Vietnam Expands Decades Long Effort To Crack Down On Any Dissent Online By Demanding Data Be Kept In The Country

Free Speech

from the wider-impact dept

It’s no secret that the Vietnamese government is no fan of the open internet. All the way back in 2002 we wrote about the government requiring people to register just to create a website. That same year we were writing about people being arrested for posting criticism of the government. In 2008, we wrote about the Vietnamese government banning “subversive” blogs as well. With the rise of social media, Vietnam has shifted its focus there. In 2013, it banned news reporting on social media, saying it should be for personal use only. In 2014, we wrote about how the government was abusing Facebook’s own reporting tools to shut down dissenters from using the site. And at the beginning of this year, we wrote about how the government now employed around 10,000 people whose only job was to monitor the internet for dissent.

And now it’s going to get even worse — to a degree that might even lead some of the big internet companies to leave Vietnam entirely. And we have the NSA (partially) to blame. Ever since the revelation of the Snowden documents, describing how the NSA was getting access to all sorts of data and metadata on foreigners by compelling various private companies to cough up their data, there’s been a big push among some for data localization. Some of that push has come from privacy activists themselves, arguing in other countries that their data shouldn’t be allowed to go to the US where the NSA has so much access — but much of it has simply been using the NSA revelations as a stalking horse to get what they want: which is the ability to snoop locally on all of that data. That’s why countries like Russia has been a huge proponent of data localization.

And now we can add Vietnam to the list. Despite strong condemnation from the US (and US internet companies) it appears that Vietnam wants to require any internet company with Vietnamese users to host that data locally where the government and its thousands of content monitors can snoop on it:

The new draft decree requires companies providing a range of services, including email, social media, video, messaging, banking and e-commerce, to set up offices in Vietnam if they collect, analyze or process personal user data.

The companies would also be required to store a wide range of user data, ranging from financial records and biometric data to information on peoples? ethnicity and political views, or strengths and interests inside Vietnam?s border.

Not surprisingly, the same law gives law enforcement much greater ability to demand data from these platforms, because of course it does. The Vietnamese officials pushing this plan say its necessary for “cybersecurity” which is utter nonsense.

This could be a real test for companies like Facebook and Google and there’s a strong argument they (and others) should seriously consider simply shutting off access in that country, even as both sites are quite popular there. Giving in here will undoubtedly mean having to give in elsewhere, and literally supporting the suppression of political dissent.

Filed Under: censorship, data localization, free speech, stifling dissent, vietnam