China to US: shut up about "so-called Internet freedom"
Highlights:
The Chinese constitution protects freedom of speech, he added—which it does, along with freedom of the press, of association, of religion, of demonstration, and freedom to criticize the government.In case you didn't catch the previous news leading up to this announcement, I'll try to sum up what I've heard:China insists that its restrictions are all written into law, however, and are therefore legal, which in turn means that they are a simple matter of cultural difference, and foreigners should just stop talking about them and start complying with them. The reality, as most Internet companies have found, is that censorship can be random, and even major companies never know when Internet services will be blocked and when they won't.
-- Google gets a (second) massive hacking attack, using an exploit in IE, from servers based on China
-- Google discovers the source of both attacks appears to be the same place/series of places, all of which are official Chinese government institutions or well-known government funded companies
-- The attacks appeared to Google to be an attempt to gain information and access to the Gmail accounts of potential Chinese government dissidents and rebels
-- Previously in a large snafu, Google had agreed to pre-censor some content for the Chinese government for it's Google.cn web portal. After the discovery that the government may be involved in the hacking attacks, Google threatens to completely uncensor Google.cn and let China regulate their own internet... and China responds as it did in this article
I find it really fascinating to see this new world power cut it's teeth in the political world. They're beginning to throw their weight around, and I'm curious to see if the world will be willing to cater to their unique laws, given their financial potential in the near-future.
Equally interesting... at the end of the article, it talks about the possible hypocrisy of the U.S. espousing a "clean"/"unregulated" internet when it's widely known that most of the world's traffic goes through the U.S., and the NSA is known to have the capabilities of monitoring/capturing all of it in real time.
Thoughts?
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