Tag Archives: China

How America Lost a War in the Battle Against Wikileaks.

assange

…even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable. 

During his visit to China in November, for example, President Obama held a town hall meeting with an online component to highlight the importance of the internet… he defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows, the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens hold their own governments accountable… The United States belief in that ground truth is what brings me here today.”

Believe it or not, those are excerpts from the speech Hilary Clinton, the US secretary of State made when it was alleged that Google was attacked by China. But as things are now, the US government is trying to wipe out Wikileaks off the face of the web. They got Amazon to stop its hosting, PayPal to close its accounts and OpenDNS to yank it (no pun intended) off the web among other assaults on their operations.

The US government’s argument is that WikiLeaks is releasing information that compromises America’s national security.

I agree that some of the information being leaked this time is mere gossip but not all of it is trivial. Is the American government trying to say that the Afghans should not know their VP was caught smuggling $52million in cash from their country? And that of course the Americans did nothing about it.

The American government’s aggressive reaction  to Wikileaks raises certain questions about its double standard with regards to  its official stance on China’s suppression of free speech.

America is practically declaring a war on Assange for disseminating classified information they don’t want out. China has also often defended its censoring of the internet on the basis of dissident’s perceived threat to their national security. Now although I am still not a fan of China’s censoring of websites (especially as I cannot communicate with my Chinese classmates who have returned home), but after this episode, one must ask, what moral right does the US have in telling China not  to censor its citizens when they are doing the exact same thing? The same logic applies to condemnations of censorship of pro democracy activists in Iran and other countries who have restricted access to information on the web. Hence, this skirmish over Wikileaks  has led America to loose all moral standing in spreading democracy and freedom of speech  around the world. Hu Jintao of China and co can now use this incident to “talk back” to America when it preaches about democracy and internet censorship. After all, National security permits you to justify any action.  

I think that war has been lost by America. The war of spreading democracy and free speech.

Almighty America 

Another important question the US’ concerted effort at shutting down wikileaks raises is on America’s control of the internet. This episode shows that America owns the web and other countries will do well to do something about it because although this war is not between two nations, control of the web might be the basis for wars in the future.

Let us take a little scenario:

The year is 2020 and the US declares Nigeria an enemy state for whatever reason and we decide to go to war. 

Immediately, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google pull all email and communication plugs used by Nigerians and in Nigeria; PayPal,Visa etc pause all financial transactions to and within Nigeria; Facebook and Twitter mute all mention of Nigeria and all root servers supporting all our websites are uprooted. The war will be over in 4 steps without even firing a single shot. Nigeria will immediately be completely decapitated. Perhaps, the message of surrender will be sent via BBM (thankfully Canadian owned) within the hour.

I have often argued that it is dangerous for any country to wield absolute power on the web. It will be abused as it is now. I think it is in the interest of national security of countries that they have alternatives to various web technology backbones. In the world today, only China can withstand the US in my above hypothesis and they are aggressively ensuring they maintain that  competitive advantage.

As for the concerted effort at silencing Wikileaks, I am guessing Twitter and Facebook will be the next to strike their blows. Update: Twitter might already be censoring wikileaks..  Soon enough Google might cave in and then wikileaks  and Julian Assange will be relegated to cached internet memory. Or not.

I am certain after this episode, the internet will never be the same again. Time to kiss net neutrality and  the free open web goodbye!

Assange, when are you releasing the cables from my dear country Nigeria.?

Thanks Iyinoluwa for helping me edit this post.

Update 2: I just realised that WikiLeaks has not been cached by Archive.org since ‘08. When US was not yet on their radar.

I am Oo, founder of GBEDU.FM where I hope to make sense of this business of music. I once tried to kill the business card with OnePage.

Google Vs. China: My Thoughts On Why The Chinese Did It.

Google has threatened to pull out of China citing human rights, security breach backed by the government, etc. and it is really a big deal! Below are my thoughts.

In my humble and simplistic view EVERYTHING happening in the world is a big chess game between the US, China, Russia and United Kingdom (hahahaha!! Of course I am kidding about the UK part).

Before now, the King (Super Power) of the world owned the largest weapons, then it moved to energy (Oil).  Now the Internet has changed all that. HE WHO HAS INFORMATION IS KING! In my post talking about Google’s dominance on the Internet, I spoke about governments being a major competition/obstacle for Google because of the amount of information it has on its citizens. You see, Google is an American company based in the US, so there is little you can to to convince me, the Chinese or the Russians that America does not have access to the information (= intelligence). For heavens sake Google parks their private jet in NASA! It is no surprise to me that Google is not the dominant search company in either Russia (Yandex) or China (Baidu).

On a side note, Facebook is not in China too.

So why did Google do it?

There are two schools of thought currently in the blogosphere

1. Human rights issues. They are just living up to their motto “Don’t be evil”.

My thoughts on this point:  Why did they go to China in the first place?  Google had always censored results in China before now I do not think they discovered their ‘conscience’ overnight.

2. Because they are loosing market share they need an excuse to succumb to defeat with their heads held high while getting a bit of positive PR.

As regards to this point, I think it is a ridiculous assertion. Google is not known to be making any loss (The are expected to hit $600M revenue this year) in China, so it makes absolute no sense to leave. Secondly, will be stupid to throw away  the human capital/knowledge (employees)  they have built up over the years  for reason of loosing market share. Moreover they will not burn the bridge with China (which they have effectively done)  if they just want to leave the business of search in China.

So i’ll say neither.

My theory (speculation) is this: Google must have realised that it has been infiltrated by by the Chinese government both form within and outside and must have lost some IP, which will be important in the battle for “organizing the worlds information”. They realize they have much more to loose than gain by operation in China.

So why did the Chinese do it?

Simple! They are now global players and they have to be on top of things. They cannot allow an American company/government have all that intelligence on their people. It will not happen now, it will not happen in future. The Chinese tactic is simple, lure greedy American companies to the country (1.3 billion is one hell of a market opportunity); Give them enough market share (some scores of millions) to allow them satisfy their greed while not compromising national security. At the same time getting enough  knowledge of the IP/Technology they own. It is a win-win deal….for the Chinese.

The only party that might loose from Google pulling out is the US government. Google will make lots of money in other parts of the world (if other governments do not follow suit), The Chinese people do not use Google anyway, and the Chinese government will lure in the next greedy company to take the space vacuum created by Google .

Did I hear you say Bing? (it even sounds Chinese!)