When you arrive in the People’s Republic of China as a visitor, you know you’re being surveilled. The evidence is so bald and ubiquitous that it quickly melts into the background. During my last visit to China in late 2019, I entered through an airport festooned with closed-circuit cameras; in my hotel, after shaking off the winter’s bitter cold, I passed a prominent hallway placard from the municipal ministry of security mandating that all guests register with the police. I fell asleep looking at a similar notice on the hotel nightstand. I couldn’t see cameras in the bedroom walls or the ceiling, but I assumed they were there.
It’s not a stretch to say that millions of American citizens and residents undergo a similar experience when they log onto WeChat, the globally popular app that keeps them connected to friends and family in China. Their data is collected and monitored by Shenzhen-based Tencent Holdings, a technology firm that ultimately must answer to Beijing, and nearly everyone on the app knows it.
On Friday, these users, who number about 3.5 million, learned their WeChat access was about to be essentially revoked by the Trump administration. If the ban passes judicial review —it’s currently on hold as a California federal judge considers Constitutional challenges—it will make WeChat unavailable for download on Google and Apple’s app stores. There would be virtually no new users in the U.S. after that, while for existing ones, the app would quickly start to “degrade” and would get more hobbled over time, like a car that can’t be taken in for repairs.
The administration has framed its latest WeChat order as “guarantee[ing] our national security and protect[ing] Americans from the threats of the Chinese Communist Party.” That’s because the company not only hoovers up user data—much as U.S. platforms do—it is also subject to Chinese authorities. The country’s 2017 cybersecurity law, reviled in the West, mandates that data generated in China be stored there, and requires internet companies to keep this data for at least six months. Under additional 2018 regulations, public security organs have broad legal authority to inspect it. (Tencent says WeChat data is stored in Hong Kong and Ontario, Canada, while data from Weixin, its Chinese equivalent, gets stored in the People’s Republic.)
Trump’s move does not come out of the blue; it’s driven by serious concerns about the uses and abuses of data by an authoritarian government. But it has nonetheless caused deep consternation among technologists, China watchers and the Chinese diaspora because it not only bans WeChat from America; it also effectively bans Americans from WeChat. In the process, it begins to revoke the digital passport that the Internet has implicitly conferred on U.S. citizens for decades—effacing the freedom baked into the moral and technical architecture of their country’s grandest modern invention.
To enter WeChat is to step into a faint digital simulacrum of China. A user can find most, if not all, of his or her Chinese friends, communicate with them directly, share articles, recipes, or videos, and stay apprised of their lives via a feature called “moments.” Like a visitor to China, U.S. users are constricted in what they can do and say. Messages to a Chinese friend about the 1989 Tiananmen student massacre or the internment of Muslim Uighurs, for example, will be censored.
Also like a visitor to China, U.S. users are watched while inside WeChat’s confines; not just what they do, but what they attempt to do, like that message about Xinjiang camps that gets sent but never received. The upshot of Beijing’s cyber rules is that all this activity is stored somewhere that the Chinese government can probably reach if it really wants to, at least for several months and quite possibly much longer.
The rest is unknown: Will WeChat keep the data beyond the legally mandated six months? How much will Tencent resist future government requests for data, if at all? Will Beijing ever try to weaponize this vast trove of information against foreigners, much as it already does against its own people? Can it find a way to combine what WeChat data tells it with the terabytes of personal and corporate secrets its intelligence services have already pilfered from U.S. government and U.S. enterprises—in a years-long series of massive breaches and heists eclipsing anything that’s ever happened on WeChat—to yield new insights and new leverage over U.S. citizens?
These concerns are hypothetical, but not trivial. Right now, a 25-year-old intern at RAND is far more likely to be using WeChat than the next Secretary of State. But by the middle of this century that former intern may be under consideration for the top job. Beijing could choose that moment to remind that person—or the world—of something embarrassing she wrote or shared as a young adult. Or Beijing could do nothing, confident the knowledge of a compromising digital trail might be enough to affect that Cabinet secretary’s judgment or resolve when dealing with China, even if only subtly.
Beijing can also use WeChat archives to target a member of the Chinese diaspora in the U.S. for speech crimes, and detain them when they return, or persecute family members in China now for leverage. These are immediate concerns, backed by real evidence of Chinese users fined, jailed, or disappeared for what they have written.
