Here’s a small sampling of their engagement:

MOROZOV: It’s all a matter of questions that we want to ask. If the question we are asking is “How does the Internet impact the chances for democratization in a country like China?”, we have to look beyond what it does to citizens’ ability to communicate with each other or their supporters in the West. I recently found a very fascinating piece of statistics: apparently, the Chinese government spent $120 billion by 2003 on e-government and something like $70 million on the Golden Shield, the censorship project. You compare those two numbers — $120 billion on e-government and $70 million on censorship — and you can sense that the Chinese are really excited by e-government. No surprises here: it can make their government more efficient, making it seem more transparent and resistant to corruption. This would only strengthen the government’s legitimacy. Will it modernize the Chinese Communist Party? It will. Will it result in the establishment of democratic institutions that we expect in liberal democracies? It may not. If we want to know whether China is moving closer to embracing fully functioning democratic institutions and what kind of role the Internet would play in this process, there are no easy clear cut answers here.

SHIRKY: This is one of the really interesting things about these questions, which is that you very quickly get a kind of philosophic vertigo. You think you’re asking a question about Twitter, and suddenly you realize you’re asking a question about, say, Hayek and markets. My bias is that non-democratic governments are lousy at managing market economies over the long haul. That’s a baseline assumption, and it affects the context of digital publics.

With that assumption as background, one of the questions you could ask is how much is political sensitivity of the regime titrated to the price of oil? If oil goes back above $100 a barrel, the Iranian regime can do anything they like. They could destroy the intelligentsia in all of Tehran and still rule the country because they’d have so much cash from oil. If it goes under $50 and stays under $50, on the other hand, their ability to hold down populist uprising will be severely compromised.

MOROZOV: Whatever the bias, the truth is that we did have revolutions before Twitter.

Good, thoughtful dialogue here.

The following is from Molly Wood Google Buzz: Privacy nightmare:

When you visit Google Buzz, you’re invited to “Try Buzz in Gmail,” with “no setup needed.” But the no-setup thing isn’t the bonus you might be led to believe.

First, you automatically follow everyone in your Gmail contact list, and that information is publicly available in your profile, by default, to everyone who visits your profile. It’s available with helpful “follow” links too–wow, you can expand your Buzz network so fast by harvesting the personal contact lists of other people!

To hide the list of followers/followees from your profile page, you have to click Edit Profile and uncheck the box next to Display the list of people I’m following and people following me. Why that option isn’t obvious on the Buzz page itself–well, decide for yourself.

On top of that, let’s say you’ve customized your Google profile page with the vanity URL Google helpfully offers at the bottom of the page. Well, that’d be your e-mail handle. Anytime anyone does an @ reply to you, they’ve broadcast your e-mail address to the world.

The release of Buzz (which should have been named BuzzOff, incorporating all it’s various street connotations – think Walter Matthau and the Bad News Bees) in such a potentially compromising manner should earn Google a big red F, for what may lead to some uncomfortable and potentially harmful exposures of activists in countries where governments are more than happy to spend their time harvesting email lists of those they deem troublesome. This from Evgeny Morozov’s Wrong kind of buzz around Google Buzz

Nevertheless, I am extremely concerned about hundreds of activists in authoritarian countries who would never want to reveal a list of their interlocutors to the outside world. Why so much secrecy? Simply because, many of their contacts are other activists and often even various “democracy promoters” from Western governments and foundations. Many of those contacts would now inadvertently be made public.

If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geeksquads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government. They can then spend months on end drawing complex social circles on the shiny blackboards inside secret police headquarters.

Despite the overwhelming numbers of email users in China, the level of technical sophistication of many of those users is low, especially in areas where minorities may be communicating in English as a third or fourth language, unsure of what to do in order to keep their list of contacts private. Email list mining by the Public Security Bureau has been given a great boost with the introduction of Buzz. Sergey Brin, who is supposed to be up on such things, should have his heels held to fire for this. The “Don’t be evil” silliness has just been scrapped. (Savvy Google has been in discussions for the last few weeks with China, and now they end up creating another ‘backdoor’ for the Party? And you wonder why I am having a ‘loss of faith’ crisis?) Unfortunately, this is what happens when you try to take over the web world: one day you’re this, and the next day you’re something else that suits your ever-shifting need to power. What we very well may be seeing (a fear that many have had for years) is that power/corruption, absolute power/absolute corruption axiom in Google’s actions. Is it evil? I’m not ready to go there yet, but I am willing to say that it is uncommonly boneheaded, since if I thought otherwise I’d be right back to evil. We’ll have to wait on the final evaluation until Google breaks it’s silence.

The ongoing Google-China debacle, which I have written about here, here and here, (and several places in-between) continues to loll about out of the public eye. What has actually happened over the past two months is still about as clear as mud. I suspect that Google still remains in discussions with China. Each day those two very proper nouns get bigger and less easy to define. I picture two boar hogs sharing separate wallows in the same rapidly drying sty. Will they decide to eventually share the sty, or will Google get shoved out the chute? We’re getting tired of asking the same question over and over, though, intentionally or not, it appears that Google with their rollout of Buzz has just given China a big, thick information hongbao*.

