Closeted communist: Beijing represses Hong Kong with active Tim Cook's help

Apple bans an app because Hong Kong protesters use it to avoid the murderous, out of control police

https://boingboing.net

Hkmap Live is a crowdsourced app that uses reports from a Telegram group to track the locations of protesters, police, and traffic, as well as the use of antipersonnel weapons like tear gas, mass arrests of people wearing t-shirts associated with the protest movement, and mass transit closures in proximity to demonstrations (it's a bit like Sukey, the British anti-kettling app).
The escalation of indiscriminate violence by Hong Kong's police has driven mainstream opposition to the Chinese state and the Hong Kong authorities. 

The protests continue to grow, the police continue to attack families, elderly people, bystanders, and the main body of protesters, with no mercy or quarter -- including the on-camera, point-blank shooting of an unarmed, nonviolent protester. 

In this context, Hkmap isn't just a way for protesters to evade police, it's a survival lifeline for innocent people facing an occupying army of sadistic armed thugs.
But Iphone owners in Hong Kong can't access the Hkmap Live app anymore. 

Apple has removed it from the App Store, telling the app's creators that "Your app contains content - or facilitates, enables, and encourages an activity - that is not legal ... Specifically, the app allowed users to evade law enforcement."
This isn't the first time that Apple has used its monopoly over which apps can be used on Ios devices to help the Chinese state abuse human rights: in May 2018, the company removed all working VPNs from the App Store, leaving only compromised ones that the Chinese state could surveil.
Apple is America's largest tech company, and its corporate communications have presented the company as an ethical alternative to "surveillance" companies like Google, but while Apple doesn't spy on you to advertise to you, it certainly is willing to facilitate state spying on its customers for the purpose of abetting their arbitrary arrest, torture, and executions.
Moreover, Apple often describes its locked-down App Store model -- which uses technical countermeasures and legal threats to prevent its customers from installing apps that it hasn't approved -- as a way of defending its users' security from unethical apps (this was a claim that was repeatedly raised last year when Apple led an industry coalition that defeated 20 state-level Right to Repair bills).
But Apple's absolute control over the App Store means that when a state suborns the company to serve as part of its anti-democratic enforcement system, users are corralled in its walled garden where they are easy pickings for murderous authoritarians and their hired killers.
Moreover, this outcome is entirely predictable: when you design your device so that users can't override your decisions, you practically beg authoritarian governments to order you to make decisions that help them control their citizens.

HKmap.live 全港抗爭即時地圖@hkmaplive
"Your app contains content - or facilitates, enables, and encourages an activity - that is not legal ... Specifically, the app allowed users to evade law enforcement."@Apple assume our user are lawbreakers and therefore evading law enforcement, which is clearly not the case.
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8:58 PM - Oct 1, 2019


Pinboard@Pinboard
It appears that Apple has rejected an app that warns Hong Kongers about police activity. The Hong Kong police force shot a high schooler in the chest yesterday and put seventy people, from 11 to 75, in the hospital. That app saves lives in Hong Kong. Let me tweet about it a bit https://twitter.com/hkmaplive/status/1179108329240424448 …
HKmap.live 全港抗爭即時地圖@hkmaplive
"Your app contains content - or facilitates, enables, and encourages an activity - that is not legal ... Specifically, the app allowed users to evade law enforcement."@Apple assume our user are lawbreakers and therefore evading law enforcement, which is clearly not the case.
751
5:14 AM - Oct 2, 2019

Rogue Nation

China is exporting the Great Firewall as internet freedom declines around the world

By James Griffiths

Hong Kong -- Speaking before an elite audience in Washington in March 2000, then US President Bill Clinton summarized much of Western thinking on the internet when he hailed a new century in which "liberty will be spread by cell phone and cable modem."
This would occur, Clinton said, despite the efforts of countries like China to fight the spread of information.
"Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet," Clinton said, his eyebrows arched as he neared the punchline. 

"Good luck! That's sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall."
In the decades since that speech, Clinton's jello comment has become a something of a dark joke among internet freedom advocates, as China continued to build up the Great Firewall, the world's most sophisticated system for controlling and surveilling the web.
A new report out this week shows that China is by far the most effective censor of the internet, and far from retreating, is exporting its model around the world.
Beijing has consistently defied all the confident predictions (including by people far more knowledgeable about the internet than Clinton) that this would be impossible. 

China's censors have reigned in blogs, social media, and US search giants, and repeatedly defeated or stymied any attempts to undermine the Firewall, from virtual private networks (VPNs) to the dark web.
Sunday Yokubaitis, chief executive of VPN company Golden Frog, told CNN they have "witnessed a massive increase" in attempts to block their services in China.
"We used to see blocks roughly once every six weeks; they now try to block our service multiple times every day," he said.
As I document in my book, "The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet," Beijing's model of the internet is now spreading beyond its borders, with China's censors working actively with their counterparts in Russia, Uganda and a host of other countries to build up internet controls and crack down on online dissent.
A new report from Freedom House -- a US government-funded NGO -- supports this. 

During 2018, the authors found, "internet freedom declined for the eighth consecutive year."
"A cohort of countries is moving toward digital authoritarianism by embracing the Chinese model of extensive censorship and automated surveillance systems," Freedom House said.

Forlorn hope
During the early decades of the internet, many influential thinkers claimed the internet -- by its very nature -- would spread democracy and freedom of speech.
The combined forces of globalization and the web were, Thomas Friedman wrote in 2000, "acting like nutcrackers to open societies."
But as writer Evgeny Morovoz has demonstrated, this assumption was often based on a willful misreading of the events of the Cold War, and the effectiveness of strategies like smuggling photocopiers and fax machines through the Iron Curtain and Radio Free Europe broadcasts.
"Viewing it through the prism of the Cold War, they endow the internet with nearly magical qualities; for them, it's the ultimate cheat sheet that could help the West finally defeat its authoritarian adversaries," Morozov writes. 

"In other words, let them tweet, and they will tweet their way to freedom. By this logic, authoritarianism becomes unsustainable once the barriers to the free flow of information are removed. If the Soviet Union couldn't surprise a platoon of pamphleteers, how can China survive an army of bloggers?"
In fact, as the Freedom House report demonstrates, the internet is an excellent tool for social control, enabling surveillance and guiding of public opinion that would have been impossible in the past.
This has been further boosted by the ongoing panic in the US and other countries which have typically been the biggest proponents of internet freedom over fake news and alleged election interference online.
"Throughout 2018, authoritarians used claims of 'fake news' and data scandals as a pretext to move closer to the China," the report said. 

"Governments in countries such as Egypt and Iran rewrote restrictive media laws to apply to social media users, jailed critics under measures designed to curb false news, and blocked foreign social media and communication services."

Global model
Since the first virtual blocks were laid in the Great Firewall, China has acted as a model for online censorship, with everyone from Bono to US lawmaker Joe Lieberman citing Beijing's policies in arguments for greater internet controls.
In recent years, however, especially since Xi Jinping came to power, China has actively worked with foreign governments to help them build firewalls of their own, and lobby at the United Nations and other bodies to reduce protections for internet freedom worldwide.
This week, the UN's International Telecommunication Union gathered for its quadrennial meeting in Dubai. 

