The Eagle-Eye May Very Well Be Chinky-Eyed

A few days ago I saw Eagle-Eye, a movie reminiscent of Orwell's 1984, where a supercomputer responsible for tracking all human activity decides that the government is no longer fit to run the United States. As a result, it puts into implementation Project Guillotine, a plan designed to execute all officers in the Executive chain of command to give the American people a fresh start. The evil supercomputer, ARIA, does this by tracking and analyzing human behavior through all possible means - via cellphone, street cameras, bank ATM machines,internet behavior, and the like. The creators suggest that this type of event is within the realm of possibility because of society's (particularly American society's) reliance on computers to facilitate almost all transactions. The movie was cool at the beginning, with all the guesswork the audience is made to do, speculating at which terrorists are behind the attacks, but (SPOILER ALERT) when it becomes apparent that a thinking computer is behind everything that has been happening, I was let down, mainly because 1) the concept has already been used in 1984, and 2) I didn't think that even the most sophisticated computer could think the way humans do, calculating in ways that they are never meant to be. Perhaps I am not geeky enough to know if this is in fact possible. But I believe that human motivation is needed - no computer could come to that conclusion alone.

I am reminded by this article I read a couple of days ago about a group of Canadian human-rights activists who discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain internet text conversations, purportedly those that are antithetical to Chinese policy and government. As of now, conversations on the popular chat forum Skype contain the brunt of the archived conversations, and the data is still being analyzed. While the idea that the Chinese government monitors and filters sensitive date is not new, there has been little concrete proof of that until now, and the extents that they have gone to were never as apparent. Topics deemed as sensitive ranged from the expected such as Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, and the Chinese Communist party, but also topics such as earthquake and milk powder.

The list also serves as a filter to restrict text conversations. The encrypted list of words inside the Tom-Skype software blocks the transmission of those words and a copy of the message is sent to a server. The Chinese servers retained personal information about the customers who sent the messages. They also recorded chat conversations between Tom-Skype users and Skype users outside China. The system recorded text messages and Skype caller identification, but did not record the content of Skype voice calls.

This is a flagrant violation of Chinese individuals' (and their conversation counterparts') privacy. What about Skype's public declaration that they protected conversations facilitated through their program? And if they did so to comply with Chinese directives in order to be able to operate there, who is liable to those conversation counterparts who are not Chinese? And what do we do now? Boycott conversations with people who are from China? There has to be an end to this.