David Murakami-Wood (of the Surveillance Studies Network) and Richard Thomas (the UK's Information Commissioner) have released a report (via BBC):

Fears that the UK would "sleep-walk into a surveillance society" have become a reality, the government's information commissioner has said.

Reuters

ranked the country alongside Russia and China as "endemic surveillance societies".

Pico Iyer reviews Lhasa: Streets with Memories in Time Magazine.

Lhasa: Streets with Memories, by Robert Barnett, is, on its surface, a meditation on the city's past and future (see Ma Jian's latest book) by a lecturer at Columbia University in New York, who draws heavily on such cultural icons as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Italo Calvino. But underneath the high-toned exterior, it is something much more interesting: Barnett spends part of each year in Lhasa, and appears in no hurry to alienate his Chinese hosts; at the same time, he was one of the few foreigners to witness the demonstrations Tibetans staged in Lhasa in 1987, and so can understand the pain and fear that lie just below the city's ever more modern surfaces. His rumination on the capital of Tibet is the rare book that can draw tears just with its assemblage of neutral, entirely unpolemical facts.

[...]

And yet, in the face of these losses, Barnett reports that more and more Chinese visitors now give offerings to the Buddhas in the Jokhang Temple, adopt Tibetan names, and even seek out lamas to instruct them. Might Tibet creep into Chinese souls and consciences even as China takes over Tibetan streets? Barnett is too subtle and skeptical to concentrate on anything more than the silences that lie at the heart of many a Lhasa conversation, and the human realities that remain too complex for any simple right or wrong. In Lhasa: Streets with Memories, though, he shows us with overpowering restraint a city that, increasingly, has no memory at all.Memory —like history and culture and religion—is just one more redundancy pushed aside to make room for more skyscrapers.

Time Magazine

The Guardian on Quaero's launch:

The French president, Jacques Chirac, yesterday unveiled what he hopes will be his great legacy to France's struggle against the global dominance of the US: a series of technological projects including a European search engine to rival Google. Mr Chirac, who walked out of an EU summit last month when a fellow Frenchman committed the grave offence of speaking English, styles himself as the defender of France in the globalised world.

Quaero - Latin for "I search" - aims to be the first search engine to efficiently sort multimedia content.

Steven Mufson writes in the Wasington Post about the myopia of internet evangelists, a phrase coined by James Mulvenon

to describe those who cling to the belief that the Internet "leads to 'tulip' and 'orange' and every other possible color and flower of revolutions around the world."

Take China, for example. Sure, China is being gradually transformed by the Internet, although not in the way many the majority of observers would have predicted -

The Chinese Communist Party, long expected to be a victim of economic modernization and the transformative powers of technology, has instead been learning how to use those powers to its own ends. This isn'merely a matter of the widely publicized blocking of the Internet; the CCP has been learning how to use the Internet as a tool for surveillance.

In an interview with de Groene Amsterdammer's Richard de Boer [129(47) van 25 november 2005, pp.20-23.] I expressed frustration that media coverage of China's Internet experience focuses on state censorship (when it isn't breathless over the potential of 1 billion consumers logging on) at the expense of analysis of dataveillance:

"Westerse ngo's moeten begrijpen welke rol de staatssurveillance speelt in de onderdrukking van afwijkende meningen", zegt freelance onderzoeksconsultant Greg Walton: "De aan obsessie grenzende nadruk in het Westen op de Chinese internetcensuur leidt de aandacht af van complexere vraagstukken."

meanwhile China is itself transforming the Internet. China, the U.S., everyone is co-evolving within this framework. As I said in 2001,

The self-interested high-tech discourse promises that new information and telecommunication technologies are inherently democratic and will foster openness wherever they are used. China’s Golden Shield...debunks this myth. Technology is embedded in a social context and, in this report, it has been shown to bolster repression in a one-party state in the name of expanding markets and exponential profits.

U.S. corporate capitalism in the service of the security apparatus of Chinese communism ... baffled?!