In the past, the ITU has been a key body for China and other leading internet censors, particularly Russia, to push for changes to international regulations to legalize or enable their controls.
In 2015, China succeeded in expanding the ITU's powers and those of national governments to set internet policy, though Chinese delegates failed to remove the terms "freedom of expression" and "democratic" from a key internet governance document.
While the meeting has only just got underway, most experts expect the issue of internet governance -- the key argument over which boils down to whether only governments should be able to set global policy, or if civil society and industry should have a role as well -- to dominate matters again in Dubai.
China's position is that national governments have the ultimate right to control the internet within their borders, and that this covers foreign companies, citizens, and anyone who attempts to interfere by, for example, creating software to undermine the Great Firewall.
The doctrine of cyber sovereignty, as advocated by Xi Jinping, will be on full display next month at China's own World Internet Conference in the southern Chinese river town of Wuzhen.

Worrying trend
As well as working to change international law and craft a model of internet control that can be easily adopted by other countries, Chinese officials and companies have also been actively engaged in the groundwork of building censorship networks overseas.
Golden Frog's Yokubaitis said his company had seen Chinese-style tactics being adopted in Russia and the Middle East, adding that China is "exporting blocking technologies to countries with repressive regimes."
The Freedom House report said that Beijing was taking steps to "propagate its model abroad" with large-scale trainings of foreign officials, providing censorship and surveillance technology, and pressuring international companies to comply with Chinese standards even when operating outside the country.
"These trends present an existential threat to the future of the open internet and prospects for greater democracy around the globe," the report said.
It listed 57 countries, from European democracies to Central Asian autocracies, which had bought telecom infrastructure, AI surveillance tools, or attended or hosted trainings by Chinese censors and propaganda operatives.
"Democratic governments will have to devote much greater diplomatic and other resources to countering China's charm offensive on the international stage," Freedom House added. 

"More governments are turning to China for guidance and support at a time when the United States' global leadership is on the decline, and the acquiescence of foreign companies to Beijing's demands only emboldens the regime in its effort to rewrite international rules in its favor."

The great firewall of China: Xi Jinping’s internet shutdown

Before Xi Jinping, the internet was becoming a more vibrant political space for Chinese citizens. But today the country has the largest and most sophisticated online censorship operation in the world.  

By Elizabeth C Economy

In December 2015, thousands of tech entrepreneurs and analysts, along with a few international heads of state, gathered in Wuzhen, in southern China, for the country’s second World Internet Conference. 

At the opening ceremony Chinese dictator Xi Jinping set out his vision for the future of China’s internet. 

“We should respect the right of individual countries to independently choose their own path of cyber-development,” said Xi, warning against foreign interference “in other countries’ internal affairs”.
No one was surprised by what they heard. 

Xi had already established that the Chinese internet would be a world unto itself, with its content closely monitored and managed by the Communist party. 

In recent years, the Chinese leadership has devoted more and more resources to controlling content online. 

Government policies have contributed to a dramatic fall in the number of postings on the Chinese blogging platform Sina Weibo (similar to Twitter), and have silenced many of China’s most important voices advocating reform and opening up the internet.
It wasn’t always like this. 

In the years before Xi became president in 2012, the internet had begun to afford the Chinese people an unprecedented level of transparency and power to communicate. 

Popular bloggers, some of whom advocated bold social and political reforms, commanded tens of millions of followers. 

Chinese citizens used virtual private networks (VPNs) to access blocked websites. 

Citizens banded together online to hold authorities accountable for their actions, through virtual petitions and organising physical protests. 

In 2010, a survey of 300 Chinese officials revealed that 70% were anxious about whether mistakes or details about their private life might be leaked online. 

Of the almost 6,000 Chinese citizens also surveyed, 88% believed it was good for officials to feel this anxiety.
For Xi Jinping, however, there is no distinction between the virtual world and the real world: both should reflect the same political values, ideals, and standards. 

To this end, the government has invested in technological upgrades to monitor and censor content. 

It has passed new laws on acceptable content, and aggressively punished those who defy the new restrictions. 

Under Xi, foreign content providers have found their access to China shrinking. 

They are being pushed out by both Xi’s ideological war and his desire that Chinese companies dominate the country’s rapidly growing online economy.
At home, Xi paints the west’s version of the internet, which prioritises freedom of information flow, as anathema to the values of the Chinese government. 

Abroad, he asserts China’s sovereign right to determine what constitutes harmful content. 

Rather than acknowledging that efforts to control the internet are a source of embarrassment – a sign of potential authoritarian fragility – Xi is trying to turn his vision of a “Chinanet” (to use blogger Michael Anti’s phrase) into a model for other countries.
The challenge for China’s leadership is to maintain what it perceives as the benefits of the internet – advancing commerce and innovation – without letting technology accelerate political change. 

To maintain his “Chinanet”, Xi seems willing to accept the costs in terms of economic development, creative expression, government credibility, and the development of civil society. 

But the internet continues to serve as a powerful tool for citizens seeking to advance social change and human rights. 

The game of cat-and-mouse continues, and there are many more mice than cats.
The very first email in China was sent in September 1987 – 16 years after Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in the US. 

It broadcast a triumphal message: “Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world.” 

For the first few years, the government reserved the internet for academics and officials. 

Then, in 1995, it was opened to the general public. 

In 1996, although only about 150,000 Chinese people were connected to the internet, the government deemed it the “Year of the Internet”, and internet clubs and cafes appeared all over China’s largest cities.

Yet as enthusiastically as the government proclaimed its support for the internet, it also took steps to control it. 

Rogier Creemers, a China expert at Oxford University, has noted that “As the internet became a publicly accessible information and communication platform, there was no debate about whether it should fall under government supervision – only about how such control would be implemented in practice.” 

By 1997, Beijing had enacted its first laws criminalising online postings that it believed were designed to hurt national security or the interests of the state.
China’s leaders were right to be worried. 

Their citizens quickly realised the political potential inherent in the internet. 

In 1998, a 30-year-old software engineer called Lin Hai forwarded 30,000 Chinese email addresses to a US-based pro-democracy magazine. 

Lin was arrested, tried and ultimately sent to prison in the country’s first known trial for a political violation committed completely online. 

The following year, the spiritual organisation Falun Gong used email and mobile phones to organise a silent demonstration of more than 10,000 followers around the Communist party’s central compound, Zhongnanhai, to protest their inability to practise freely. 

The gathering, which had been arranged without the knowledge of the government, precipitated an ongoing persecution of Falun Gong practitioners and a new determination to exercise control over the internet.
The man who emerged to lead the government’s technological efforts was Fang Binxing. 

In the late 1990s, Fang worked on developing the “Golden Shield” – transformative software that enabled the government to inspect any data being received or sent, and to block destination IP addresses and domain names. 

His work was rewarded by a swift political rise. 

By the 2000s, he had earned the moniker “Father of the Great Firewall” and, eventually, the enmity of hundreds of thousands of Chinese web users.

Throughout the early 2000s, the Chinese leadership supplemented Fang’s technology with a set of new regulations designed to ensure that anyone with access to China’s internet played by Chinese rules. 

In September 2000, the state council issued order no 292, which required internet service providers to ensure that the information sent out on their services adhered to the law, and that some domain names and IP addresses were recorded. 

Two years later, Beijing blocked Google for the first time. (A few years later, Google introduced Google.cn, a censored version of the site.) 

In 2002, the government increased its emphasis on self-censorship with the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for China’s Internet Industry, which established four principles: patriotic observance of law, equitableness, trustworthiness and honesty. 

More than 100 companies, including Yahoo!, signed the pledge.
Perhaps the most significant development, however, was a 2004 guideline on internet censorship that called for Chinese universities to recruit internet commentators who could guide online discussions in politically acceptable directions and report comments that did not follow Chinese law. 

