labor", "ability to pay workers below subsistence", "ability to create the equivalent of company towns", "ability to dump toxic waste into rivers", "ability to blot out the sun with airborne waste", and "availability of vast pool of rural poor workers". You can't deny that this is indirectly partly due to America's demand for cheap goods that China provides. Look, United States has already passed this stage -- we have had dark spots in our history too, with crimes among the most heinous in world history: slavery, genocide, child labor. We've mostly improved... and I expect China will improve as well as its populace becomes more learned and starts demanding more freedoms. But at any rate. I have one question for you tptacek: don't you agree that the extent of child labor, improper wages, toxic dumps, etc. taking place in China would be considerably less if Americans conscientiously chose to not fund these operations by essentially doing business with them? In other words, isn't America -- and the people of America -- culpable of these crimes that you make note of to a non-zero degree?
- glurgh 13y agoa program which marks the bleakest moment yet in the history of the Internet Writes someone from the other side of the Great Firewall.
- tty 13y agoWhat an insightful contribution.
- zalzane 13y agoThe only thing more terrifying than the great firewall is a construct with the same purpose that doesn't block internet access, but silently lets the government know when youre likely to be the kind of person who steps out of line.
- panacea 13y agoIt's all rotten to the core. I honestly think the method for defeating fascism, the blue meanies, is sustained whimsy and fantasy. Block their rigid methodologies with simply enjoying life and giving them the middle finger as they sit in dark rooms poring over the details of our lives. Cave dwelling sickos.
- im3w1l 13y agoIt depends on how numerous the threat is. Silently disappearing is useful for a small highly organized enemy, but for preventing large scale unorganized rioting, restricting the information flow is probably better.
- etherael 13y agoI feel quite ashamed to admit this now, but when I was much younger and had less scruples, I had a consulting role with an elite private school in a well to do suburb of Melbourne in Australia that had chronic problems with students accessing material that violated the school's internet usage policy. They had experimented with many, many blacklists and blocking solutions before, but with little success. The problem was that the kids were smart enough to know that they could just keep trying random sites until they got through the simplistic measures that flat blocklists were taking, and it was just a matter of time before they'd finally find something that wasn't in a list and get through. I came up with the bright idea of turning the blocking off, and turning the blocklist into a honeypot regex matcher in the squid logs and deep packet inspection on accessed urls. Now any attempts to circumvent the rules would invisibly tripwire a sysadmin or staff member to take administrative and or disciplinary action on the students. I'm told they had no more violations after that, I have my doubts mind you, but not about whether it was a more effective form of control. It forced them to self censor so big brother didn't have to do it for them, I think that's the real goal of pervasive permanent surveillance, even if you're not being watched, you can't be certain, so you'd best watch yourself.
- brokentone 13y agoSlightly off topic: China must be very happy about this revelation. We (US) have been criticizing their "great firewall" for so long, but now it's revealed that we have our own program with similar motivations, only a different execution. Rather than burying and censoring information, this surveils your usage of certain information and calls you a terror threat when you step outside the lines.
- tptacek 13y agoIt takes an enormous amount of rationalizing to compare a system of overt and pervasive government censorship of the Internet --- a system run by the government that blocks access to things the government doesn't want its citizens to read --- to even the most egregiously editorialized assumptions Glenn Greenwald has come up with.
- brokentone 13y agoI'm certainly playing the devil's advocate to some degree and being hyperbolic, but fact is we, or should I speak for my self and say I, have been on high moral ground for quite some time, demonizing the "great firewall," applauding Google's circumventions, etc. Yet now we find out we're far closer than we would like to be, and have been for some time.
- tptacek 13y agoThis is a slippery claim; anything the NSA does that you don't approve of would enable you to claim we're "far closer than we'd like to be" to China. It's a phrasing designed to end discussion, not encourage it.
- daywalker 13y agoWhy don't you call the PRISM hotline and enlighten us? You seem to be obsessed with criticizing Glenn Greenwald instead of the surveillance state which has been (partially) revealed.
- saraid216 13y ago
- tptacek 13y agoXinhua is the official news outlet of China; they're China's Pravda. They aren't doing Snowden any favors in the US by writing this, but, of course, that's not the point.
- dear 13y agoI agree that they are not doing Snowden any favors by writing this piece. It makes him look more suspicious. They should just shut up and watch the show.
- marcosdumay 13y agoWhy would they want to do Snowden any favors? Their best move is to be very vocal, and milk the scandal for all its worth.
- teawithcarl 13y agoHaving researched China for 27 years, 北京大学等等 - I thought the official Xinhua editorial would be interesting to an HN audience. Actually, this New Yorker article is better. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5885327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5885327 Evan Osnos, a top journalist in Beijing.
- dear 13y agoSo what's wrong with this article?