Christopher R Hughes (reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE) in oD on China's “socialist spiritual civilisation”:

The overall result is a peculiar globalisation of nationalism that allows some sense to be made of oxymoronic concepts like the “socialist market economy”. It also provides an ideological justification for the emergence of an elitist techno-nationalism appropriate for the current generation of leaders. This was systematically formulated as party orthodoxy when the theory of the “Three Represents” – coined by then-CCP general secretary Jiang Zemim – was put alongside Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory as an element of the party line at the Sixteenth Party Congress in November 2002. The Resurgence of Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era

How can China's security apparatus keep track of people in a country as vast as China?

By using much the same methods that the United States uses to track terrorist cells. Although the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program has attracted a lot of attention here, in China listening-in is an old habit. It's the way the NSA most likely identified the thousands of people it chose to listen in on -- through a program called Novel Intelligence from Massive Data -- that is the source of real hope for China's communist mandarins.

Can you still draw a line between China and U.S. agencies applying data mining to social control? MSNBC:

Holding the line at privacy invasions that “makes sense” is the most subtle of standards, a fine line that police, governments, and citizens will now try to walk in the post Sept. 11 world. Libertarian cries of absolute privacy sound empty these days, with the knowledge that Khalid al-Midhar and other plane hijackers exploited America’s lax security measures. At the same time, what’s to keep overzealous investigators from using the Anti-terrorism Act to create America’s version of Golden Shield? Sullivan, the techno-savvy police investigator, says the Supreme Court will play the crucial role in picking through those issues.

“The crux of the difference (between the U.S. and China) is the Supreme Court,” said Sullivan. “Ultimately they will decide what’s Constitutional and what’s not. We have the ability as U.S. citizens to cry foul. In China, citizens do not.”

HRIC's Sharon Hom at the congressional hearings this afternoon

Preparations for the 2008 Olympics have attracted the participation of foreign
companies across diverse sectors, including construction, advertising,
architecture, legal services, surveillance and communications. The
beneficiaries of the Olympic Games, and as such of the contracts agreed to
between foreign companies and Beijing as the host city, have always been
presented as the people of Beijing, and more broadly, of China. This is
documented not only in China's numerous promises to the International
Olympics Committee before being granted the right to host the Games, and
also in its 2002 Olympic Action Plan. During the Olympics, security
equipment and infrastructure will be operated by the government. How will
the hardware and technical know-how be used after the Olympics? The post-
Olympics use of this equipment and these technologies must be transparent
and monitored. Given China’s human rights record, what are the impacts on
privacy rights if these technologies are exported to other countries?
Any industry-wide code of conduct or specific legislation should move beyond
the narrow conception that technologies are used in isolation of one another.
The lines between online technologies and offline actions have been blurred.
Technologies such as Internet Web browsing, VoIP, e-mail, instant messaging,
SMS, podcasting, and more, work in interrelated spheres, impacting
journalists, students, activists, organizations, and individuals in their access
to and dissemination of knowledge.

Any recommendations and guidelines should not ignore the challenges and
opportunities that lie ahead in the expansion into the collateral uses of
surveillance or the restrictive uses of a particular technology. For example,
SMS messages will not only be increasingly filtered, but could also be
integrated into database systems used to store and track required pre-paid
cell phone user information, with serious implications for users who may send
and receive politically-sensitive messages.

Harry Wu:

A friend of mine recently tried to access some politically sensitive websites while
at an Internet café in a remote, small city in Xinjiang Province. The police quickly
showed up to arrest him. I don’t know who supplied the technology enabling the police to
track my friend’s Internet surfing, but I am pretty sure that U.S. technology was involved.
The PRC’s Ministry of Public Security has been continually upgrading and expanding its
$800 million “Golden Shield” project- a government-sponsored surveillance system that
was begun in 1998. The Golden Shield’s advanced communication network was
supposedly aimed at improving police effectiveness and efficiency. However, China has
also used the “Golden Shield” as a way of monitoring Chinese civilians. The project will
help prolong Communist rule by denying China’s people the right to information. In
order to develop the “Golden Shield,” China has utilized the technologies of a number of
foreign companies, such as Intel, Yahoo, Nortel, Cisco Systems, Motorola, and Sun
Microsystems. The “Golden Shield Project” would not have been possible without the
technology and equipment from these companies.

