I’m back again with a new school unit: “How has technology acted as a disruption with its creation throughout history?”.

A recent activity in this unit was to read a novel entitled Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. The book focuses on an alternate reality where terrorists blow-up the Bay Bridge in San Francisco giving the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) the perfect excuse to enforce government spying and censorship.

Reading this novel, I came across some interesting technologies that are in use today. One of them was the Chinese Firewall.

The Great Firewall of China (GFW) coined by Geremie Barmé in 1997 is a firewall system enforced by the People’s Republic of China to regulate China’s internet.

The purpose of the firewall role is to block the peoples’ of China access to foreign websites and to slow down internet traffic crossing their borders. This includes: limiting access to foreign news sources, blocking foreign tools such as Google Search or Facebook, blocking most mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to conform to domestic regulations, as they relate to China’s internet policies and practises.

In addition to censorship, the GFW has had an impact on China’s digital economy by nurturing and advancing Chinese companies while reducing the access and effectiveness of foreign internet companies.

As part of the Great Firewall, China started the Golden Shield Project which is a massive surveillance and censoring system. Ironically, the hardware used by this project was mainly provided by by U.S. companies such as Cisco Systems.

The main activities of the Golden Shield Project include: monitoring domestic websites and email and searching for politically sensitive language and calls to protest.

When unacceptable content is found, local officials are usually dispatched to investigate or make arrests. However, around late 2007, the Golden Shield Project was operating inconsistently because users in China had adapted to internet blocking by using proxy servers to communicate and view blocked content.

But what does this have to do with Little Brother? Well one of the key premises of the book is censorship and government spying which is exactly what is going on in China as result of the Golden Shield Project and the GFW.

To quote Little Brother – pg.229:
“For a normal Internet surfer, a session online is probably about 95 percent cleartext, five percent ciphertext. If someone is sending out 95 percent ciphertext, maybe you could dispatch the computer-savvy equivalents of Booger and Zit to ask them if they’re terrorist drug-dealer Xnet users.
This happens all the time in China. Some smart dissident will get the idea of getting around the Great Firewall of China, which is used to censor the whole country’s Internet connection, by using an encrypted connection to a computer in some other country. Now, the Party there can’t tell what the dissident is surfing: maybe it’s porn, or bomb-making instructions, or dirty letters from his girlfriend in the Philippines, or political material, or good news about Scientology. They don’t have to know. All they have to know is that this guy gets way more encrypted traffic than his neighbors. At that point, they send him to a forced labor camp just to set an example so that everyone can see what happens to smart-asses.”

But how does the GFW relate to our driving question: “How has technology acted as a disruption with its creation throughout history?”

I think that the act of censorship and spying requires people to take extra precautions to avoid breaking any laws or gaining acess to information frowned upon by the government. This not only prevents people from being connected globally, it can also disrupt and create stress in their life, especially when the government sends agents to question them on their internet habits.

Personally, I’m completely against censorship and governments spying on their citizens. Especially tools like the GFW and how it blocks foreign communications and websites. Sending agents to question people, in an often threatening way, simply based on their internet history, seems to me a violation of human rights.

Anyway that’s all for now but expect more blogpost around this very soon.