Jailed for a Text: China’s Censors Are Spying on Mobile Chat Groups

It's heading there in other countries, it's just not done by the government yet except in extreme cases. I already can't do anything on social media which could piss off my employer. It makes sense that I can't talk shit about them or leak info, but I also can only share certain political opinions - for example, while I'm sure my employer would be fine if I told them I voted for Hillary and supported gay marriage, I'm not so sure they would be fine if I told them I voted for Trump or was involved in union/labor politics. Of course there would be no direct consequences to either, but HR and managers would know (because they check) and it would affect their opinions of me negatively.

And now it's happening with advertisement too. Tell your friend you just took a pregnancy test via FB messenger and now every advertiser on the internet knows just what to sell you. Most people don't really care about this yet, but most people don't realize that this kind of thing could be used in the future for all sorts of dystopian shit. All this data is being stored. I think Google is treating my data pretty responsibly at the moment, but I could see it being used for anything from background checks (e.g. checking search history or message logs for indicators of illegal activity) to blackmail.

On a tangential sidenote, I read an article about Snap recently about how they're trying to position themselves as a different kind of social media company. They don't (yet) perform highly sophisticated targeted advertising and don't save a lot of actual content data. You typically are only connected to your actual friends, not some random guy from your high school class, your aunt, your ex-girlfriend, and your coworker. There's also no public profile for employers to search for and snoop around. Of course these are typically the case for any tool focused on direct messaging but I hope as Snap expands they can be both successful and keep these fantastic qualities.

The practices of the Ministry of Truth — “memory hole” and constant revisioning of history — also become trivial to implement when all data is on centralized servers owned by companies whose continued existence relies on the benevolence of the government.

The censors didn’t like Jane’s posts? With the aid of some text generation AI that captures her writing style, rewriting her post history is much less conspicuous than deleting it outright.

It's chilling indeed. Unfortunately I don't think the masses (anywhere, not just in China) care enough about censorship or surveillance for the trend you described to ever happen. Most of my Chinese friends I've talked to about the dangers of WeChat (in person, of course) just shrug off the censorship aspect of the app as a minor inconvenience that they occasionally run into, one that gets completely outweighed by the overall utility the app provides.

And that's probably an accurate assessment for most individuals. Even in a borderline dystopian surveillance state like China, the chances that an average law-abiding citizen could ever see the chilling effects of surveillance and censorship materialize as a life-changing event in their own lives or the lives of someone close is admittedly rather slim. The chilling effects shrouding over their society is rarely ever felt to a significant enough degree by a significant enough portion of the populace for them to want to affect change at the risk of prosecution.

That said, the possibility that eventually Chinese internet products could by their own merit compete in the global market, outcompeting western alternatives in some cases, is the even more terrifying aspect to me. I wrote a lengthy post about it a while ago, and have copy pasted it a few times already, but here it is again anyways, because I feel it's still relevant:

To authoritarian governments all over the world, the censorship and surveillance frameworks built into many Chinese internet services like WeChat are actually extremely valuable features, rather than something they'd want to opt out of.

These features have been battle-tested in the largest and most ruthlessly robust surveillance state the world has ever seen, and have time and again proven their effectiveness in influencing public opinion and quelling dissent.

If an app like WeChat were to ever gain foothold in a nation with an authoritarian government, all they'd have to do is strike a deal with TenCent, and with the flip of a switch, that government can then enjoy unprecedented control and visibility into the "private" communications of its populace. All the friction involved in the decidedly difficult and costly exercise of building your own large-scale surveillance/censorship infrastructure will suddenly have been removed. The one thing Chinese internet services can offer that no western counterpart can reasonably compete with also makes them by far China's most dangerous export: authoritarianism as a service.

To those of us in democratic nations, we must also remember that authoritarianism usually doesn't manifest itself as a cliff, but rather as a gradual, slippery downward slope. Every government in the past has displayed authoritarian tendencies in their history, to varying degrees, and governments in the future will inevitably continue to do so. The natural tendency of government is to slide down the slope of authoritarianism, because government is power, and power corrupts. It takes diligence and continued effort on the part of the governing body and its citizenship to counteract this natural descent.

All it would take is another 911 type terrorist attack to sway public opinion enough to the point where enacting some kind of dragnet surveillance system in the name of national security would become politically feasible, in any democratic nation in the world. At that point, the horrible user experience and PR nightmare in having to rebalance the national budget or raise taxes to make room for improving your domestic spying infrastructure could be the only thing standing between us and an irreversible descent into authoritarianism. And if a significant portion of a democratic populace happens to be using WeChat at that point, well, let's just say I don't have a lot of faith that my own government could resist the temptation and take a principled stand against such a frictionless way to expand its own powers.