These commentators became known as wu mao dang, or “50-cent party”, after the small bonuses they were supposedly paid for each post.
Yet even as the government was striving to limit individuals’ access to information, many citizens were making significant inroads into the country’s political world – and their primary target was corrupt local officials.
In May 2009, Deng Yujiao, a young woman working in a hotel in Hubei province, stabbed a party official to death after she rejected his efforts to pay her for sex and he tried to rape her. 

Police initially committed Deng to a mental hospital. 

A popular blogger, Wu Gan, however, publicised her case. 

Using information gathered through a process known as ren rou sousuo, or “human flesh search engine”, in which web users collaborate to discover the identity of a specific individual or organisation, Wu wrote a blog describing the events and actions of the party officials involved.
In an interview with the Atlantic magazine at the time, he commented: “The cultural significance of flesh searches is this: in an undemocratic country, the people have limited means to get information... [but] citizens can get access to information through the internet, exposing lies and the truth.” 

Deng’s case began to attract public support, with young people gathering in Beijing with signs reading “Anyone could be Deng Yujiao.” 

Eventually the court ruled that Deng had acted in self-defence.
During this period, in the final years of Hu Jintao’s presidency, the internet was becoming more and more powerful as a mechanism by which Chinese citizens held their officials to account. 

Most cases were like that of Deng Yujiao – lodged and resolved at the local level. 

A small number, however, reached central authorities in Beijing. 

On 23 July 2011, a high-speed train derailed in the coastal city of Wenzhou, leaving at least 40 people dead and 172 injured. 

In the wake of the accident, Chinese officials banned journalists from investigating, telling them to use only information “released from authorities”. 

But local residents took photos of the wreckage being buried instead of being examined for evidence. 

The photos went viral and heightened the impression that the government’s main goal was not to seek the true cause of the accident.
A Sina Weibo poll – later blocked – asked users why they thought the train wreckage was buried: 98% (61,382) believed it represented destruction of evidence. 

Dark humour spread online: “How far are we from heaven? Only a train ticket away,” and “The Ministry of Railways earnestly requests that you ride the Heavenly Party Express.” 

The popular pressure resulted in a full-scale investigation of the crash, and in late December, the government issued a report blaming poorly designed signal equipment and insufficient safety procedures. 

As many as 54 officials faced disciplinary action as a result of the crash.
The internet also provided a new sense of community for Chinese citizens, who mostly lacked robust civil-society organisations. 

In July 2012, devastating floods in Beijing led to the evacuation of more than 65,000 residents and the deaths of at least 77 people. 

Damages totalled an estimated $1.9bn. 

Local officials failed to respond effectively: police officers allegedly kept ticketing stranded cars instead of assisting residents, and the early warning system did not work. 

Yet the real story was the extraordinary outpouring of assistance from Beijing web users, who volunteered their homes and food to stranded citizens. 

In a span of just 24 hours, an estimated 8.8m messages were sent on Weibo regarding the floods. 

The story of the floods became not only one of government incompetence, but also one of how an online community could transform into a real one.
While the Chinese people explored new ways to use the internet, the leadership also began to develop a taste for the new powers it offered, such as a better understanding of citizens’ concerns and new ways to shape public opinion. 

Yet as the internet increasingly became a vehicle for dissent, concern within the leadership mounted that it might be used to mobilise a large-scale political protest capable of threatening the central government. 

The government responded with a stream of technological fixes and political directives; yet the boundaries of internet life continued to expand.
The advent of Xi Jinping in 2012 brought a new determination to move beyond deleting posts and passing regulations. 

Beijing wanted to ensure that internet content more actively served the interests of the Communist party. 

Within the virtual world, as in the real world, the party moved to silence dissenting voices, to mobilise party members in support of its values, and to prevent foreign ideas from seeping into Chinese political and social life. 

In a leaked speech in August 2013, Xi articulated a dark vision: “The internet has become the main battlefield for the public opinion struggle.”
Early in his tenure, Xi embraced the world of social media. 

One Weibo group, called Fan Group to Learn from Xi, appeared in late 2012, much to the delight of Chinese propaganda officials. (Many Chinese suspected that the account was directed by someone in the government.) 

Xi allowed a visit he made to Hebei to be liveblogged on Weibo by government-affiliated press, and videos about Xi, including a viral music video called How Should I Address You, based on a trip he made to a mountain village, demonstrate the government’s increasing skill at digital propaganda.

Under Xi, the government has also developed new technology that has enabled it to exert far greater control over the internet. 

In January 2015, the government blocked many of the VPNs that citizens had used to circumvent the Great Firewall. 

This was surprising to many outside observers, who had believed that VPNs were too useful to the Chinese economy – supporting multinationals, banks and retailers, among others – for the government to crack down on them.
In spring 2015, Beijing launched the Great Cannon. 

Unlike the Great Firewall, which has the capacity to block traffic as it enters or exits China, the Great Cannon is able to adjust and replace content as it travels around the internet. 

One of its first targets was the US coding and software development site GitHub. 

The Chinese government used the Great Cannon to levy a distributed denial of service attack against the site, overwhelming it with traffic redirected from Baidu (a search engine similar to Google). 

The attack focused on attempting to force GitHub to remove pages linked to the Chinese-language edition of the New York Times and GreatFire.org, a popular VPN that helps people circumvent Chinese internet censorship.
But perhaps Xi’s most noticeable gambit has been to constrain the nature of the content available online. 

In August 2013, the government issued a new set of regulations known as the “seven baselines”. 

The reaction by Chinese internet companies was immediate. 

Sina, for example, shut down or “handled” 100,000 Weibo accounts found to not comply with the new rules.
The government also adopted tough restrictions on internet-based rumours. 

In September 2013, the supreme people’s court ruled that authors of online posts that deliberately spread rumours or lies, and were either seen by more than 5,000 individuals or shared more than 500 times, could face defamation charges and up to three years in jail. 

Following massive flooding in Hebei province in July 2016, for example, the government detained three individuals accused of spreading “false news” via social media regarding the death toll and cause of the flood. 

Some social media posts and photos of the flooding, particularly of drowning victims, were also censored.
In addition, Xi’s government began targeting individuals with large social media followings who might challenge the authority of the Communist party. 

Restrictions on the most prominent Chinese web influencers, beginning in 2013, represented an important turning point in China’s internet life. 

Discussions began to move away from politics to personal and less sensitive issues. 

The impact on Sina Weibo was dramatic. 

According to a study of 1.6 million Weibo users, the number of Weibo posts fell by 70% between 2011 and 2013.
The strength of the Communist party’s control over the internet rests above all on its commitment to prevent the spread of information that it finds dangerous. 

It has also adopted sophisticated technology, such as the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield. 

Perhaps its most potent source of influence, however, is the cyber-army it has developed to implement its policies.
The total number of people employed to monitor opinion and censor content on the internet – a role euphemistically known as “internet public opinion analyst” – was estimated at 2 million in 2013. 

They are employed across government propaganda departments, private corporations and news outlets. 

One 2016 Harvard study estimated that the Chinese government fabricates and posts approximately 448m comments on social media annually. 

A considerable amount of censorship is conducted through the manual deletion of posts, and an estimated 100,000 people are employed by both the government and private companies to do just this.
Private companies also play an important role in facilitating internet censorship in China. 

