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More Fakery in the Olympic Opening Ceremonies
By Brian | August 12, 2008 | Share on Facebook
Just yesterday, I posted about how some of the fireworks in the Olympic opening ceremony were computer generated for television.
Topics: News and/or Media, Sports Talk | 18 Comments »
Very interesting posts and well written.
I will put your site on my blogroll.
:-)
You should check out some of the writing that’s been done on what’s behind the Great Firewall of China — there’s a vast swath of the Internet over there, largely ignored by us because, well, it’s in Chinese. Social networking sites with hundreds of millions of members. And yes, there’s a thriving blogosphere — although since the authors are tracked and monitored, with jail terms being the potential reward, you just don’t find much political debate.
As for policed blogs, I’m suggesting that quotes like the one above show a certain level of defiane that I find encouraging. Unless, of course, it was the last thing that blogger ever wrote. :-(
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In brief, though, it’s definitely true that you’ll see things on the Chinese Internet that you wouldn’t expect to see. The fact is that most Westerners never see them — and that’s due to what I think is an amazing aspect of the Internet: almost all US observers assume that the English segment of the Internet is “the” Internet, and completely ignore the vast swaths of it that they can’t read. Hence, the world’s largest social networking sites, online MMORPGs, and blog forums are completely invisible. This does not occur in the opposite direction; there is a large plurality of non-native English speakers on the Internet who have some English facility. (And, of course, major English properties are frequently translated.)
A few thoughts to get you started on your reading:
1) one of the interesting aspects of China’s Internet policy is that everything gets read by the government. At first, China threw huge resources at reading everything that was posted internally — estimates of over 100,000 government viewers were made — so that no subversive thought could go unpunished. Today, the job is mostly done electronically, with things such as keyword filtering, text analysis, and cameras at public Internet cafes. China’s internal routers are designed to allow for this to occur at the IP level, so you don’t need to post in a public forum to attract governmental attention.
I strongly encourage you to read more about what has happened in China and elsewhere on this front, because it informs my opinions about the ease of creating such a totalitarian state here. To date, American advances in this regard include the ISP filters watching domestic Internet traffic, the ECHELON and other transnational systems that review all incoming and outbound international traffic, individuals being increasingly tracked by the government through cameras and data mining, and the moves by the TSA to put dissenters on terrorist watch lists. (Did you catch the news that, to fly without ID, you need to provide the government with details of your past addresses? I.e., what you say at the airport is checked against their pre-existing databases on you.)
We are completely in agreement that today we have much freer expression than people in other countries; my fear is that this is a temporary situation, thanks to lack of concern about how we nibble at the edges of free speech. It’s a fairly simple tautology: a) future terrorist attacks and threats will induce a greater clampdown on American freedoms; b) future terrorist attacks and threats are largely assumed to be inevitable. Ergo, it’s a question of when, not if, we will lose more of our current civil liberties.
2) in authoritarian states, there is a complicated pax de deus whereby the government signals its people what things may be discussed and what may not. Generally, this is far more subtle than having a presidential aide tell the country that they have to watch what they say. What you’re seeing on the Chinese Internet is a result of all communication which have already passed through these internal filters. I don’t think it’s particularly heartening that dissent about Chinese management is online; history proves that such dissent exists in all authoritarian states. What you see online is, by and large, only the approved dissent, which is up there with “free speech zones” in the realm of inherently contradictory concepts.
That said, what I find much more heartening is the potential of technology to provide ways to bypass government filters in repressive regimes. Encryption and proxy servers can go a long way towards giving authoritarian government headaches; authoritarian governments respond by making such technologies themselves illegal.
Hence, I would argue that the affordances of such technology are highly political: people who have access to such technologies and frequently use them are likely to enjoy greater civil liberties, and are likely to continue enjoying these liberties. Put another way, a polity that currently enjoys a high level of civil liberty is likely to stanch the authoritarian impulse in their governments by making it nontrivial for them to casually review their communications, and to make it more difficult for them to casually impose new restrictions and monitoring.
