Comparisons are… odious?
I first came across the idea in a tweet by my friend Martín Varsavsky, and I think it is worth developing beyond 140 characters: on January 12, 2010, Google announced that it was rethinking its relationship with the Chinese authorities due to a series of attacks presumably carried out by groups of hackers related to the government. As a result of this rethink, Google refused to comply with censorship requirements, and decided to pull out of China.
China was a flourishing market of indubitable economic potential where Google had already taken a 30 percent share of a demographic that was the most savvy in web use, and a widespread belief among the public that despite the restrictions imposed by the Chinese government, its presence was a positive sign that the future might bring greater freedoms and an opening up of the media.
So let’s not forget: Google quit China after a few isolated attacks, possibly organized by the Chinese government, and that were presumably attempts at garnering information about Chinese human rights activists. But following the revelations published in The Washington Post on October 30, we now know with certainty that the US government penetrated Google’s data centers around the world, scooping up information without the company’s permission on hundreds of thousands of accounts, many of them belonging to US citizens. We’re not talking here about accusations, but clear, hard evidence based on the National Security Agency’s own documents.
Sure, some people at Google seem to “very upset” about the news. And? Consequences? Might not this be the moment when the company, based on its response to the Chinese government’s activities, began to think seriously about where to move its main offices so as to enjoy a more secure operating environment, and from where it could really guarantee the rights of its users thanks to a sound legal environment. Have we forgotten that the NSA is able to read the emails of any Google user, and therefore arrest that person, limit his or her business activities with US companies, or refuse him or her entry to the country, to name but a few of the options that we have seen deployed so far by the US government?
We’re not talking about “tests” or “rehearsals” or “probability games” here; we’re talking about real systems that have real consequences in real people’s lives, people whose communication is not only being intercepted, but subjected to interpretation by some of the most paranoid people on the planet, who, unaware of context, linguistic factors, irony, or opinion, can pub somebody on a blacklist.
Is it really worth putting your users through this? Is it enough simply to lobby for laws to regulate cyber-surveillance, or is such a lobby simply a way of trying to give the impression that something is being done, when the Senate’s actions are going in precisely the opposite direction? Are comparisons really so odious?
