Because When You Censor You Can't Collect As Much Data

Legal Issues

from the which-is-worse? dept

It seemed quite odd that Congress waited until now to call hearings about how US tech companies were helping the Chinese government censor the internet. Despite the fact that this has been going on for years, and plenty of articles had been written about it, apparently the fuss surrounding Google joining the game was mainstream enough to make such a hearing politically feasible. With the hearings scheduled to go off tomorrow, the State Department put on a well-timed opening act talking about plans to fight internet censorship outside of the US, which seems to be a lot of talk with little substance. In the meantime, since “hearings” are really just a dog-and-pony show for politicians who have legislation they want to introduce with a splash, it’s no surprise to hear some of our elected representatives are already putting the finishing touches on bills concerning companies that do business in China. This seems like a lot of fuss over something that the US has little-to-no control over. The US government has already made it clear in its own actions that doing business with China, despite its human rights issues, is tolerated due to the size of the market — so it’s hard to see it hold the moral high ground here. Meanwhile, with another set of stories coming out about how the government is trying to do even more data mining on our own activities, the cynical among you might wonder if half the reason they’re so against censorship is that it limits the amount of data they can collect to be used against you in the future. Of course, that would mean the government was actually thinking some of these things through, and we’re pretty convinced that few of our politicians would ever bother to spend the energy necessary to actually think things through — beyond how it might impact the next election cycle.