- frozenport 13y ago1. Hypocrisy of those who preach about Internet . The USA might be spying but they don't aggressively remove anti-American content. Much unlike China where criticism of the lives of its political elite will get your foreign website blocked. 2. China has no tolerance for those that embody the courage to fight against the system. It has a military interest in learning what Snowden knows. We may even see Snowden go from wistleblower to traitor. China's Internet policy is increasingly leading to cultural isolation, xenophobia and bellicose nationalism. I don't trust Fang Yang and other social engineers to control the feelings they cultivate.
- mark_l_watson 13y agoI don't intend on being too harsh on this article, but I must say that it seems about as skewed as a Fox "News" broadcast. It is not too difficult to find less biased coverage - my favorite technique is to take a story I am interested in and then read two or three articles about it from different countries.
- e3pi 13y agoConsidering its origin, anyone have a firm-handle on the Miss Liberty political cartoon? Who's the rat?
- pinaceae 13y agoWhistleblowers that serve China's needs. Oh, you're a whistleblower against any Chinese policy? Say goodbye to your freedom and count yourself lucky if you don't end up in a stadium with a bullet in your head.
- muyuu 13y agoThe time has come that we cannot talk with superiority over China from the West in that respect. We've also started "disappearing" people and hunting them down, locking them in isolation without due process.
- tptacek 13y agoNo, that time has not come.
- stefantalpalaru 13y agoIt has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site
- j_rogers 13y agoYour response is a non-sequitur. Tptacek was specifically referring to the first line of the comment, you addressed this one: "We've also started "disappearing" people and hunting them down, locking them in isolation without due process."
- jrockway 13y agoWhat exactly is Guantanamo if not being locked in isolation without due process?
- tptacek 13y agoWithout arguing in favor of Guantanamo, which is indeed a travesty that urgently needs a decisive fix, there is a difference between detaining foreigners captured in an active combat theater because the State earnestly believes them to be an immediate, violent threat to Americans and "disappearing" its own citizens. Also, people in Guantanamo haven't been "disappeared". They're being detained indefinitely, which is a problem, but we know where they are, and they have access to courts and lawyers (albeit hard-won access). The "disappeared" in Central and South America were more often than not murdered.
- songgao 13y agoThis is disgusting. A news agency that is known for defending its own governments' dirty stuff, twisting truth, and manipulating public opinions, is now appreciating a freedom fighter and a human rights activist. It's apparently not because what Snowden did matches their core values, or they want the same thing happen in China. Oh yes, they certainly like Snowden. It's because Snowden exposed some bad things done by US authorities, and they can use this as political tool; furthermore they can finally take this and say to Chinese people, hey, US does this too. You like the freedom in US? That's all bullshit. If you are interested in what their reactions were when this kind of thing happened in China, back in 2010, this [1] (google translate: [2]) was xinhuanet's opinion on Chinese human rights activist, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Liu Xiaobo [3]. They described Liu Xiaobo as an evil man used by western countries to attack Chinese government, while the truth is Liu Xiaobo spent years striving for Chinese people's freedom, human rights, and constitution enforcement in China. Xinhuanet basically writes what the government tells them to write, and say what the government tells them to say. [1] http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2010-10/15/c_12664760.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2010-10/15/c_12664760.htm [2] http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http://news.xinhuanet.com/world/2010-10/15/c_12664760.htm&prev=/search%3Fq%3D%25E6%2596%25B0%25E5%258D%258E%25E7%25BD%2591%2B%25E5%2588%2598%25E6%2599%2593%25E6%25B3%25A2%2Bsite:xinhuanet.com%26biw%3D1304%26bih%3D776 http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http:... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo#Nobel_Peace_Prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiaobo#Nobel_Peace_Prize EDIT: typos
- joe_the_user 13y agoA news agency that is known for defending its own governments' dirty stuff, twisting truth, and manipulating public opinions, is now appreciating a freedom fighter and a human rights activist. Oh indeed, like the New York Times, say? Obviously, the point isn't that China has democratic integrity. Rather, it is that China is happy to push the theme that the US is not looking that much better than China given this scandal. And that's good for everyone, in the sense that it keeps Snowden safe and it puts pressure on the US to really prove that it takes democracy and transparency seriously.
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- unreal37 13y agoDid anyone catch the dig against Chinese Internet freedom? "For this reason China, despite the fact that it does not have a good reputation as far as Internet governance is concerned, should move boldly and grant Snowden asylum." If this is official government propaganda, why are they saying China doesn't have a good reputation? The article also calls for Google to withdraw from the United States on the same grounds it withdrew from China - hacking of Gmail and state surveillance.
- nadrafia 13y agoCommunist agitprop. They know that unless they address the bad reputation their article will lack credibility. They aren't stupid. I think the article is hilarious and I'm glad China is sticking it to the US. Not because I support China, but because I hope this makes Americans uncomfortable with the prosecution of American whistleblowers to the point that something will actually change.
- toyg 13y agoIf Xinhua is taking a stand, it means the Chinese government decided they quite like the situation as it is. Looks like Snowden's bet paid off: he'll likely not face extradition from Hong Kong after all, and SEALs teams will be kept at bay. The boy is hella smart.