But many Chinese users in America nonetheless oppose the U.S. ban, believing it will estrange them from China and further distress their anxious families. In an alternate reality, these families would have other ways to connect; they could have chosen Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other major U.S. communication platforms, all of which support Chinese characters and sport enthusiastic user bases elsewhere in Asia. But Beijing long ago decided that its citizens were unfit for the risks and benefits of a truly global Internet—that the government alone could tell them what was dangerous or unclean. So users work within WeChat’s confines as creatively and bravely as they can, just as they do within China’s larger censored information environment, “dancing in chains.”
The would-be WeChat ban has disturbed many U.S.-based China watchers for a different reason: not because it brings China further from America, but because it brings Chinese-style governance closer to U.S. shores. Everything about the Administration’s latest order—its selectivity, its suddenness, its inherent politicization, and in particular its vague invocation of largely hypothetical national security concerns—is redolent of Beijing’s style of regulation, one that deploys a bundle of fuzzy red lines to scare and confuse citizens into overcompliance.
For example, in early 2014, shortly after taking power, Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping oversaw the launch of a jingwang, or “clean the Internet” movement. It was one of a ceaseless procession of Chinese government “strike hard” campaigns that sometimes target bona fide criminal behaviors, other times industries or individuals the authorities don’t like. Part of the initiative Xi oversaw in an effort to protect internet users from themselves involved a purported anti-pornography campaign that somehow ensnared Sweet Potato Net, a fan-fiction site, and Sina Reader, a portal for book lovers.
When the U.S. State Department announced a “Clean Network” initiative in early August centered on “five new lines of effort” across the Internet technology stack to keep out “malign actors” such as China, the verbiage immediately struck China watchers as eerily similar to something Beijing would say. This does not mean Donald Trump or Mike Pompeo seeks to become the next Xi; only that they are either unaware of, or more likely indifferent to, the echoes.
Faced with a balancing act between security and freedom, U.S. authorities have historically defaulted to disclosure and choice. It is the bargain explicitly conferred by a physical U.S. passport—once a guarantee of passage into 185 countries. The pages within it are stuffed with warnings that make plain the risks a bearer freely assumes. U.S. citizens should purchase healthcare that covers them while abroad. They must follow local laws (even if those laws are unjust or offend American sensibilities). They should call home if a “catastrophic event” occurs. They should register with a U.S. embassy when traveling and demand to see a U.S. consul if they are arrested. The risks are clear. And Americans have chosen to keep traveling anyway, including millions to China.
Now that Covid-19 has America on its knees, the U.S. passport no longer ranks among the world’s most powerful. Americans are turned away at most borders, or more accurately, they do not even try to cross them. A series of moves away from global institutions like the World Health Organization signal an inward retreat, keeping foreign elements out while also trapping Americans further within their homeland. Yet the digital realm has so far retained its character—a network born in America, driven by ideals of openness, and which Americans have enjoyed near-total latitude to navigate. With its WeChat move, the White House is trying to lower a curtain on at least one part of that realm, with no sign it plans to stop there.
A trip into WeChat provides a chance for some to communicate with their loved ones, and gives others a way to stay connected with, and learn more about, a culture that’s not their own. It carries genuine risks, too, most acutely for those with family in China. There are other possible approaches to its risks more in keeping with American traditions: A new U.S. approach to WeChat and other Chinese-controlled apps, for instance, might require app stores warn users repeatedly and explicitly of these dangers. A bona fide data regulatory framework could require all companies worldwide to do the right thing to protect U.S. users. Washington could also help protect users from an overbearing Beijing via a firm commitment to human rights and free expression.
But the U.S. government does not wear the role of controlling parent well. Neither national nor personal security has ever been “guaranteed,” to paraphrase Trump’s latest order. U.S. citizens have long bestrode the global commons, confident their government had their back, both burdened and immensely privileged by their choices. Grounded now, Americans must turn to the digital sphere—a place still borderless to us, one whose values we invented, and whose promise we once cherished.
from Politics, Policy, Political News Top Stories https://ift.tt/2EqX4uG
via 400 Since 1619