Since commercial internet providers are so involved in censoring the sites that they host, internet scholar Guobin Yang argues that “it may not be too much of a stretch to talk about the privatisation of internet content control”. 

The process is made simpler by the fact that several major technology entrepreneurs also hold political office. 

For example, Robin Li of Baidu is a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, an advisory legislature, while Lei Jun, founder and CEO of mobile phone giant Xiaomi, is a representative of the National People’s Congress.
Yet Xi’s growing control over the internet does not come without costs. 

An internet that does not work efficiently or limits access to information impedes economic growth. China’s internet is notoriously unreliable, and ranks 91st in the world for speed. 

As New Yorker writer Evan Osnos asked in discussing the transformation of the Chinese internet during Xi’s tenure: “How many countries in 2015 have an internet connection to the world that is worse than it was a year ago?”
Scientific innovation, particularly prized by the Chinese leadership, may also be at risk. 

After the VPN crackdown, a Chinese biologist published an essay that became popular on social media, entitled Why Do Scientists Need Google? 

He wrote: “If a country wants to make this many scientists take out time from the short duration of their professional lives to research technology for climbing over the Great Firewall and to install and to continually upgrade every kind of software for routers, computers, tablets and mobile devices, no matter that this behaviour wastes a great amount of time; it is all completely ridiculous.”
More difficult to gauge is the cost the Chinese leadership incurs to its credibility. 

Web users criticising the Great Firewall have used puns to mock China’s censorship system. 

Playing off the fact that the phrases “strong nation” and “wall nation” share a phonetic pronunciation in Chinese (qiangguo), some began using the phrase “wall nation” to refer to China. 

Those responsible for seeking to control content have also been widely mocked. 

When Fang opened an account on Sina Weibo in December 2010, he quickly closed the account after thousands of online users left “expletive-laden messages” accusing him of being a government hack. Censors at Sina Weibo blocked “Fang Binxing” as a search term; one Twitter user wrote: “Kind of poetic, really, the blocker, blocked.” 

When Fang delivered a speech at Wuhan University in central China in 2011, a few students pelted him with eggs and a pair of shoes.
Nonetheless, the government seems willing to bear the economic and scientific costs, as well as potential damage to its credibility, if it means more control over the internet. 

For the international community, Beijing’s cyber-policy is a sign of the challenge that a more powerful China presents to the liberal world order, which prioritises values such as freedom of speech. 

It also reflects the paradox inherent in China’s efforts to promote itself as a champion of globalisation, while simultaneously advocating a model of internet sovereignty and closing its cyber-world to information and investment from abroad.

Tech Quisling

Apple’s iCloud Data Storage in China Includes Cryptographic Keys – Decision Raises Security Concerns
By Rafia Shaikh

Apple will begin hosting iCloud data of its Chinese users in a new data center in China. 

Complying with the tougher Chinese laws, the local authorities will start having faster access to iPhone users’ data stored in the cloud. 

The company had first announced this move last summer after the new cybersecurity laws were passed in China requiring all the foreign companies to use locally managed businesses to store data.
This data, that is currently stored in the United States, will now be stored locally in China and includes, among other things, iCloud cryptographic keys needed to unlock an account. 

This essentially means that China will no longer need to reach out to the US government or deal with US legal system to seek information on a Chinese Apple user. 

While this is becoming an increasingly common practice with the US itself pushing for a similar strategy, the approach does raise user privacy and security concerns. 

Reuters reports today that it’s the first time for Apple to store keys outside of the United States.
That means Chinese authorities will no longer have to use the U.S. courts to seek information on iCloud users and can instead use their own legal system to ask Apple to hand over iCloud data for Chinese users, legal experts said.
For a perspective, Apple reportedly refused all requests it received from the Chinese authorities for information on over 176 users between 2013 and mid-2017. 

Considering China’s tightening control over local internet access, human rights advocates warn that this move will make it impossible for dissidents and journalists in China to freely communicate, as it will become easier for the authorities to track them down. 

They are also pointing to a similar move taken by Yahoo several years ago, when this data access was used to arrest dissidents and human rights activists.
“Jing Zhao, a human rights activist and Apple shareholder, said he could envisage worse human rights issues arising from Apple handing over iCloud data than occurred in the Yahoo case,” Reuters report added.
In its statement Apple said it has to comply with the local laws as it does in the United States, as well. 

The move does raise questions over Apple’s previous strategy of keeping user security at the center of its business – something that no longer seems to be the case.
“While we advocated against iCloud being subject to these laws, we were ultimately unsuccessful,” Apple said in its statement. 

The company said offering this new system was a better choice than discontinuing it which would have led to bad user experience.
The company continued to say that the latest move affects only the data stored in cloud that will now be easily accessible to Chinese authorities who will just need to push Apple with a local legal warrant.
While Apple led the industry with user-focused decisions for years, it continues to make moves that no longer align with the company’s previous focus on user privacy. 

The company recently also removed VPN apps from its Chinese App Store raising questions from the United Nations. 

Tim Cook had said at the time that the company was “just following the law.”
Privacy advocates warn that Apple’s decision to comply with the Chinese demands will only hurt Apple and other tech companies in the long run, since more governments will follow to make similar demands. 

The company’s position, however, aligns with what Bill Gates had said earlier this month – follow whatever governments legally ask you or be ready for strict government regulation.

Tech Quisling

Reporters in China should close iCloud accounts to avoid surveillance, says press watchdog
By Shannon Liao

In light of Apple’s intentions to outsource Chinese iCloud operations to a firm with ties to the local government at the end of the month, French nonprofit Reporters Without Borders — otherwise known as Reporters Sans Frontières or RSF — is telling journalists to take security precautions.
The nonprofit said in a post on Monday that members of the media who have Apple iCloud accounts in China should either move or close their accounts before the deadline, or face “control of their data [passing] to the Chinese state.” 

iCloud operations in China will be taken over by Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD), which is supervised by a board run by government-owned businesses.
However, this is the second time RSF has recently expressed concern over Apple’s compliance with the Chinese government. 

In August, the organization commented on news that VPNs would be withdrawn from Apple’s Chinese App Store since the government considers them illegal. 

RSF has expressed a dark outlook on Apple’s partnership with GCBD, noting how Apple’s lawyers have added a clause in the Chinese terms that both Apple and GCBD may access all user data.

Chinese Paranoia

Command and control: China’s Communist Party extends reach into foreign companies
By Simon Denyer

Chinese dictator attends the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in October. Xi’s vision of complete control over Chinese life is intruding into the boardrooms of foreign companies.

BEIJING  — American and European companies involved in joint ventures with state-owned Chinese firms have been asked in recent months to give internal Communist Party cells an explicit role in decision-making, executives and business groups say.
It is, they say, a worrying demand that threatens to put politics before profits, and the interests of the party above all other considerations. 

It suggests that foreign companies are no longer exempt from Xi Jinping’s overarching vision of complete control.
“The creeping intrusion by the party apparatus into the boardrooms of foreign-invested enterprises has not yet manifested itself on a large scale, but things are certainly going down that path,” said James Zimmerman, a managing partner of the law firm Sheppard, Mullin, Richter and Hampton and former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, who is instructing clients to “push back.”
The party’s demand would give its cells a formal role in approving management decisions, such as investment plans or personnel changes. 

And that is ringing alarm bells.
At the same time, a campaign to reinforce China’s draconian censorship of the Internet is beginning to affect foreign companies.
The twin efforts to keep tabs on foreign companies are an expression of the Communist Party’s constant paranoia about internal stability. 

