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Comment by bun_at_work | Hacker News Reader

Just a few things:

1) This tool is made by an Alphabet owned company (Jigsaw), not Google, another Alphabet owned company. The companies will have different missions, even if profits flow the same direction.

2) Venezuela doesn't have a huge market where Google is blocked by a nation-wide firewall.

3) China has a nation-wide firewall blocking any Google service, thereby forcing Google to negotiate how their service works if they want to make money there.

Note: Oversimplifying the situation for the sake of pitchforking a company you might not like does no one any good. Venezuela and China are very different companies, in very different environments. Google as a company (and Alphabet, probably more so) is almost certainly anti-censorship, philosophically; they just don't operate in a vacuum.

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>Google as a company (and Alphabet, probably more so) is almost certainly anti-censorship, philosophically; they just don't operate in a vacuum.

Since when was being motivated to do wrong a mitigating condition for having done wrong? "Sorry officer, I wasn't going to steal it at first, but then I started wanting it."

This isn't like theft. It's more like the law says you can't read certain things, so a printing company adjusts the books they print for the people of that country. Obviously they don't want to censor things, but they also want to profit.

They can either be totally censored or partially censored and still make money. Are you asking for them to give up and accept total censorship and forfeit money? If not, what would you like Google to do?

The parent was arguing that it was less wrong because Google was motivated to do it by self-interest. That's simply not a mitigating factor in any case.

I guess that’s what the GP was saying. I’m not sure what the alternative is, though - Google could completely pull out of the Chinese market and leave it for competitors like Facebook, Yahoo and MS? Didn’t we go through that already?

To respond to your argument, the same "sitting duck" claim could be made in any case of wrongdoing. You can't steal something just because it is unsecured and likely to be stolen - "His bike wasn't locked, so I took it on the grounds that somebody would probably take it and that somebody might as well be me." Neither the ease of perpetrating the crime nor the number of other criminals in the world are mitigating factors when you and your specific actions are tried.

We’re talking about business. To many people, those other companies are conducting legitimate business in China, not committing a clearly inexcusable crime, like your example. Google is competition with those companies worldwide, and it could easily be construed by shareholders that their refusal to participate is harming the business. A clear case can be made that choosing to not participate in the largest market in the world for moral reasons is not a good business decision. The comparison you’ve made fits the situation poorly but I’d welcome a better analogy.

> Obviously they don't want to censor things, but they also want to profit.

I'm not seeing the moral difference between this and the grandparent post. "We don't want to be evil, but they offered us a lot of money, so what could we do?"

Is google existing in China with censorship an "evil" thing? Any alternative in China will need the same censorship, so why is Google evil? I think we can all agree that people (and companies) being censored are not evil just because they must censor themselves - rather, the heads of the country that require censorship are the evil ones.

If you're a police officer and you have to arrest people for some stupid law you disagree with, are you evil, or are the people requiring you to perform that arrest evil?

This argument boils down to "What I'm doing is evil, but someone else would do it if I refused, so I might as well get paid for it." It's basically the Nuremberg Defense, but without even the threat of punishment, only desire for profit.

To answer your question: the police officer may not be evil, but she's certainly doing evil. It may be possible to make a coherent argument that the harm done is outweighed by the good the cop can do in her community if she toes the line and keeps her job. I don't think you can make that argument when the harm is "willingly abetting an oppressive government on a massive scale" and the benefit is "we make a whole bunch of money."

China will steal any technology you put in their country.

Not only will they steal it, but they'll use it for whatever they want.

Right now China is talking to Google because they lack the technological prerequisites to make their goals happen by themselves. If you want to see a Chinese Google competitor, just let Google get a shoe in the door and wait a couple years. Then when China has what it wants they'll dismiss Google.

Google's short-sighted greed is going to divide the internet in two. We should be letting China either stand on it's own or join the rest of the world. Instead they will prioritize market share in a technologically inept country and, quite advertently, give the Chinese everything they're lacking to completely break away from the world wide web and start their own.

I just can't wait until Google gets kicked out of the party they created for themselves.

What technology do you think will be on Chinese soil from this?

There's no reason to bring source code over.

Do you really think a nation state (especially a psuedo-communist one) that involves itself in a project like this with specific requirements (like backdoors) is going to let it be housed off-site? Do you really think they won't demand to let their engineers all over it? Inside and out?

The whole reason AMD exists is because IBM wouldn't do business with Intel without an alternate domestic supplier.

In government manufacturing here in the US we can't even put CUI in the Cloud if the end-user is the government. And we're democratic. Can you imagine the export controls on Chinese technology?

The chances that China WON'T see the source code are zero.

The compiled binaries can end up in a Chinese DC, but the source? I don't understand why. I don't think Google's interested in being replaced.

> China is talking to Google because they lack the technological prerequisites to make their goals happen by themselves

Seriously? China has 1.3B people and you don't think that any of them can do the same things people in USA can do?

> technologically inept country

Add up the populations of Europe and USA and you'll still be hundreds of millions away from that of China alone. And you still believe China is technologically inept?

I can't tell if this is satire or if you just hate China. Do you have any measurements demonstrating the ineptitude you mention?

China certainly isn't technologically inept. They are playing a game of catchup that is mad impressive, makes plenty of sense that they'd seek to "appropriate" IP instead of reinventing the wheel.

