After months of mixed messages and a series of high-profile departures, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai danced around questions of censorship for their China search engine in a letter to US Senators. As reported in The Intercept:
[Google] Search Engine Chief Ben Gomes… informed staff during a private meeting that the company was aiming to release the platform in China between January and April 2019. Gomes told employees working on the Chinese search engine that they should get it ready to be “brought off the shelf and quickly deployed…
[Dragonfly] would restrict people’s access to broad categories of information, blacklisting phrases like “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize.”
Earlier reporting by The Intercept on the so-called “Dragonfly” project indicate extensive collaboration with the Chinese government over sensitive issues such as searches for ruling party figures. A secret Google memo obtained by The Intercept in 2018 said that how an unnamed Chinese “partner company” would be able to change or eliminate search results without consulting Google. Users will also be required to log into a Google account associated with their phone number to make use of the search engine.
U.S. Senators have criticized Google over potential collaboration with China. Politicians in the United States are generally more vocal about the surveillance and control mechanisms appearing in China than the other readily apparent signs of an authoritarian drift in the United States. The largest tech companies act as crucial partners in the United States government’s vast surveillance apparatus.
Intelligence analysts in the CIA, NSA, and FBI utilize advanced government technologies to scoop up data from web traffic running through–for example— ATT and Verizon. Close relationships with each of the major tech companies grants government spooks multiple entry points to track and/or influence a surveillance target. If China is successful in linking all Google searches to a phone number and name, it would be a technological coup for its authoritarian government.
The situation in China has become more extreme in recent years, as horrifying reports have emerged of the ethnic Uighur group being held in “secret” concentration camps.
At the same time, 2018 has seen an entrenchment of China’s elaborate social credit system (社会信用体系). Wikipedia describes the system as “a form of mass surveillance which uses big data analysis”. Troubling on its own, the Chinese system could also be a precursor to generalized social scores in North America as well.
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