But they also represent a shift in the balance of power here, as China feels itself to be stronger economically and Western businesses more dispensable.
Not every company is affected by the changes. 

Larger enterprises have dedicated lines and special technology ensuring unfettered Internet access. But the smaller ones do not have that latitude.
By the same token, wholly owned foreign ventures have not faced the same pressure from internal party cells, while even companies involved in joint ventures are pushing back against the new demands.
But everyone is aware which way the wind is blowing.
For decades, China was something of an El Dorado for foreign companies, its low wages luring manufacturers and its vast consumer market and rapidly expanding middle class presenting an unrivaled opportunity for growth — even if it was always a challenging place to operate. 

These days, the mood has perceptibly changed: China is no longer so keen to put out the welcome mat, and foreign companies are increasingly prone to complain of unfair treatment.
Even after the wholesale transformation of the Chinese economy, the Communist Party has remained ever present in business. 

Executives of state-owned firms are party members, while under Chinese law, any organization that has three or more party members has to provide the “necessary conditions” for cadres to establish a party cell.
In practice, that rule has not, up to now, been intrusive.
Party members might use company premises to meet, but they would tend to do so after office hours and might help organize social events for employees. 

Executives described relations as friendly and cooperative, with the cells acting at times as if they were adjuncts to existing human resources departments.
In the past year, that has begun to change. 

Party members are expected to spend more time studying Xi Jinping Thought, the president’s political theory, in office hours or in time-consuming off-site retreats. 

Although a formal role for party cells in management decisions is not required under Chinese law, business executives are worried about a trend toward growing party interference.
“The long-term negative cost, in my view, is the inefficiencies and wastefulness that are likely to result from political influence that has no other purpose than to drive the political machine,” Zimmerman said.
The European Chamber of Commerce in China said in a statement that introducing an “additional layer of governance” would have serious consequences for the independent decision-making ability of joint-venture companies and deter investment from the continent.
China’s investment law stipulates that foreign companies must enter into joint ventures in many sectors of the economy. 

Already, many companies are being used simply to mine their intellectual property, before they are one day pushed aside by their erstwhile partners.
For now, minority joint ventures are feeling the most heat from party cells, but even 50-50 joint ventures have reported a growing assertiveness, executives and business groups say.
“That’s the danger European investors see, a kind of salami-slicing tactics, that starts with the minority joint ventures, then heads for the 50-50 joint ventures, and eventually heading for the 100 percent foreign-owned companies,” said Joerg Wuttke, former president of the European Chamber of Commerce.
“We really want people here to understand: We don’t object to party activities or people, but we do want them to stay away from operational questions,” Wuttke said.
The controls on the Internet could follow a similar salami-slicing tactic, whereby controls are extended across smaller companies first.
China has embarked on a major crackdown on VPNs, or virtual private networks, technology that is widely used to jump over the country’s Great Firewall to gain access to banned websites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and many foreign news sites.
Although large companies use dedicated lines and technology known as MultiProtocol Label Switching, which allows them to bypass the firewall and encrypt messages, that’s often too expensive for small and medium-size enterprises that rely on commercial VPN and encryption software.
Some companies have had ports closed down until they register with local telecommunications operators and report who is accessing the Internet and why.
To regain full access to the Internet, one American company was asked to sign a “solemn commitment” — that it would obey the Chinese Communist Party’s “seven bottom lines,” do nothing to undermine the socialist system, public order or social morality, and wouldn’t use the Internet to violate the interests of the state.

Chinese dictator shown on a screen in front of logos of China’s leading Internet companies, Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba Group, during the fourth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China, in December. 
The agreement, made in Shanghai last November, is typical of the hoops some foreign companies are having to jump through to maintain access to the Web, and to continue doing business in a country where politics is back on top of the agenda.
That has led many American companies to take a “much more cautious approach” to regulating who within their organization uses VPN software, said Jake Parker, vice president of China operations at the U.S.-China Business Council in Beijing.
A mergers and acquisitions team might, for example, be cleared to access websites such as Reuters and the Financial Times to make better business decisions, but other staffers would be more restricted, Parker said.
“That’s because there is an emerging consensus among our legal counsels that using VPNs for noncommercial functions could be construed as potentially violating China’s rules and regulations,” he said. 

“There is a ‘more safe than sorry’ approach.”
Parker said not everyone was taking this approach, but there has been a shift in that direction, with “10, 15 or 20” companies saying they had adopted similar procedures.
An ongoing clampdown on VPN use by private individuals could also have a negative effect on recruitment, executives say: Parents will be reluctant to relocate to China if their children can’t access their preferred social media sites, many of which are banned here.
A more fundamental anxiety is that the Communist Party will ultimately demand to see everything that flows in and out of the country over the Internet, under China’s new Cybersecurity Law, which went into effect in June.
“How safe will intellectual property and trade secrets be? Will servers have to be stored here? Will companies have to hand over encryption codes to Chinese authorities?” asked a ­Beijing-based diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
“Could perhaps entire industry sectors become off limits for foreigners for security reasons? It’s not clear whether Chinese authorities are aware of possible collateral damage to businesses.”
To an extent, Beijing does not care as much about foreign firms as it used to, with a definite hubris setting in after the Western financial crisis, experts say.
“Foreign companies used to be seen as special here, as friends of China,” said James McGregor, a China-based author and businessman. 

“But that kind of flipped during the Western financial crisis.”
Attitudes changed, he said. 

China began to believe its system of state-directed capitalism was superior to the West’s, and that foreign companies are simply “here to serve us.”
One consequence: As President Trump starts to take retaliatory action against China over its trade and business practices, Beijing is putting off some of its most valuable lobbying partners.
“In the past, foreign business has been an important ally for China, but the country now appears to be alienating it at a time when it most needs friends abroad,” said Wuttke, the former president of the European Chamber of Commerce.

China Blocks WhatsApp, Broadening Online Censorship

By KEITH BRADSHER

Censorship has prompted many in mainland China to switch to communications methods that function smoothly and quickly but that are easily monitored by the Chinese authorities, like the WeChat app of the Chinese internet company Tencent. 

SHANGHAI — China has largely blocked the WhatsApp messaging app, the latest move by Beijing to step up surveillance ahead of a big Communist Party gathering next month.
The disabling in mainland China of the Facebook-owned app is a setback for the social media giant, whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has been pushing to re-enter the Chinese market, and has been studying the Chinese language intensively. 

WhatsApp was the last of Facebook products to still be available in mainland China; the company’s main social media service has been blocked in China since 2009, and its Instagram image-sharing app is also unavailable.
In mid-July, Chinese censors began blocking video chats and the sending of photographs and other files using WhatsApp, and they stopped many voice chats, as well. 

But most text messages on the app continued to go through normally. 

The restrictions on video, audio chats and file sharing were at least temporarily after a few weeks.
WhatsApp now appears to have been broadly disrupted in China, even for text messages, Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cryptographer at Symbolic Software, a Paris-based research start-up, said on Monday. 

The blocking of WhatsApp text messages suggests that China’s censors may have developed specialized software to interfere with such messages, which rely on an encryption technology that is used by few services other than WhatsApp, he said.
“This is not the typical technical method in which the Chinese government censors something,” Mr. Kobeissi said. 

He added that his company’s automated monitors had begun detecting disruptions of WhatsApp in China on Wednesday, and that by Monday the blocking efforts were comprehensive.

