surveillance

China, Hong Kong and cyber espionage

Poster at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

In 2017 I spent some time in Hong Kong and Macau, and had the opportunity to speak to a number of academics. One of the most frequent questions that they asked me was whether people in the United States were following events in Hong Kong. I had to tell them no. There were so many major political debates taking place within the United States itself that events in Hong Kong hadn’t drawn much attention. That has changed now.

Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1999, under a “one country, two systems” approach. In recent years, however, people have become increasingly concerned about their independence. For example, in 2015 five booksellers in Hong Kong went missing. At least one of the men later claimed that he had been kidnapped for selling books critical of China’s leadership. This context shaped how people in Hong Kong viewed a proposed law to allow the extradition of Hong Kong’s residents to mainland China. The bill was presented in April, and provoked massive protests by June. Even after Hong Kong’s governor withdrew the bill in September the protests continued to escalate. This issue has come to embody the fears of most people in Hong Kong that they will lose autonomy. For this reason, one of the protesters’ demand is for complete suffrage in the selection of their leaders, along with amnesty for those who have taken part in the protests, and an independent investigation of what they view as police brutality. …

Cypherpunks’ strange fight for freedom

Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet is a short, engaging and provocative look at surveillance and freedom on the internet. The book records a series of discussions between Assange and his co-authors (Jacob Applebaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn and Jeremie Zimmerman) on March 20, 2012 (while he was under house arrest in the UK), which was later edited for readability and coherence (p. 6). As a result, the reader feels as though they are eavesdropping on particularly interesting conversation in a pub, but a conversation by people who have great expertise in their fields. A front sheet on the book provides the essential context for this conversation: “What is a Cypherpunk? Cypherpunks advocate for the use of cryptography and similar methods as a away to achieve societal and political change. Founded in the early 1990s, the movement has been most active during the 1990s `cryptowars’ and following the 2011 internet spring.” The book reads as an introduction as much to the political philosophy of this group as it does to the technical issues involved in modern encryption debates. …

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