*hongbao: the red envelope full of money given as a gift @ Chinese New Year

What I see at this point as possibly the most important aspect in this digital horn-locking battle is the fog surrounding “the ostensible reason for Google’s change of posture.” It is not clear what really happened and why things have unfolded as they have. Here in China it is being spun as a timing issue: Google going public to whip up world sentiment and support in the lead-up to SecState’s Clinton’s ‘”internet freedom” speech, and now she is being portrayed, in effect, as Google’s Foreign Minister. There were interactions between Google and State before Google went public, which is being seen as collusive. What those discussions were in regard to is unclear and open for a variety of interpretations.

Was the hack a national security concern or was it a private company vs a foreign government issue? If it was the former, then it’s a whole different ball game than the latter. As I’ve pointed out before, at the New America Foundation Authority, Meet Technology: Will China’s Great Firewall Hold?, the day before SecState Clinton’s “internet freedom” speech, State Dept. Senior Advisor for Innovation and one of the architect’s the speech, Alec Ross, claimed that they were dealing with the Google/China dispute as a private company vs foreign government problem, which seems to say that it was not a national security issue. He also said that the State Department was not Google’s foreign policy wing, or something to that effect. Not only do I find that line unconvincing, but I am also not willing to go the “my country right or wrong” route on this one (or any issue, really, since I believe that the level of controls China holds on its internet China is one that that the Bush/Cheney administration would have been quite happy with), which is to say that I think Ross’ veracity is suspect, hardly the first time I’ve questioned the statements of a public official. There is a lot of slippery slope stuff going on here, and everyone’s trying their best to not let anything spill for fear that the whole mountainside may slide off into the sea.

But who are the parties at the table? Well, Google and China, obviously, but what about the State Department? I think it’s fair to assume that they are chin-deep in the thick of it all. The US Embassy has had at least two sessions with bloggers at the Embassy: one the day before Clinton’s speech, for foreign bloggers (and no, they didn’t invite me), and another the day after the speech with Chinese bloggers. They are quite obviously trying their best to get the right spin on this pitch – especially in the wake of the speech – to get this one over the plate. Knuckleball? Too soon to tell.

There is much at stake here that goes far beyond the immediate flare-up, which obviously makes this more than a private company vs foreign country clash. If there were not, as Ross implied, a national security component to the murky hack, then why do they appear  to be so deep in the middle of this? Well, for a variety of reasons, one of them clearly being national security, which makes them major stakeholders in the outcome. This is fundamentally a clash between dueling ‘capitalisms’, with the U.S. becoming more open and aggressive aligning with and protecting corporate interests (privacy information and intellectual property), since national security is, has been, or may possibly be compromised by aggressive states, i.e, China, engaging in cyber attacks on private companies that do business with the federal government. Google is one of those companies. Let’s also not forget that a lot of state-run companies in China are owned by the military, since the military is part of the “get rich is glorious” free market system scheme. Many of the Chinese businessmen who sit at the dealing tables around the world have strings that reach back to people who also happen to command armies. This is about a lot more than blocked internet sites. Amazingly China is still spinning it as a pornography issue on local radios, which speaks to the utter bottomlessness of their domestic deceit.

Until we know more, it is not possible to make an informed decision, which is quite ironic, since the argument is about information freedom, though neither side is forthcoming with any. The Chinese authorities have a history of being uninformative, so at least they are remaining consistent. Google, on the other hand, has staked out a moral high ground based on the open access ideal (which is not as open as they are currently permitted to be in China), but they have done nothing but tease in this issue while remaining silent and “in discussions” with Chinese authorities. And where is the State Dept. in all of this, if it is, as Ross insinuated, not their business? What really happened in the last two months, and what is currently happening? Good questions. It would be nice to be informed. It seems to me that each day of silence works against Google, especially if they come out of it staying in the Chinese market in any form or neo-evolution.

There is so very much that is still unclear, and I have the feeling that it will remain so, at least for as long as the parties are talking. And possibly a lot longer if they reach some sort of deal. But the onus will be on Google to cough up the facts, since they are the ones claiming the high ground mandate. I cannot imagine that there will be any settlement that China will sign off on that doesn’t include some sort of non-disclosure clause. Will Google be able to live with that in the wider international community? My guess is that they will not. That would be seen as “being evil” and they have a lot invested in the “Don’t be evil” mantra. So, if there is a favorable settlement, you can bet that Google will be on the hot seat, as well they should be. There is more than a fair chance that Google may come out of this smelling like the proverbial south end of a northbound mule. In my opinion each day that goes by without any news coming from behind the closed doors, is another day that Google takes a negative hit.