> China has a nation-wide firewall blocking any Google service, thereby forcing Google to negotiate how their service works if they want to make money there.

So if the Chinese demand they get real-time access to all information Google has stored about anyone, or Google gets banned from China, they should do that too?

Is there a difference to how the NSA does same albeit with a time delay instead of being instantaneous?

> time delay

Is there one? PRISM and the early Snowden leaks indicated the searches were immediate. Was that not true?

IIRC, MUSCULAR was the program where they were getting direct access, and they did so without Google's knowledge. That was the program that had the slides with the infamous (at least within Google) smiley talking about how SSL is removed at the edge of Google's network.

The NSA doesn't send people to "reeducation camps" because of their political or religious beliefs.[1]

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/world/asia/china-uighur-m...

Who needs camps when you can drone strike them? [1]

> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”

> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...!

What America does has no effect on the morality of what China does. This is whataboutism at its finest.

GP was asking how this is different than what the NSA does. The poster above me said it was because China acts on that information, but the US does not.

I provided evidence America does act on information.

This is perspective.

You're not wrong. The NSA acts on that information, but the comparison is meaningless. America launches targeted attacks on what it believes to be terrorist threats to itself. China murders millions of its own innocent civilians.

The NSA and USA do not have a recent history of murdering tens of millions of its own citizens.

What America does has no effect on the morality of what China does. This is whataboutism at its finest.

Saying “whataboutism” is not a defense for hypocrisy.

But I suppose you’re right, the US only murders tens of millions of foreigners.

The USA has not murdered tens of millions of foreigners.

Whataboutism wasn’t necessarily the point I intended on making. Rather if Google employees feel morally infringed at the prospect of Dragonfly for reasons described why then do they give a pass to their own state? Of course the USA & China differ vastly on governance but what’s the use of principles if you selectively apply them?

related to #1 -- I predict if some division of Alphabet threatens the income of another larger division (esp. Google), the smaller one will be shut down.

This is the reason for much of Sony's failure/inability to build a usable mp3 player. They built amazing music playback devices, but the record label division was so terrified of 'piracy' they forced the hardware division to require a proprietary encryption format (no "plain" mp3s) which essentially ruined the usability. So the company that built the walkman was hobbled, deliberately. Even the Poor Sony Aibo robot dog had to use specially modified Sony memory sticks with encryption and keys written into the normally-unwritable boot sector.

Alternately, Jigsaw won’t work against Google’s own censorship efforts, and exists to push countries that want to censor their citizens’ internet to use Google’s own censorship product.

> ...thereby forcing Google to negotiate how their service works if they want to make money there.

I'm struggling to see how this addresses the point about Google's variable standards. I mean, are you saying that somehow because Google needs to adjust its standard to make money in a particular market that it therefore doesn't have variable standards?

Not quite following you ...

> if they want to make money there.

That's the point. Google is willing to throw out their supposed principles in order to make money.

>2) Venezuela doesn't have a huge market where Google is blocked by a nation-wide firewall.

How is that a justification?

I'm not trying to justify anything, exactly. I'm pointing out that oversimplifying the situation is not helpful.

However, they are different in this case because Venezuela's market isn't large enough that Google feels the need to bend to the will of the government there to be competitive in the world's market. Therefore, they can afford, on a competitive level, to stand against censorship in Venezuela, where doing the same thing in China costs them a huge amount of money. Which is their motivator, as they are a corporation.

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at.

Alphabet and Google can't claim to be against censorship while they're profiting from it. They can't have their cake and eat it too.

Clearly the only thing Google and Alphabet are "for" is making more money, so there's really no point pretending they have a moral compass guiding them.

Why can’t they make that claim? There are many things in this world that I oppose yet benefit from. I can’t fight every injustice in the world — I don’t know how to, I haven’t got the skills, I don’t have the resources.

It’s like a prayer to serenity: Grant me the courage to change what I cannot accept, the serenity to accept what I cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Google maybe rich beyond the dreams of any single human, but they can’t force the Chinese government to stop thinking like the Chinese government.

> yet benefit from

this seems a bit reductive if not weaseling. google isn't a bystander, they're knowingly and voluntarily aiding a state oppress it's people.

> Why can’t they make that claim?

Well, they can claim anything they want. If they want to be consistent and have integrity then they'll make sure their actions align with their claims. Claiming to support privacy while also conceding to China shows they have no integrity and they're only telling people what they want to hear for marketing purposes.

> Google maybe rich beyond the dreams of any single human, but they can’t force the Chinese government to stop thinking like the Chinese government.

Right, but their inability to change Chinese policy doesn't imply that they have to take an active role in helping China's censorship. They could have said, "We're not doing business in China because it conflicts with our 'Don't be evil' policy." Instead, they got rid of that policy and are working with the Chinese government to censor web content.

> Venezuela and China are very different companies

c o m p a n i e s

Can I ask you if you work for Google? If so you should probably disclose that because you post history makes this very much look like astroturfing.

Sorry for bringing this up (I never do that on HN) but this is just too questionable of a defense to be putting up.

As someone who was a part of a project that Jigsaw sponsored, I can vouch for his claim that Google and Jigsaw have entirely different (and often contrary) missions.

I am a Google critic as much as everyone else here, but I can say with confidence that we would all be thrilled if Google took the same stand on censorship as is Jigsaw's.

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