Xiao Qiang, China Internet Project at the Graduate
School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley:

The challenge in front of us, Mr. Chairman, is to find a way to help these information
technology companies work in concert, perhaps with some of the world’s great research
universities, to establish a set of guiding principles for the entire information and
communication technology industry. These principles, or standards and practices, should
transcend individual companies’ own relationship to any given market. In other words,
to seek collective ways to find the ability to resist demands for information or technology
that violate fundamental human rights .

Released this week the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defence Review identifies three countries as key to the global security environment in the 21st century - India, China, and Russia - with China being singled out as : "greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States." This is the first time the U.S. has specifically named China as a threat, in its QDR. (In the previous report - just prior to Sept 11, 2001, a broad swathe of territory stretching from the Middle East to north-east Asia was highlighted - these days, 'post'-Afghanistan, 'post'-Iraq, the U.S. military is preparing to accelerate transformation to meet the economic and strategic rise of China.

What's interesting to me about recent U.S. punditry surrounding China's breathtaking ascent is the ever denser linkages being identified between economic growth - facilitated by exponential increases in trans-national information flows, and the changing nature of the strategic environment between two increasingly interdependent continental economies. Last week I flagged up a Nortel--Huawei joint venture in research and development that has potentially serious implications for human security, (see this Rights & Democracy briefing paper, for example).

AEI's Dan Blumenthal asks, What Does China's Economy Mean for U.S. Strategy?. Summarizing A New Direction for China’s Defense Industry, (Evan S. Medeiros, Roger Cliff, Keith Crane, and James C. Mulvenon -RAND) he notes,

The crown jewels of American industry--Motorola, Intel, Microsoft--are investing heavily in research and development (R&D) and co-production, helping Beijing to build a world-class communications infrastructure and information technology industry. And it is these commercial technologies, to a much greater extent than generally appreciated, that are being leveraged to form the backbone of China’s modern, networked military force.

While it might lack the journalistic verve of China, Inc., the 2005 report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission provides much-needed analysis of the linkages between China’s investments in science and technology and its geopolitical aspirations. The so-called National High Technology Research and Development Program, the report notes, "was initiated in 1986 as the guiding ideology to focus national policy on key scientific areas to develop technology and ultimately build national power and military strength." For Beijing, in other words, high-tech production has long been linked to its international strategic position.

While not exactly a revelation - (The PLA's desire to develop C4ISR capacity through state-sponsored commercial activity is well documented. Most recently Kathleen Rhem (American Forces Press Service) reports that China appears to be taking a leaf from U.S. RMA doctrine and working toimprove its information warfare capabilities, according to a DoD report on Chinese military power released July 19):

A senior defense official, speaking onbackground said the Chinese military has a long way to go in C4ISR -- -- but they're clearly doing researchand development into such capabilities. China is also usingadvances in C4ISR to project military power farther from its ownborders. Over the long term, the report states, China's advances inthese areas "could enable Beijing to identify, target, and trackforeign military activities deep into the western Pacific and provide, potentially, hemispheric coverage."

-- the Rand report highlights an acceleration in this trend:

According to the Rand researchers, the PLA is successfully executing "the wholesale shift to digital, secure communications via fiber optic cable, satellite, microwave, and encrypted high-frequency radio." The secret of its success, Rand argues, is an approach it terms "the digital triangle"--an alliance among China’s booming commercial information technology companies, the state R&D infrastructure and the military. Under the digital triangle, private Chinese companies such as Huawei are designated “national champions,” allowing them to receive lines of credit from state banks as well as funding and staff from the military and state research institutions. The military, in turn, benefits as a favored customer and research partner. National champions also enjoy "infusions of near state-of-the-art foreign technology, thanks to the irresistible siren song of China’s huge information technology (IT) market, which encourages foreign companies to transfer cutting edge technology for the promise of market access." Among the main foreign partners of Huawei, for instance, are Motorola, IBM, Intel, Altera, Agere, Sun, Microsoft, Texas Instruments and NEC.