As Chinese offerings mature and become polished and innovative enough to compete with western counterparts in markets outside of China, we could easily start to see users around the world voluntarily start switching to them. That could very well mark the beginning of the end of this golden age of democracy as we know it.

I highly recommend taking a look at Nathan Freitas's excellent talk "The Great Firewall Inverts": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk. In it, he explores how China's so-called Great Firewall is actually a bit of a misnomer because it's most crucial functionality is its ability to control the flow of information inside its own borders as opposed of keeping information out, how this ability is readily available to be exported to countries around the world in the form of internet services like WeChat, and what we can do about it (which is unfortunately, not a whole lot, other than to educate others on the very non-obvious non-immediate consequences of using these services, and to be vigilant and proactively take stands against the spread of authoritarianism in our own governments).

If you use Android I recommend you to use Work Profile (or experimental app Island) for it. You never know what WeChat is actually reading from your phone, having really extensive set of permissions.

>No one is going to use these forums if it means they or their family members can be put in jail for a joke.

Nah, they will. The convenience factor far outweighs the risk for most people. Everyone thinks "well, they must've done something stupid", and if not that, "well, that was just one strange occurrence. It won't happen to me."

You can share the articles to your friends in China, and they surely will not be jailed.

And I think you can talk with them about China's internal politics through WeChat if they are interested in these talks, if there is not a third person will report your conversations to the authority.

The person in the article is 'jailed', because someone publicizes his comment or reports it to authority.

It's been like this forever, the police have access to so called "information management system" directly to QQ and later Wechat. There is no other way to talk to people online, you are monitored in all channels. They have no choice, anyone that doesn't cooperate is blocked. Also the sense of "Privacy" is very weak among Chinese, they are brain washed enough to believe "what are you afraid of if you have nothing to hide". So yeah people will continue to use Wechat and other social channels in China.

If by "incredible" you mean "a dystopian hellscape" then yes, it is. And with this comment I probably just eliminated any possibility of a Chinese visa!

I'm not sure what you mean by end-to-end encryption.

It's a group chat, so it's more likely all messages are processed on server and then relayed to every people in the group. The easiest way to monitoring that kind of chat messages is .... install monitoring software directly on server.

And as far as I know, many (If not all) commonly used domestic chat software in China are monitored by the government.

So, it's a rather common sense in China to NOT chat on some specific topic during some specific period (Or, don't talk about it at all) online.

It's not an end-to-end encryption problem, it is the problem of National security (What ever that means to CCP) v.s. Individual freedom.

End-to-end encryption really isn't the solution here. Your message might be considered harmful and blocked instantly if they couldn't decrypt it. It may not the case for now, but it's possible and fairly foreseeable.

or slack or github for that matter although intermittent outages are part of the hair pulling fun

The NSA is watching, but they are not censors.

We're already experiencing the start of this. This [1] article discusses an event when prosecutors in New York simultaneously subpoenaed Reason Magazine for information on commenters to an article, and also gagged them preventing them from being able to discuss it.

The commenters were upset about the judge who chose to sentence Ross Ulbricht, founder of Silk Road, to life without the possibility of parole -- a sentence even greater than what the prosecution was seeking. The comments range from innocuous like "I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman" to ones that are more vile, but still come nowhere near even remotely close our 'imminent criminality' first amendment exception. Given what happened the first time that line was stated, I'm hesitant to quote it. What freedom...

[1] - https://reason.com/reasontv/2015/07/07/ken-white-on-how-he-b...

> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

But it can't happen here, regardless of where "here" is. And when it does happen, it can't be discussed or resisted, especially when "here" became everywhere.

> We’re going to live in a world unless we do something quickly in which our media consume us and spit in the government’s cup. There will never have been any place like it before and if we let it happen, there will never be any place different from it again.

and

> What will they say when they realize that we lived at the end of a thousand years of struggling for freedom of thought. At the end, when we had almost everything, we gave it away, for convenience, for social networking. Because Mr. Zuckerberg asked us to. Because we couldn’t find a better way to talk to our friends. Because we loved the beautiful pretty things that felt so warm in the hand. Because we didn’t really care about the future of freedom of thought, because we considered that to be someone else’s business. Because we thought it was over. Because we believed we were free. Because we didn’t think there was any struggling left to do. That’s why we gave it all away.

> Is that what we're gonna tell them?

> Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die.

-- both by Eben Moglen in "Freedom of thought requires free media"

It won't be done in the US because they're going to use China as a model for a new world government and that can't happen until we're gone.

Tencent is one of the backers of Discord, a service that os very...flexible about who the rules are enforced on. Now i think we can see why.

In a democratic country like U.S., they will not jail you for your tweets that try to sabotage the government, besides closing your account.

You can say anything in a democratic country, except when you are forced to shut up.