When Google came to China they hopped in bed with a partner who knows quite well how to work all the positions between the sheets. There are varying opinions on their 2006 move into China. Some see it as a move from “don’t be evil” to “don’t be too evil if it makes a lot of money.” Though I won’t go that far, I do believe that they knew what they were getting into. And if they didn’t, they should have. The Google person to watch in the coming weeks is Sergey Brin, who was opposed to the move into China. If there is any compromising crack in Google’s shiny armor in their negotiations with the Chinese government I suspect that there would be some sort of action or movement from Brin. And you can bet that China knows this. If anything, their “5,000 years” has honed their skills at “divide and conquer,” which I would imagine is what they are trying to do here. A few days ago a re-tweet of an original GE_Anderson tweet showed up on my Twitter page: “China loves the concept of win-win: it means they get to win twice.” Indeed it does.
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Update: January 25, 920 AM (+8 UTC)
I recommend that you have a look at this from CNN (h/t @evgenymorozov on Twitter): U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google. “In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.” It’s beginning to sound like a little more than just a private company vs. foreign government fluff-up. Maybe it’s even a national security issue. A secret entrance created by Google to assist info mining of Google users by US security agencies. I’m … abashed! And which also allowed Chinese hackers – or any hackers for that matter – to gain access to sensitive data, the very sort of data that Google says was hacked? If this is actually the case, Google’s going to have to change their unofficial motto to “Let’s try not to be too stupid.”

In the aftermath of Google’s announcement, some members of Congress are reviving a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens. Presumably, those legislators don’t understand that their own government is on the list.

This might explain the continuing silence coming from who knows how many camps. Could it be as simple as Google leaving a side door open thinking that it would remain a secret?

This is looking more like the whining child in the backseat on long, long trip scenario:
“Are we there yet, Papa?”
“No, kid, but we’re getting closer.”
“How much loooonger?”
“Pretty soon, kid. Pretty soon.”

As the assessments are rolling in, it is curious that almost all of them, even those praising the speech, can’t really lay a finger on what it really means. Perhaps that’s the nature of “major foreign policy” speeches announcing what I naively assume would be clear policy shifts, and, if not shifts then clarifications of policy fuzziness. I stepped away from the audio feed last night shaking my head – a head, I might add, that is still shaking.

There has been much written on China, the internet and Google’s “we’re not going to take it anymore” wavy line in the sand. I wonder how long it will be before it gets a bit more straightened out? I have been paying particular attention to three people who have long-established credibility and knowledge of the issues involved in China and/or global political issues concerning the internet: Rebecca MacKinnon, James Fallows and Evgeny Morozov. Though Morozov is not as intimately familiar with China as MacKinnon and Fallows, he has been heavily involved with issues affecting the “Internet’s impact on global politics.”) Each of them were involved in the New American Foundation’s discussion Authority, Meet Technology: Will China’s Great Firewall Hold? the day before SecState Clinton delivered her speech, which I wrote about here.  As expected, each of them has already weighed in on Clinton’s speech, though I expect that they will address it again:
Fallows: A momentous 40 hours, leading to Clinton/China/Internet; (updated) More on Hillary’s speech
MacKinnon: Clinton speaks on Internet freedom
Morozov: Is Hillary Clinton launching a cyber Cold War?

I am not going to get into a critique of their initial takes on the speech, but I do encourage you to read them. I wrote yesterday here: “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.” Well, I am not willing to say that yesterday’s prognostication was wrong. Again, it is too soon to make any judgment, since both specific solutions and realistically projected outcomes were lacking in the speech. I said last night at the conclusion of the speech that it felt like a lot of big and very fluffy pillows being thrown around, and my view has not changed over the last 12 hours. I feel solidly in Morozov’s corner, and if you read his post you’ll understand why I do not see this speech as much more than what we’ve seen before: a political show of hope that is, at this point, toothless. From Morozov: “Overall, I was disappointed with the speech — it lacked depth. I didn’t sense any coherent intellectual vision underpinning the State Department’s digital strategy.”

Regarding China: Fallows mentions that “Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Egypt — this is not the grouping of countries that the Chinese government, in its recent sense of rise to superpower status, is used to being lumped with.” Good point, but not, at this point, news. That it is coming from the U.S. SecState in a high profile, public speech is, or better yet, was, since this statement could not have caught Zhongnanhai by surprise, especially after the week they’ve just had. If Google had not pulled the rug from under their feet last week, I think they would be spinning at the moment, but it’s fair to say that they were steeled for this.

One last point: NGO, for better or worse, connotes “good work, low pay, planet/people love, etc.” It’s a term that conjures up “the good fight.”  For anyone whose eyes still water when they hear the term, I would like you to know that the Chinese government is on to this, and they have done their very best to not only de-fang foreign NGOs within their borders – especially in the contentious Tibetan areas – but they’ve also learned that the term equates to money. Over the last several years there has been a dramatic rise in domestic, homespun NGOs within China, most of which have been corralled into obeisance by “unofficial’ oversight. When there is money involved, you can rest assured that the government controls the gate to anyone who wants to swim in that pool. (For a look at how a clean drinking water project in Qinghai province was capitalized upon by the local government, have a look here.) Each time SecState Clinton mentioned NGOs last night I rolled my eyes. I kept imagining Chinese locals in the countryside with mobile devices digitally assessing the CCP in collective village meetings where everyone’s grading codes would be checked as they pushed the ‘enter’ button. And all under the watchful eye of Chinese NGOs.

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.
________

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.
________

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.