Absurdity, Allegory and China

I was fortunate enough to watch live last evening the informative roundtable discussion hosted by the New America Foundation Authority, Meet Technology: Will China’s Great Firewall Hold? as I mentioned yesterday here. For those interested in internet freedom on the eve of Secretary of State Clinton’s speech on the subject, I’ve embedded the YouTube link of the entire discussion below. One of the panelists was Clinton’s Senior Advisor for Innovation, Alec Ross,  – introduced as being “one of the architects of that speech” – who, unfortunately, had to leave early to get back to his duties, and so did not participate in any discussions with the three other panel members. He did answer two questions posed to him by the moderator, James Fallows, which only proved to me that he really needed to have stayed seated through the rest of the discussion. Thankfully, the other three members of the panel were in it for the long haul, and they provided keen insights into not only the Google v. China debacle, but also into internet freedom in general. (Timothy Wu presented filtering/blocking as a “trade barrier,” which, at least for me, casts internet censorship in an entirely – and international -  light.)  Those three, along with Fallows, an informed and gracious host, were

Evgeny Morozov, Contributing Editor, Foreign Policy Magazine
Yahoo! Fellow, Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University

Rebecca MacKinnon, Fellow, Open Society Institute
Co-Founder, Global Voices Online

Tim Wu, Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation
Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
Contributing Writer, Slate

There was too much presented for me to comment on here, so I have focused on one issue: the government’s assessment of the Google/China blow-up as an aspect (but only one aspect) of the upcoming Clinton speech as presented by Mr. Ross, and Evgeny Morozov’s take on the same issue as a national security question. I have transcribed two exchanges between each of them and Fallows. It would have been fortuitous if Mr. Ross had stayed to address the wider national security implications of the Chinese cyberattack, but perhaps that would have been too much of a hot seat for him to sit comfortably in on the eve of his boss’ speech.
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Fallows (10:28): Can you describe the thinking that goes into … in the moment of … when there is a very highly publicized standoff between an American-based company and a foreign government, what is the thinking about the role the U.S. government should or should not play in addressing that dispute?

Ross: That’s a very good question. I think it is important to emphasize the private nature of some of this. This is principally … ummm, you know … this is primarily an issue between Google and 30+ other private entities and the Chinese government, but we have responded with what I think is justifiable concern. We’ve asked for an explanation; we have had conversations over the years where we have made clear our opinions both about the freedom of expression, as well as cybersecurity. So we are taking this very seriously. But all of that said, the State Department is not the foreign policy arm of Google. Ummm… so, while we will look to the Chinese for an explanation, ummm … you know, we do need to … ummm … engage in this appropriately recognizing the primacy of the roll of the private sector actors within this.

Fallows: Right. The other question is, and thank you for that, you mentioned there are centuries’ old values in the United States, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, those are two particular freedoms that another major government in the world explicitly denies. The Chinese government policy does not believe particularly in the freedom of assembly or the freedom of speech. In what way does the Secretary address that conflict between our values and the values of other major nations? How do you deal with this?

Ross: So, I am not going … I will answer that by principally by saying, tune in tomorrow at 9:30.
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In speaking of the wider topic of international internet freedom, Mr Ross states (13:29), “Tomorrow’s speech is not a speech about China.”
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Fallows (32:12): Tell us what is significant in the whole hacking aspect of this, as you’ve written about a number of times.

Evgeny Morozov (32:20): Well actually, I didn’t find the hacking aspects as fascinating as this has been presented in the media. I mean the truth is that most companies operating in China do experience cyberattacks of some kind, they do experience theft of intellectual property, and I think the most interesting thing about Google in China is that the cyberattacks are likely to continue even if Google decides to shut down the office and leave it altogether, simply because it does contain a lot of valuable information about Chinese human rights activity. People will still continue having their email inboxes hosted by Google, because you know, if Google can be hacked, it means any other service can be hacked probably even more easily. So, my difficulty was in understanding how exactly the cyberattacks, which Google decided to publicize, how they actually related to its decision to stop censoring the results and adopt a different stance, because it didn’t seem like it’s going to protect them any more.

Fallows: No, they weren’t logically related.

Morozov: They weren’t. Sure

Fallows: It was just a sign of exasperation. They’d had too much.

Morozov: Sure, but on the other hand now I see that the cyberattacks actually are making it possible to present it almost as a national security issue, because I doubt that any … well, most media in the United States would make such a fuss out of Google’s decision were it not framed as an attack by Chinese hackers on U.S. companies, stealing data and no one is secure. And if it became a completely different issue, which, of course played into Google’s hands, but I don’t think we should make something extraordinary out of that. Cyberattacks happen which is veryunfortunate, and they will continue happening whether Google is in China or is not in China. As long as it does host this data it’s still a target.
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There are a host of issues surrounding cyberattacks, not the least of which is a territoriality: how does the government view an electronic intrusion, committed by a foreign governement, of a private company’s computer system hosted within its borders? Is it a national security issue, and what is a private company’s legal responsibility to report it? Is it a national security issue or is it legally handled in the same way it would be if the attack were from foreign private hackers? Mr. Ross seems to be saying that it is a private company’s problem.

Perhaps I am being a bit jaundiced here, but my sense is that the Obama administration, via Sec. of State Clinton, will be taking a soft approach to the recent Chinese hacking job. I believe this is unfortunate. After one year in office this administration seems unable to forcefully take the hard positions it needs to be able to take in order to be seen in a positive leadership light. (Full disclosure: I have been a supporter of the Obama team, but I am losing both faith and hope as they appear to be playing more for the 2010 midterms and 2012 general election than for the wider public good. See James Fallows cover piece in the Atlantic How America Can Rise Again for an assessment of the wider broken polity mess that the U.S. seems hopelessly mired in.) If Clinton delivers more governmental boilerplate I think that we’ll be able to see which way this wind is really blowing. And so, I might add, will China. It would be a major mistake to allow China off the hook on this one, since this will empower them more. I understand the argument that the way to most effectively deal with China is via the quiet backdoor, but this is an issue that needs to be out in the public eye.  That said, I am not hopeful of anything but ‘more of the same,’ but I also hope I am very wrong. If I am, I am quite willing to say so here tomorrow.