In short, once the question is asked, “What do you have to hide?”, the presumption that you have to choose what is hidden is already made for you. Likewise, if your answer is “I have nothing to hide”, then your lack of concern makes it more likely that this will cease to be a choice, but rather a regular state of existence.
Which is why I think it would be excellent if more Americans paid regular attention to what it is like to live in China. America in 2008 bears political features which we despised in the 1988 Soviet Union, and this transition has occurred organically. It seems to me that if we do not wish to live in a Chinese-style environment in 2028, we should pay attention to the current sociological demonstrations of such cultures that we have available to us.
I strongly encourage you to read more about what has happened in China and elsewhere on this front, because it informs my opinions about the ease of creating such a totalitarian state here.
There’s a huge difference between the Chinese government reviewing their citizens’ blog posts and the American government requesting search engine logs, or Chinese “approved dissent” and American “free spech zones,” or Chinese lack of privacy and American use/abuse of the 5th Ammendment.
And the difference is this: we get to choose our government, they don’t. We can “take back our rights” by voting in people who disagree with the current administration. They can’t.
I’ve long argued our laws need to keep up with our society, and when they don’t, sub-optimal situations arise that require us to update our laws. In recent decades, technology has been the major culprit in this phenomenon, be it data mining or wiretapping or airport security. You have long pointed at these dichotomies as clear evidence of the rise of a totalitarian state in America. And, like the next terrorist attack, the complete breakdown of our civil liberties is assumed to be inevitable, so it’s constant failure to arrive with each passing law or administration doesn’t make you wrong, it just makes you more prescient about a longer timeframe.
So yes, 2008 America has similarities to 1988 USSR and 2008 China, but in much the same way that Steven Hawking and my kids’ Mr. Potato Head toy both have two eyes, two ears and a mouth. One’s a permanent condition and the other is regularly changeable.
Into the breach!
So while I can
LOL! I guess travelling for you people means going from one State to another. The World is so much bigger. Even America has many countries to explore and learn from (the USA being *just one of them*). That may be the reason for being so surprised of the existence of a blogosphere in China.
**I
Free speech zones are still somewhat anomalous here, but are common near political conventions and speeches. And yes, as the name implies, it picks an arbitrary point around a Very Important Person Whose Safety and Convenience Exceeds the Importance of the Constitution, and restricts protest speech to a “zone”, usually around a half-mile away and surrounded by barricades and police.
Meanwhile, this hit my radar today, an article on GPS usage for prosecution, with shoutouts to cell phones, epass technology, and warrantless tracking:
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1837470,00.html
Again, I’m in favor of using these technologies for law enforcement at the end of the usual process of grand juries and warrants. But if some parties are tagging suspects with GPS without warrants, I expect that it’s only a matter of time before there is a call for police access to existing, universal GPS data “to save them time and money”, much as antiterror efforts have been “restricted” by our pesky civil rights.
Any system of tabulation which cannot document its totals is broken.
No argument here. But it doesn’t mean it’s been tampered with. Remember, you started with “The move to computer-mediated voting has introduced places where the wholesale theft of elections becomes feasible [and] as I
Free speech zones are most common around Very Important Events, not so much Very Important People. As Jeff is fond of pointing out to me, the Free Speech Zones around the political conventions are in place regardless of who is speaking. Their stated purpose are to keep protests safe and nonviolent, and despite Jeff’s inherent problem with them, they have never once been declared unconstitutional. I’m not even sure they’ve been challenged…
As to Time Magazine and GPS devices, a few quick thoughts:
1) If you have a GPS device, then you also have a foolproof device to prevent tracking of your GPS device. It’s called the “OFF” switch on your GPS device. Funny how many people forget that…
2) Let’s not forget this line in the article, conveniently buried in the third to last paragraph: “GPS data is usually just one part of the criminal case because attorneys also have to prove the defendant possessed the unit and entered the information into it.”
3) You’ll note that each and every case described in the article was a criminal trial – not terror-related at all. Criminal trials require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. GPS evidence is circumstantial evidence that goes toward removing doubt. It’s not physical evidence.
Protraction faction, what’s your action? Hooking up words and phrases and clauses….
No argument here. But it doesn
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