Facebook declined to comment, following past practice when asked about WhatsApp’s difficulties in China.

Lokman Tsui, an internet communications specialist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that WhatsApp seemed to have been severely disrupted starting on Sunday. 

But he said that some WhatsApp users might still be able to use the service.
The Chinese authorities have a history of mostly, but not entirely, blocking internet services, as well as slowing them down so much that they become useless. 

The censorship has prompted many in China to switch to communications methods that function smoothly and quickly but that are easily monitored by the Chinese authorities, like the WeChat app of the Chinese internet company Tencent, which is based in Shenzhen.
“If you’re only allowed to drive one mile per hour, you’re not going to drive on that road, even if it’s not technically blocked,” Mr. Tsui said.
The disruption of WhatsApp comes as Beijing prepares for the Communist Party’s congress, which starts Oct. 18. 

Held once every five years, the congress chooses the party’s leadership, which in turn runs the country. 

Next month’s meeting is expected to reconfirm Xi Jinping’s nearly absolute grip on power, but considerable uncertainty remains over who will join him on the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the party’s highest-ranking group.
Over the past several years, China has not only stepped up censorship but has also closed numerous churches and jailed large numbers of human rights activists, lawyers and advocates for ethnic minorities.
The shutdown of WhatsApp prompted considerable dismay on Chinese social media.
“Losing contact with my clients, forced back to the age of telephone and email for work now,” one user complained on Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging site.
“Even WhatsApp is blocked now? I’m going to be out of business soon,” another Chinese social media user said on Weibo.
In China, even the use of email is fading as residents embrace the convenience of WeChat. 

The messaging service, which has 963 million active users, bears some similarities to WhatsApp but has a wider array of features and one crucial difference: close ties to the government. 

This month, WeChat sent a notice to users reminding them that it complied with official requests for information.
When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, it agreed to open online data services and other enhanced telecommunications services to international competition. 

But it obtained the assent of other W.T.O. members to retain restrictions on the media. 

Technology multinationals, heavily dependent on the Chinese market, have been reluctant to accuse Beijing of falling short of its W.T.O. commitments.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative has opened a formal investigation into whether China is violating the intellectual property of American companies, but it has released few details. The trade office has not said whether the inquiry will include the blocking of products that rely on American intellectual property, or whether it will focus more narrowly on cases in which China has allegedly purloined or otherwise copied it.
WhatsApp has a strong reputation among cryptographers for security, which may have been what drew the attention of Chinese censors. 

The app provides so-called end-to-end encryption, which effectively means that even Facebook does not know what is being said in the text, voice and video conversations passing through its servers.
WhatsApp’s video, file sharing and other advanced features rely partly on broadly used internet data transfer protocols, and were disrupted over the summer. 

But its text messaging function relies on a different, heavily encrypted method for moving data that has seldom been used by companies.
The latest disruption of the WhatsApp messaging system suggests that China’s censorship apparatus may have figured out how to target the more uncommon and heavily encrypted data transport protocol as well, Mr. Kobeissi said.
Other services provided by American technology companies are available in mainland China. 

The country tolerates Microsoft’s Skype service for phone calls, which does not provide end-to-end encryption and as a result is easier for governments to monitor. 

Beijing also allows Apple’s FaceTime service, which has end-to-end encryption but does not have a WhatsApp-like feature allowing users to exchange secret codes — letting WhatsApp users combat what are known as “man in the middle” attacks.
By blocking the heavily encrypted WhatsApp service while making less secure applications like WeChat available to the public, the Chinese government has herded its internet users toward methods of communication that it can reliably monitor.
Residents of mainland China can still use services like WhatsApp if they first connect to virtual private networks that provide them with communications channels to servers outside the Chinese mainland. 

But the government has also been cracking down on virtual private networks in recent months — and even when those networks appear to be working, they sometimes do not allow access to services that the government is particularly targeting.

China Communist Party Youth Twitter account prompts abuse

BBC News
The Twitter account appeared to be set up on Friday.

Setting up a Twitter account may seem a fairly obvious thing for a political party to do, but the step has not so far worked out too well for China's Communist Party.
The account by the party's youth wing made its debut on Friday with a chirpy one-liner -- "I'm here!" -- and a picture of what appeared to be cartoon communist rabbits.
The Twitter bio says the account provides "information on the work and activities of the Communist Party Youth League and hot topics among youths".

It has posted more than dozen times since then -- in Chinese -- covering patriotic topics like the anniversary of the Japanese invasion in 1931 and links to state media articles.
But the posts have been met with a deluge of abusive tweets and questions about how the account has managed to circumvent the "Great Firewall" surrounding China's internet and accusing the youth wing of hypocrisy.

'Go back behind the firewall'
China closely controls what can be posted and seen online, and is steadily tightening its restrictions.
To get round this, Chinese users have always used VPNs to access Twitter and other banned sites by making it seem like their device is in another country.
But dozens of VPN apps have been withdrawn in China in recent weeks after the government issued new rules requiring them to get a licence. 

It has also been reining in social media and messaging apps in recent months.
"Go back behind the firewall" and "Give us our VPN" were some of the more popular -- and printable -- responses to @ccylchina.
"Please tell me what kind of miraculous VPN you've used to circumvent the firewall... how brazen you are, you should know that those who do so can be caught!" wrote Twitter user Maoyaodong.
Other criticism referenced Weibo, China's heavily censored Twitter-like microblogging platform. 

One user warned: "This isn't Weibo [where you can] scrub away opinions, get lost."

'Fake news'
One possible reason for the Youth League's debut on Twitter could be the appearance last week of another account, called @ComYouthLeague.
That arrived in a very similar way -- with a tweet, announcing "Hello Twitter" -- and has also been posting patriotic links and news stories.
It met similar questions about firewalls and VPNs, but on Monday, @ccylchina warned its followers it was a fake account, saying: "Please look for the Central Communist Youth League."
It posted a picture -- crossed out -- of a tweet from @ComYouthLeague which talked about respecting China's internet laws.
The ComYouthLeague responded seeming slightly wounded, saying its post was "not fabricated nor fake" but aimed to reflect "the positive energy that Chinese youth should have".
Neither account has yet knocked up a substantial following yet -- in fact @ComYouthLeague is slightly ahead with 1,666 followers at the time of writing.
But that's perhaps unsurprising given the limited Twitter audience in China, where organisations are far more likely to rely on the likes of Weibo to interact with the public.

@Ccylchina seems to be still be finding its feet - it twice posted bursts of "test" tweets on Monday.

Though many Chinese state media outlets have a presence on Twitter, few government and Communist Party bodies maintain accounts.
Those that do include the information office of China's State Council, as well as the main Chinese Communist Party, though its last post was in March 2016.

U.S. Tech Quislings

Tech companies automate Chinese censorship around the world
By Nick Monaco and Samuel Woolley 

A troubling trend is sweeping Silicon Valley—big tech acquiescing to digital authoritarianism to gain access to the Chinese market.
In July, Apple removed VPNs from its Chinese app store and announced plans to build a data center in Guizhou to comply with China’s new draconian cybersecurity laws.
This follows Facebook’s decision months earlier to build a tool that allowed third-parties in China to suppress controversial content on its network. 

While these moves can be rationalized from most business perspectives, acquiescing to China’s digitally authoritarian policies for market access will have harrowing political consequences in the long term.
Apple and Facebook, two of the most powerful companies in the world, have set dangerous precedents in these decisions that risk being followed both in and outside of the tech industry. 