The linchpin that companies such as Huawei form between foreign firms on the one hand and the Chinese military and state R&D institutes on the other is an example of what the Rand authors characterize as China’s new approach to weapons building: "civilianization," or the use of civilian entities to conduct military research. According to the Rand researchers, the tripartite arrangement has proved mutually beneficial to the PLA’s C4ISR program and the country’s commercial IT sector: "While it is true that the Chinese IT industry is commercially oriented, the research and financial apparatus underlying its success derives significantly from state research and development institutes, including those affiliated with the defense industry and military units. In this sense, the information-technology sector, particularly those firms supplying finished C4ISR and related products to the PLA could be seen as a new defense-industrial sector in China. . . ."

The MacArthur Foundation has awarded $3 million to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and its partners to advance their collaborative study of state-sponsored Internet filtering worldwide through the OpenNet Initiative. In recent years the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a joint project among the University of Toronto, Cambridge University, Harvard Law School, and now, Oxford University, has produced a series of snapshots mapping internet censorship and surveillance practices on an international scale - a global MRI of the internet.

Statements from OpenNet Initiative Principals:

"Over the last several years, the OpenNet Initiative's careful and intensive research has put a spotlight on Internet filtering and surveillance practices worldwide, raising serious questions about the transparency and accountability of states and corporations who participate in them," said Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. "The MacArthur Foundation's support for the Berkman Center and the OpenNet Initiative will help to sustain and broaden this research over the coming years."

"The contest between states, corporations, and individuals shaping the technology and rules that govern the Internet is at the core of the new geopolitical environment, and will define civil liberties in the coming decades," said Rafal Rohozinski, director of the Advanced Network Research Group, Cambridge Security Programme (Cambridge University). "The MacArthur Foundation's generous support to the OpenNet Initiative will ensure that the debate defining the appropriate balance between national security and civil liberties is supported by credible comparative research."

Prof. Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School and Oxford University, has brought the Oxford Internet Institute into ONI. Writing recently Zittrain said

Collaborative is the key word. What is needed at this point, above all else, is a 21st century international Manhattan Project which brings together people of good faith in government, academia, and the private sector for the purpose of shoring up the miraculous information technology grid that is too easy to take for granted and whose seeming self-maintenance has led us into an undue complacence.

PetroChina, the state owned operators of China's controversial West-East Gas Pipeline have chosen Nortel Networks to supply communications, both wired and wireless, along its 4,200-kilometre route. The pipeline is the longest in China, spanning nine provinces to transport natural gas from the rich Lunnan gas fields of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region all the way to the economic hub of Shanghai and other regions of the Yangtze River Delta. Nortel has been winning critical infrastructure network supply contracts with Chinese utilities: water, electricity and notably with China's railway networks. . & - like the Qinghai-Tibet railway

"This pipeline is being built more for political reasons than for economic reasons," said Dinakar Sethuraman, an analyst with World Gas Intelligence in Singapore. "Its prospects for profit are cloudy."

..

China's leaders have staked their credibility on the pipeline. It is a central component of the government's "Go West" initiative, pressed by President Jiang Zemin as a way to lift China's impoverished western provinces by pumping billions of dollars into the region.

I'm sure I've been on about this for a while -- the more precise timekeeping system planned for Galileo could prove to be a major competitive advantage for the system over GPS:

the US must now recognize that it is in a “chronographical arms race” with the EU, and it cannot be passive.

On the flight from Paris I read an International Herald Tribune article by Nicolai Ouroussoff (As Israeli barrier goes up, views harden on all sides). The article focuses on Eyal Weizman's critique of the concrete barrier that is encircling Palestinian terriroty:

on a fundamental level, it is also a piece of architecture. And its construction has generated an architectural debate as charged as any in the political realm.

That debate has pitted strategists who mine the leftist architectural theories of the 1960s for ideas on contemporary urban warfare against architects who see the barrier as a perversion of those ideas, along with the utopian visions of Modernists who believed society's problems could be solved with concrete, glass and steel. It is not only unfolding in the halls of academia but in Israeli and American military circles. And it presents a vision of the wall as a system of complex, interweaving spaces - some concrete, some invisible - that is far from our normal perception of an international border.

At the center of this debate is Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect and activist who has been a controversial figure in his homeland since 2002, when he published a report for a local human rights organization that essentially accused Israeli architects of being collaborators in colonizing the West Bank.

Building is never a neutral act, of course, and Weizman, 35, makes no distinctions between architecture and politics.

