EFF wants Cisco in front of a judge over tech for China's 'Great Firewall' The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is hoping to help re-start a lawsuit against Cisco over whether or not it provided technology China's government used to facilitate human rights abuses. The row over China's "Golden Shield" (aka the Great Firewall) has gone on practically forever, with Amnesty accusing Cisco of …
We do not customize our products in any way that would facilitate censorship or repression.
Someone of a cynical frame of mind might seize on the fact that statement doesn't preclude the possibility that the products are produced with facilities to aid censorship or repression as standard features. Not suggesting that's actually the case with Cisco, obviously...
Their head of domestic control, Tengfei Sa Mai, is responsible for spying on the ordinary people of China in case they say something that's off party message, or visit a website and see information that is unapproved. People web browsing is watched 24/7 for signs of dissent by the state surveillance apparatus. Their Facebook pages monitored, the Tweets spied on.
Their phones are tracked to monitor where they go and who they associate with. Companies are forced by secret orders to spy on their customers and hand over all their data. Type the wrong search terms into a search engine and you can end in jail. Typing a few extra dots in a URL is a crime!
China labels people who express political views "terrorists", even if they've never held a gun or committed any act of terror. It has star-courts where evidence is heard in secret and the defendant has no right to hear the evidence, let alone challenge the evidence!
Expressing political views they don't like can get you disappeared using control orders. I heard of one man, a Chinese citizen, who was labelled a terrorist recruiter, (because he hadn't committed acts of terror or broken any Chinese laws), they gave him a demeaning name "Jihadi Jin", removed his citizenship, extradited him and murdered him with a drone!
There's no right to free speech, like there is in the UK. If you say something that Tengfei Sa Mai dislikes, it is labelled "radicalizing speech" and expect the secret police to come pay you a visit.
It really is an appalling place run by evil people like Tengfei Sa Mai.
I agree with many of your sentiment but:
China labels people who express political views "terrorists", even if they've never held a gun or committed any act of terror - Same as a great many other countries including the US and UK. Set up a protest camp outside Parliament and you'll get a law passed just for you.
t has star-courts where evidence is heard in secret and the defendant has no right to hear the evidence.
Guantanamo Bay springs to mind (some would say the same about family courts in the UK)
There's no right to free speech, like there is in the UK. - No such thing in the UK
Go ahead, test in the UK if you don't believe me. Carry an ISIS or Nazi flag and set up a YouTube site saying I hate Jews, Gays and the mentally retarded and see how that goes.
LostallFaith, I am appalled to think you believe that such things happen in a free country like the UK!
UK would never watch peoples web browsing 24/7, or demand secret access to their Facebook accounts, or private data to read their private thoughts!
Why if the UK didn't have enough reason to arrest someone, instead stripping them of their citizenship, extradite them, handily permitting their drone murder, I imagine the police would immediately investigate.
If a spy agency turned on its own people, the doors would be kicked in, and they'd be in jail! GCHQ would never do that! They'd be labelled f*ing traitors by their fellow Brits and rightly so!
I'm sure UK never has courts where evidence is heard in secret without the defendant able to hear or challenge it! That would deny a defendant their right to face their accusers, a basic human right.
Typing a few extra dots in a URL ../. would NEVER be a reason to prosecute someone in the UK!
Theresa May never labels people as terrorist for views she dislikes. She's not a power crazed people hating psycho, destroying core freedoms the way Tengfei Sa May does.
Theresa May would never invent the new type of speech "radicalizing speech" words that if you heard them would immediately cause you to go out and murder someone! That would be ridicuous! No one would believe such a 1:1 conflating of free speech and bad deed. Such that you can prosecute the speech as if it was the deed!
No, China is a terrible place, the leaders are just puppets, it doesn't matter which leader is in power, the same mass surveillance laws are driven and used against the populace on the most tenuous claims.
Not like UK at all.
Totally not like the UK.
You can draw parallels as if things are the same or virtually indistinguishable, but generally it really is much worse in mainland China. Thousands are shot every year. Organs get harvested.Opposition of any sort is immediately snuffed. While it might no be that rosy in the U.K. these days, it is much worse for those under the thumb of the dictatorship operating in mainland China.
"Go ahead, test in the UK if you don't believe me. Carry an ISIS or Nazi flag and set up a YouTube site saying I hate Jews, Gays and the mentally retarded and see how that goes."
Shocking. You really have a twisted view of the right to freedom of speech. Even more shocking is that you got upvotes for that comment, but there you go, an example of free speech - it allows for a debate even thought the views of the person expressing them and his supporters may be daft. You're upset because you are not allowed to carry a Nazi flag, well, I don't feel sorry for you.
"Free speech" IS NOT "any speech", it's a subset of it and excludes "hate speech", amongst others, for obvious one would think reasons that you seem to have difficulty grasping. Similarly a "free person" is not "can-do-anything person". You are not allowed to go out and, say, smash shops' windows or have a dump in the middle of the street, and this doesn't make you any less free. It makes sense if you think about it.
So, yes, UK is a free speech country even though there are people who would love to believe otherwise (one of the reasons could be boredom caused by living in a civilised country where you don't really have much to worry about).
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