When big tech bends its principles to limbo into Chinese markets, it encourages other Western companies and institutions to do so as well.
The latest example is Cambridge University Press. 

The prominent publishing house recently removed hundreds of academic articles from the website of its publications China Quarterly and the Journal of Asian Studies, in response to Chinese authorities deeming them controversial. 

After outcry from academics and researchers, Cambridge University Press reversed its decision – but the fact remains that they were willing to censor peer-reviewed academic research.
At best, such decisions risk entrenching the status quo – China has already ranked as the lowest in the world in Internet freedom for two years running. 

 At worst, these moves encourage the omnipotent aspirations of the Chinese government to build a digital dictatorship.
Chinese AI research and production is set to supersede the US in the next few decades, especially given Trump and the GOP’s refusal to recognize the importance of scientific R&D and blue-sky research. 

Given this outlook, Western tech companies must consider the social ramifications of their involvement in China.
It’s undeniable that the Party may be on the brink of unprecedented automated repression – extremely few companies control the most popular apps in China, and – as experts like Richard McGregor have shown – the Chinese Communist Party always has its hands in the country’s most successful businesses. 

The possibilities that would exist – such as automated mining of publicly and privately available data coupled with mass sentiment analysis to predict and quell dissent in advance – have horrifying implications for human rights. 

Repressive governance could, to a large extent, become an automated affair.
China has already implemented a frightening citizenship score pilot program, which gives each citizen a “social credit score”. 

It is also known that markedly more scrupulous governments, from Mexico to Ecuador, have deployed surveillance and intelligence systems against political opposition. 

The possibility of AI autocracy in the People’s Republic is real, and it is one that Western tech companies are tacitly endorsing when they choose to forfeit digital rights in favor of market access.
It would also be naïve to assume this form AI autocracy will stay put in the Middle Kingdom. Authoritarians have a way of sharing repressive technology – which is why one of Egypt’s biggest telecoms companies, Orascom, owns 75% of North Korea’s only official mobile network, Koryolink. It is also why China’s cellphone company Huawei helped Iranian security forces to stifle dissent at home.
Two-thirds of all internet users worldwide live in countries where criticism of the authorities is subject to censorship. 

It would be reasonable, with this in mind, to assume that China’s AI authoritarian model—if successful—could become the soft-power the country has lacked on the world stage up to now.
The Economist rightfully pointed out in July: “Western companies are at least engaged in an open debate about the ethical implications of AI; and intelligence agencies are constrained by democratic institutions. Neither is true of China. [..] If China ends up having most influence over its future, then the state, not citizens, may be the biggest beneficiary”.

In an era where the leader of the free world is emboldening authoritarians on everything from reneging on human rights to slanderously impugning the press, the onus falls on civil society and the private sector to maintain and promote liberal democratic values at home and abroad. 

Western tech companies are one of the most powerful actors in the latter sphere, and also fund many in the former. 

This puts them in a unique position to promote privacy, security and digital rights around the world.
The social and political consequences of technology are externalities that must be accounted for. 

It is impossible to decouple business decisions in the tech community from responsibility for the consequences that result from them, especially as technology continues to play an ever more crucial role in individuals’ daily lives.

Orwell 2017

China’s Internet Crackdown Is Another Step Toward Digital Totalitarian State
By IAN WILLIAMS

Bill Clinton once mocked attempts by China to limit free speech online.
“Good luck,” he said. 

“That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”
But 16 years later, Beijing is taking steps to isolate the Chinese internet from the outside world, while drastically stepping up digital surveillance of those within and cracking down on online anonymity.
Chinese authorities are targeting virtual private networks (VPNs) and other tools that are used to circumvent the so-called "Great Firewall," the country’s system of strict internet censorship. 

VPNs provide anonymity and access to banned or blocked websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, and until recently have been used widely in China.
And from Oct. 1, users posting comments on web platforms or other internet forums will have to use their real identities. 

Forbidden content includes damaging the nation’s honor, endangering national security, spreading rumors and disrupting social order. 

The list encompasses just about anything the authorities decide they don't like.
China’s cyber-regulator has banned any VPNs it has not approved, leading to shutdowns across the country. 

Apple has removed VPNs from its China app store, in a move that Amnesty International described as a “deplorable decision.”

'Distract the Public and Change the Subject'
Until now, the Great Firewall, though formidable, has been porous. 

That's partly because of VPNs, but also as a result of the ingenuity of internet users themselves, playing cat-and-mouse with the authorities. 

Previous attempts at real-name registration have not been widely enforced.
The firewall has operated by blocking specific websites and by the use of key word filters, preventing searches of sensitive words or phrases, like “democracy,” “Tiananmen” or “June 4,” the date of the 1989 massacre in and around Tiananmen Square. 

This automated element is complemented by an estimated 100,000 internet police who check content.

A Chinese man stands alone to block a line of tanks in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989. He was calling for an end to bloodshed against pro-democracy demonstrators and was pulled away by bystanders before the military vehicles continued on their way.

The system has become increasingly sophisticated, employing up to 2 million additional loyalists to join and steer conversations and debates, according to China's state-sponsored media, where this is seen as more effective than simply blocking them. 

These loyalists have been dubbed the “50 Cent Army,” since each member is paid that sum each time they post in favor of the Communist Party.
The system was analyzed earlier this year by three American academics: Gary King of Harvard University, Jennifer Pan of Stanford University and Margaret Roberts of the University of California at San Diego.
They estimate the Chinese government “fabricates and posts about 448 million social media comments a year.” 

They say the operation is massive and secretive, the goal being to “distract the public and change the subject.”

Winnie the Pooh
Even before the VPN ban, Xi Jinping had been progressively tightening controls, re-enforcing the firewall as users have found ways of circumventing censorship through the use of symbols, images or acronyms to comment on events or mock their leaders. 

One of the most popular images for Xi, a picture of Winnie the Pooh, who appears to share the president’s physique, was recently outlawed by the censors.
China has built the world’s most extensive system of internet control, but while it has always been wary of VPNs, sporadically trying to block them, it had grudgingly tolerated their use until recently. This is largely because of their widespread adoption by business leaders and academia, who prize secure communications and access to unfiltered information from outside China.
The latest moves suggest those concerns are trumped by the Communist Party’s desire for greater control. 

Beijing has given assurances that “official” VPNs will be made available to businesses which need them, but that is likely to trigger further alarm bells, given widespread Chinese economic espionage and intellectual property theft.
ExpressVPN, one of the biggest providers, said the move “represents the most drastic measure the Chinese government has taken to block the use of VPNs to date, and we are troubled to see Apple aiding China’s censorship efforts.”

On Monday, the South China Morning Post reported that a 26-year-old had been jailed for 9 months for selling VPN software which allowed users to "visit foreign websites that could not be accessed by a mainland [China] IP address.”
The crackdown has been given legal basis by a new cybersecurity law, which was introduced in June. James Zimmerman, the chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, described it as “a step back for innovation in China.”

Images Blocked in Mid-Transit
Along with the crackdown on VPNs, researchers say there is a more concerted re-tooling of the Great Firewall. 

Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto-based group studying internet censorship, has found evidence of images of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo blocked in mid-transit during chats on WeChat, a popular Chinese platform. 

This followed the death of the human rights activist from cancer while in police custody.
Citizen Lab's report describes this as “the first time we see image filtering in one-on-one chats, in addition to image filtering in group chats and WeChat moments."
Lotus Ruan, one of the Citizen Lab researchers, speculates that the latest crackdowns might be related to the forthcoming Communist Party Congress, now confirmed to begin on Oct. 18. 

