MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-12-28 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Zoom, Google, Facebook spyware
|
msnbc.com
It's time for big tech companies to stand up to China
By Yaqiu Wang, MSNBC Opinion Columnist
8-9 minutes
On Dec. 18, prosecutors from the U.S. Justice Department charged a
China-based Zoom executive with conspiring to terminate Zoom meetings
this year that commemorated the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre at the
Chinese government’s behest. The 47-page complaint contains detailed
exchanges between the executive and employees at Zoom’s California
headquarters this year.
Beijing has long leveraged market access to compel foreign tech
companies to meet its censorship demands, whether in China or abroad.
It was a fascinating read, not least because few global tech companies
that do business in China have ever made public the details of their
communications with Chinese authorities on censorship issues, despite
repeated calls to do so from human rights organizations and United
Nations experts.
What the complaint reveals is Beijing’s aggressive pursuit of global
censorship of topics deemed sensitive or critical of Beijing, and Zoom’s
failure to adequately protect its users’ rights to free expression and
privacy.
In May, the China-based Zoom executive, Xinjiang Jin, who served as a
government affairs liaison, contacted employees at Zoom’s headquarters
about the massacre's anniversary on June 4. The anniversary is one of
the most censored events in China, and Jin told his colleagues in the
U.S. that the “internet police” in China had increased pressure on Zoom
to censor politically sensitive content of Chinese users no matter where
they were.
According to the document, Jin said that China “has implemented
real-name registration/verification, so there are not many that do bad
things anymore. All are from the U.S., if we don’t handle them well, net
security will ban all overseas servers, so I respectfully ask you to
take this seriously.”
A U.S.-based colleague obliged: “We will hurry and ban all the free
accounts from US04,” referring to the name of a Zoom server.
Beijing has long leveraged market access to compel foreign tech
companies to meet its censorship demands, whether in China or abroad.
Apple has removed hundreds of virtual private network (VPN) apps from
China’s App Store. In 2019, it also removed a mapping app widely used by
pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong from the App Store.
Companies understandably want access to China’s huge market, but they
also have a responsibility to respect human rights.
LinkedIn blocked content critical of Chinese authorities for users in
China. From the complaint, one can see Zoom’s fear that if it didn’t
terminate meetings or suspend accounts upon request, it risked having
its China operation shut down at any time, which loomed large in all of
its decisions.
Companies understandably want access to China’s huge market, but they
also have a responsibility to respect human rights under the United
Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Zoom said
publicly that it is “dedicated to the free and open exchange of ideas,”
but when Jin repeatedly framed speech critical of the Chinese government
as something that could “do bad things” or “illegal activities,” and
demanded they be censored, he met no resistance or got any questions
from his colleagues at headquarters.
Besides conveying Chinese authorities’ demands and threats to Zoom’s
headquarters, Jin was also shutting down meetings on behalf of Beijing
in a more deceitful way.
When a private June 3 Tiananmen commemoration meeting was in motion,
some emails were sent to Zoom’s public, generic U.S.-based complaint
email account, alleging that the meeting contained content supporting
terrorism, inciting violence or distributing child pornography. (An FBI
investigation later found that no user accounts associated with the
email addresses from which the complaint was filed actually participated
in the meeting.)
Jin, who had no access to that generic complaint account, concurrently
alerted his U.S.-based colleague of the complaints. The colleague
quickly terminated the meeting and suspended the host account without
any investigation into the matter.
For the past 31 years, the Chinese government has scrubbed any mentions
of the Tiananmen Square Massacre from the Chinese internet.
For a public meeting on June 4, Jin suggested to his U.S.-based
colleague, “It’s a public meeting, so we could join and report to Zoom
[U.S.] as [an] abus[ive] meeting, then you [in the] U.S. may have
evidence to suspend it.” Upon receiving Jin’s message, the colleague
terminated the account used to host the meeting. Soon after the
organizer of the meeting restarted the meeting in another room using a
different account, some Zoom accounts with avatars of naked women and
the flag of the Islamic State group joined the meeting.
Around the same time, emails were sent to Jin reporting these accounts
for “inciting violence” or “pornography.” Jin relayed those emails to
his U.S.-based colleague who then terminated the meeting again and
suspended the new account.
So in order to justify shutting down legitimate meetings hosted in the
U.S., a China-based Zoom executive was running schemes to trigger a
violation of Zoom’s terms of service, and a U.S.-based Zoom employee,
knowing they were schemes, facilitated it.
Earlier in the chat between Jin and the U.S. employee, Jin suggested
that, instead of suspending the host account, they could put the account
in “quarantine” for 24 hours, as if Zoom was having technical issues. It
therefore seems reasonable to say that the U.S. employee was aware of
the schemes. Second, the schemes have so many other holes (detailed in
the complaint), it’s hard to imagine the U.S. side wouldn’t detect them
if they actually wanted to.
All these events not only raise serious questions about what kind of
oversight Zoom has over requests for censorship and user data, but also
over staff who handle such requests. One also has to wonder, to what
extent Zoom’s top leadership knew about them? Zoom said in a statement
that the company only learned about Jin’s violations of Zoom’s policies
during an internal investigation it initiated after the incidents became
public. Zoom said it had terminated Jin’s employment and placed other
employees on administrative leave.
Going forward, Zoom said it will not allow requests from the Chinese
government to affect anyone outside of mainland China, but said nothing
about protecting the rights of its users in the country.
For the past 31 years, the Chinese government has scrubbed any mentions
of the Tiananmen Square Massacre from the Chinese internet, imprisoned
and harassed numerous activists and writers who dared to talk about it,
and restricted the movement and communication of the families of
victims. The censorship of the event has been so successful that most
young people in the country today do not know it happened.
I personally know some of the participants in the aforementioned
meetings. Some were student leaders of the protests and some were
parents of people killed in the ensuing massacre. They are the most
courageous people I know. Despite facing extraordinary repression over
the past three decades, they have chosen to continue to speak out. And
this is how Zoom treated them.
Statements about being committed to free expression and human rights are
empty promises unless companies enact policies and conduct due
diligence, making sure they’re respecting human rights and mitigating
harm. This especially applies to companies that operate in different
countries and cultures. A company can’t say it stands for rights and
then unfailingly do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party.
The party is increasingly a threat to the human rights of people
everywhere. Not only Zoom, but all tech companies who do business in
China need to think about what kind of role they want to play in the
history of justice and human rights.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
_______________________________________________
Hangout mailing list
Hangout-at-nylxs.com
http://lists.mrbrklyn.com/mailman/listinfo/hangout
|
|
