The Filthy Hypocrisy of America's Clean China Free Internet

 Posted by Collectivist

https://mronline.org/2020/08/08/the-filthy-hypocrisy-of-americas-clean-china-free-internet/

"THE STATE DEPARTMENT has a new vision for a “clean” internet, by which it means a China-free internet. This new ethno-exclusive network “is the Trump Administration’s comprehensive approach to guarding our citizens’ privacy and our companies’ most sensitive information,” by ensuring that China won’t be able to do a litany of subversive and violative things with technology that the U.S. and its allies have engaged in for years. As a policy document it’s nonsensical, but as a moral document, a piece of codified hypocrisy, it’s crystal clear: If there’s going to be a world-spanning surveillance state, it better be made in the USA.

A statement from Secretary of State Mike Pompeoincludes a five-pronged plan for beating back Red China’s attempts to siphon and abuse your data: Working to keep Chinese phone carriers (presumably compromised by Beijing) out of U.S. markets, to have privacy-violating Chinese apps kicked off American app stores, to remove U.S. apps from app stores run by Chinese companies, to keep U.S. citizens’ data off of Chinese cloud servers “accessible to our foreign adversaries,” and to ensure that the undersea cables that ferry internet signals between continents aren’t secretly tapped by eavesdropping Chinese intelligence services.

The real question, even more than how could any of this practically be accomplished by State Department diktat, is: Why should anyone in the world take the initiative seriously? How can any network fondled for decades by American spy agencies be considered clean? The absolute gall of the United States in condemning “apps [that] threaten our privacy, proliferate viruses, and spread propaganda and disinformation” is just slightly too stunning to be laughable. Without exception, the United States engages in every one of these practices and violates every single one of these bullet pointed virtues of a Clean Internet. Where do we get off?

The post-9/11 NSA phone surveillance program, through which major telecom carriers like AT&T and Verizon cooperated with the government to provide sensitive data for hundreds of millions of calls and texts, was only shut down last year (and only reportedly shut down at that). Though critics of the China-originated social network TikTok are quick to point to Chinese tech firms’ data-sharing obligations to their government, we don’t need to look to the other side of the world to find such opaque arrangements. As the New York Times noted when the NSA program was terminated, “Starting in 2006, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court began issuing secret orders requiring the companies to participate, based on a novel interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which said the F.B.I. may obtain business records ‘relevant’ to a terrorism investigation.” Long-running fears that pre-tampered communications equipment manufactured by China’s Huawei could breach American networks start to feel a bit morally hollow when you recall the NSA investigated these fears by breaching Huawei itself while simultaneously exporting pre-tampered network equipment from Cisco, a U.S. firm. A psychologist might describe U.S. concerns in this area as “projection. . ."