The key five-yearly event will confirm the new leadership line-up and set policy direction.
“Censorship on Chinese internet is increased around political or sensitive events,” she said, but added that it could equally be a long-term trend for what she describes as the Chinese “intranet” — a system increasingly closed and separated from the rest of the world’s internet.
That’s echoed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy and free-speech advocacy group, which believes the best indication of where the crackdown is leading will come later this year, after the Congress. 

“If VPNs remain absent, it may signal an even darker turn for Chinese internet censorship,” according to an EFF report.

There is other evidence that the latest crackdowns are more than just the ebb and flow of censorship, and part of a concerted effort by the Communist Party to assert what Xi calls “internet sovereignty.”
Cambridge University Press (CUP) recently blocked online access in China to 300 articles in its leading journal on the country, which were deemed by Beijing to be politically sensitive. 

It re-instated them after heavy criticism for colluding with Chinese censorship.
The South China Morning Post last month attended the Beijing Book Fair and reported that CUP isn’t the only Western publisher practicing self-censorship. 

It quoted several others saying they routinely keep sensitive topics out of publications available in China.
Publishers, as well as tech firms such as Apple, see complying with Chinese censorship as the price to be paid for access to what they hope will be a lucrative market.

Efforts are also underway in China to develop a “social credit system,” the idea being to encourage acceptable online behavior by harvesting and analyzing digital behavior. 

The developers say it will help stamp out fraud and provide a measure of individual credit-worthiness. 

But the government is also taking a strong interest, seeing its potential for social management, evaluating loyalty by analyzing the way an individual uses social media, what they post and share, and the sites they visit.
The implications of this sort of big data analytics are also raising alarm bells in the West, but the difference is that in China there is an almost total lack of internet privacy. 

Users have been described as “running naked” online, with their data fully exposed and unprotected.
China's measures to overcome obstacles that Clinton highlighted in his Jell-O comment have been motivated to a large extent by fear of an Arab Spring-style uprising — a revolution using social media to organize and coordinate protests and spread unfiltered information.
While it could well be that the latest levels of censorship ebbs after the forthcoming Communist Party Congress, tools are being lined up to reinforce and bolster the Great Firewall, cementing over the holes, and building behind it a separate intranet that the Economist magazine dubbed “The Digital Totalitarian State.”

U.S. Tech Quislings

Cambridge University stood up to China in a way companies like Apple haven't
By Cheang Ming

With its decision to reinstate hundreds of academic articles, a division of Cambridge University has done what larger entities have failed to: stand up to China.
Cambridge University Press, the world's oldest publishing house, on Monday reversed an earlier decision to block access within China to 315 articles in the China Quarterly, a leading academic journal focusing on contemporary China. 

Most articles that had been blocked focused on topics seen as inconvenient to the Chinese government, including the Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square protests and Taiwan.

People stand outside the Cambridge University Press stand at the Beijing International Book Fair in Beijing on August 23, 2017.

The publisher had blocked those articles from being accessed on the mainland after receiving an "instruction" to do so from a Chinese agency, CUP said in an Aug. 18 statement.
While China has blocked other media platforms — such as Reuters and the Wall Street Journal — in the past, the move to censor CUP was different due to the academic journal's smaller, niche readership.
Anita Chan, an Australian National University senior fellow, told CNBC the move was "unprecedented." 

Two articles authored by Chan were among those blocked.
Meanwhile, a petition started by Peking University Associate Professor Christopher Balding stated that the academic community was "disturbed" by the Chinese government's attempt to "export its censorship on topics that do not fit its preferred narrative."
Public outcry from academics and activists eventually led to the articles being reinstated by CUP on Aug. 21.
Even though it took several days of heated protests for the Cambridge unit to change its mind, the publisher's ultimate decision highlights moves taken in the opposite direction by multinational corporations to placate regulators on the mainland.

Multinationals fall in line
One of those companies is Apple.
The Cupertino-based tech giant drew ire for removing apps from virtual private network (VPN) providers from the Chinese version of its App Store in July. 

VPNs allow individuals in China a way of bypassing its "Great Firewall," a system that restricts access to the internet.
In December last year, Apple pulled a similar move when it removed the New York Times' app from its Chinese app store.
Reuters also reported last month that the iPhone maker announced it was building its first data center in China after the introduction of new cybersecurity laws requiring companies to store sensitive data on servers in China. 

The new rules were vague while the practice of storing data on local servers could expose companies to government monitoring.

Apple isn't the only company complying with tougher regulations in China either.

Amazon's Chinese partner told clients it would "shut down" unauthorized VPNs, Reuters reported earlier this month. 

Like Apple, an Amazon Web Services spokesman said the company had to work through Chinese partners to adhere to local regulations, Reuters added.
In 2014 media reports said LinkedIn (now a subsidiary of Microsoft) was censoring posts of a sensitive nature from being seen in China so it could operate in the mainland market.
Even though well-known companies — such as Apple and Google — make headlines when they either accept or reject regulator demands, the decision-making process is more "nuanced and mundane" for most firms, said Christopher Beddor, an associate at consultancy Eurasia Group.
"For those companies that are impacted by censorship regulations, there's often a behind-the-scenes back-and-forth discussion with local partners and regulators over how to adapt the content for the Chinese market," Beddor added.
That discussion happens, in part, because companies are trying to make money in China — as their shareholders likely desire — whereas CUP has more leeway as a university department.

What's next
Chinese authorities reacted to CUP's reversal just hours after its announcement: Regulators promptly scrubbed a Weibo post from the Cambridge University account announcing the decision, according to a report from the Guardian on Tuesday.
However, the academic publisher's website remained available in China.
Greatfire.org, a website monitoring censorship in the country, found that the webpage for "The China Quarterly" was uncensored as of Aug. 24. 

As the CUP website used Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), the only way for authorities to block individual pages would be to block the entire website, Greatfire.org co-founder Martin Johnson (a pseudonym) told CNBC.
The CUP website was also likely to remain unblocked, Charlie Smith, a pseudonym used by another Greatfire.org co-founder, told CNBC in an email. 

He said that's because the financial cost required to access journal articles acted as "its own form of censorship."

An aerial view of King's College, University of Cambridge. Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the university.

"I think that CUP probably overreacted to some request from an official," Smith added.
Some China watchers have linked the tightening in regulations to the upcoming 19th National Congress of the Communist Party in the fall as bureaucrats attempt to step up their game ahead of an anticipated leadership reshuffle. 

However, the new level of scrutiny is unlikely to subside after the event, experts said.
"The fundamental trend remains toward more state control over media and information," Beddor told CNBC.
Although the pace at which new regulations are initiated could slow after the party congress, it was unlikely that rules would be reversed following the event's conclusion, he added.
Even though Apple's Cook was hopeful that engaging with the authorities would lead to fewer restrictions in the future, not everyone was equally optimistic.
"Censorship in China is a long-term vision and is not really a tap that get(s) turned on and off. It's not like sites get unblocked after the congress finishes. They stay blocked. Which is part of Xi Jinping's grand plan," said Smith.
Meanwhile, some experts have voiced fears that China's censorship regime may even extend beyond its borders.
University of Canterbury professor Anne-Marie Brady, who had one article in the China Quarterly blocked in the mainland, said, "China under Xi is now not only trying to control the information environment in China, but also the external information environment when it pertains to China."