I first understood Eyal Weizman’s extraordinary cartography of Israeli control over the West Bank through a series of essays in openDemocracy and it really allowed me to see the Israel-Palestine conflict in a new way. What is rather interesting is that IDF's Operational Theory Research Institute has been reading into Deleuze:

Among the most provocative counterpoints for Weizman's analysis is Shimon Navez, a retired brigadier general in the Israeli Army. Navez, who revels in the kind of jargon heard in architecture studios, directs the Israeli Defense Forces' Operational Theory Research Institute, which trains senior military staff in innovative war tactics.

"We were looking for new modes of thinking that could be suitable to military strategy," he said. "The Americans were looking for technological solutions; we wanted to understand the whole depth of the problem. It struck us that architecture could be a very helpful metaphor."

Navez has little faith in the barrier, which he called "too simplistic, too vulgar" to accomplish its task. "It is a tragic regression in terms of strategy," he said. "It derives from a necessity, but in the longer range it will create a lot of damage - a lot of antagonism. It is a huge violation of space that will be hard to remove."

Navez speaks of "striated" and "smooth" spaces - of a world shaped by solid walls and a more fluid one virtually without boundaries. In his view, the West Bank is an example of smooth space.

It is segregated into carefully defined zones, some of them controlled by the Israeli military and others jointly with the Palestinian Authority. Satellite and aerial surveillance has become ubiquitous.
And an Israeli company is developing a handheld thermal-imaging machine that will let soldiers detect human figures through concrete.

Navez does not direct Israeli military policy. But his views have exerted an influence over a small group of Israeli generals whom he refers to as his "disciples."

He has also met with officials at the Pentagon and American military research groups like Rand to discuss urban warfare in the Middle East, where "swarming" - the idea that soldiers infiltrate enemy space like "clouds" in small, loosely coordinated groups - has become a catch phrase. In such a scenario, the traditional command structure does not apply. Urban soldiers communicate directly with one another in a fluid, amorphous world, free to react to whatever situation arises.

Compared to such a dystopian vision, a concrete barrier erected to separate Israelis from Palestinians can seem like an apparition from antiquity, a counterpart to the crude wooden barrier Trajan built to keep out warring tribes - to separate civilization from barbarity.

Yet to Weizman, these are simply two forms of the same evil. Navez, he said, "is simply trying to replace one form of control with another that is less visible."

The FT explores price targeting strategies: individual v group, and more generally, how consumers react to prices - uniform v targeted.   more »

All the ITU or any international body need do in order to fork the Internet is to do it. There is no army, and no weapon, which can prevent the creation of new DNS regimes, especially if national governments choose to force ISPs to point to them.    more »

Tom Wright in Geneva for the International Herald Tribune

GENEVA An effort by the European Union to break a deadlock in talks here on changing the way the Internet is governed drew an angry reply on Thursday from the U.S. delegation, underlining how far apart nations remain on the issue.

...

Without consensus, some experts say countries may move ahead with setting up their own domain name system, or DNS, as a way of bypassing Icann. The United States, however, says a single addressing system is what makes the Internet so powerful, and moves to set up multiple Internets would be in no one's interest.

"The EU position seems to be a compromise solution between two extreme factions," said Robert Shaw, a policy adviser at the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body based in Geneva.

www.chinaview.cn 2005-09-23 13:26:18: BEIJING, Sept. 23 (Xinhuanet) -- A Paris-based media watchdog released a free guide Thursday to help bloggers and cyber-dissidents avoid political censorship in countries as far apart as Iran, Vietnam and Cuba.

The guide, published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and partly financed by the French Foerign Ministry, identifies bloggers as the "new heralds of free expression" and offers advice on how to set up a blog and run it anonymously.

"Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure," wrote Julien Pain, head of RSF's Internet Freedom Desk.

"Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest."

The 87-page "Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents" was launched at the Apple Expo computer show in Paris on Thursday. It can be downloaded from the RSF website (www.rsf.org), and is available in English, French, Chinese, Arabic and Farsi . . .

The Beijing Olympics are shaping up to be the most technically advanced in history, writes Tang Yuankai

A bullet proof transparent window sheeting, a multi-directional surveillance camera and iris recognition ...   more »