US calls on Internet freedom for spying
By Philip J.cunningham (China Daily) Updated: 2014-03-26 08:03'The lady doth protest too much, methinks." William Shakespeare said it first, back in 1602, in reference to the broken trust between Hamlet and his scheming mother Queen Gertrude who liked to think her crimes were undetectable, but it also applies to Lady Liberty in the latter-day United States of America.
American politicians love to promote the Internet; Hilary Clinton made a fine art of it, even Michelle Obama has now joined the fray.
"It is so important for information and ideas to flow freely over the Internet ... because that's how we discover the truth," she patronizingly told the net-savvy students at Peking University.
She went on to say how this technology "opens up the entire world" and "exposes us" to ideas, but she neglected to say the Internet also opens up the world to surveillance and it also exposes our ideas to those who police us.
As if the first lady's talking points were not clear enough, US Ambassador Max Baucus made a pitch for Facebook and Twitter in his introduction to her speech.
The cheerleaders for Team America have a point, up until a point. Free speech and free information flow are essential to feedback and correction of errors. A modern society needs information flow like a modern city needs electricity.
But it is the electric nature of today's communications that point to a special problem.
The same messages that can be created and distributed with unparalleled ease can also be hacked and traced back to senders. Surveillance and espionage of unprecedented thoroughness is the flip side of the Internet revolution, so anyone who waves the flag to promote Google or Facebook as supposed icons of freedom is either na?ve, or turning a blind eye to the spying, data mining and commercial surveillance conducted by those huge corporations.
What's more, the Silicon Valley giants cooperate with NSA's even bigger, even more comprehensive spying operations, both willfully, for a fee, and unwittingly, as their own servers and cables get hacked.
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