Amnesty International: Give Us More Money to Do Nothing
I am sure that Amnesty International gets tons of money from Microsoft employees. And it’s great that people can feel good about themselves by spending money to change the world. But this is really a waste of time.
Basically, AI wants you to boycott Google, since Google gave information to the Chinese government. This is how they intend to change China’s policies: by boycotting American companies. Blaming American companies for everything is a great way to get people to donate money to liberal causes, but it’s not a … hmmm.
Here are the facts. China doesn’t have a first ammendment right to political speech or assembly. In China, you can get arrested for having a political meeting in your basement. You can buy GHB on the web in China, but you can’t try to overthrow the party. It’s illegal. Furthermore, there is absolutely no public support in China for political speech legislation. If you held free and fair populist elections, you would get less than 10% of people voting for it.
Before anyone flames me, let me say that I love the first ammendment in America, and I want everyone to be as happy as we are with our clearly superior system (yes, we are also committing self-inflicted genocide at an alarming rate, but our political system is superior, “rah! rah!”)
My point is that, if you want to change the laws of China, as AI claims to do, you have to do a few things. First, you have to change the public opinion of a billion-person nation. Then, you have to convince the ruling party to change the laws. You can do that by instituting a revolution and becoming the ruling party, or you can do it by joing the ruling party and working your way up. That’s how it works.
So what will boycotting American companies do (besides get liberals to donate money to AI)? Well, it will give China more incentive to promote domestic Internet companies like baidu and taobao, who follow the laws. Sure, it will make the dissidents more likely to use Google, but that would only be great publicity if dissidents and sympathizers represented more than single-digit percentage of the population. They don’t.
Furthermore, we’re at a point where baidu is within a percent or two of being #1 in China. In 10 years, there will be twice as much Chinese language Internet traffic than western languages. The domestic companies already get enough competitive advantage from the Chinese government, and there is a very real threat that some of these companies could depose the American giants in the next ten years. AI would seem to prefer that Google be constrained to being the search engine for political dialog in the western hemisphere, and to hell with serving the rest of the world.
Great. Tell the Chinese people, “when you awaken from your brainwashed stupor, you’re going to thank us — we gave you free speech by KICKING GOOGLE OUT OF CHINA!”
July 24th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
As long as Google and other American companies don’t get the idea that they can do it in America too…. Oh, that’s right, AT&T already did!
Remember, AT&T Delivers You Straight To The NSA!
Thanks for the opportunity for repeating this and reminding people that we may have free speech, but we’re losing our rights to privacy.
July 28th, 2006 at 9:09 am
Maggie,
What I find interesting is that most Americans have no problem with Safeway knowing EVERYTHING about what they buy, but freak out if the government wants to use this information to catch terrorists. As long as the information is only available to hackers, bad employees, stalkers, and foreign and domestic “commercial partners” of Safeway, it’s cool. Oh — I get it; the U.S. government wanted it for FREE, those thieving crooks! If they set up a shell company and buy the same info from AT&T, it’s cool, right? I mean, that’s how foreign governments do it, and nobody complains.
July 29th, 2006 at 7:41 am
I am more concerned about the government using records to build a case against me (or not award a contract to me, etc.) because I didn’t vote for the party in power, or I assembled to protest a gov’t policy or action or something like that.
July 29th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
Yes, I understand the issue. My point is that people are focusing on the wrong thing when they complain about NSA using the information to find terrorists. The U.S. government is bound by transparency laws, FOIA, and so on — if the government is going to break all of its own rules by tracking political opponents, the fact that the data resides in Safeway’s database and not federal government is not going to stop them. That is, it would be illegal and an abuse regardless. Interfering with legitimate anti-terror activities does absolutely nothing to protect you. Furthermore, private corporations are not bound by FOIA or many of the transparency requirements of U.S. government. So, if you want the data to be kept somewhere where it is safe from corrupt government officials, other governments, and so on — you don’t want it in a private company’s database. If you truly want to be safe, you would push for legislation making it illegal for Safeway to hold this personal data; push for legislations to make all private companies adhere to the same transparency and privacy regulations as the government does. Then you would mandate that private companies institute the same anti-hacker and data protection policies of U.S. government. Finally; that still wouldn’t be quite as good as letting the government host the data; because the U.S. government has thousands of watchdog groups and media watching like a hawk to alert the public in case of any screwups. But the personal data about you that is owned by 1000 private entities has no such oversight. When it leaks to corrupt FBI officials or foreign governments, the companies generally cover things up, and nobody finds out.
I agree it’s a huge problem — but the U.S. government is the least of your problems. Letting private entities host richer personal data about you than the government just means that you have little to no oversight, and no recourse when the information is abused (by government or anyone else).
July 31st, 2006 at 7:11 pm
I agree, certain private entities are a huge problem, and they are the power behind the gov’t. and that’s why the gov’t won’t move on certain issues, like global warming. I heard on NPR that AT&T said that the data they turned over to the NSA didn’t belong to the customers, it belonged to AT&T. Just like that.
I remember a few years ago hearing about a customer suing a grocery store and the grocery store using the customer’s data in an attempt to show the customer was an alcoholic, to discredit them. And wasn’t there also something about insurance companies wanting access to the data so they wouldn’t have to provide health insurance to people who didn’t eat right?
Didn’t we used to have laws that protected our data?