U.S. Prism, Meet China’s Golden Shield

BEIJING â€" On Tuesday, shortly before China escalated its criticism of the United States over its global surveillance programs, saying they showed not just the “hypocrisy” but also the “true face” of the U.S., a Beijing lawyer named Xie Yanyi filed a public information request with the police asking about China’s own surveillance operations.

Mr. Xie wanted to know: How was the state protecting citizens’ rights to online and communications privacy? By what laws was surveillance taking place? Who granted the permission to monitor citizens? Were such activities approved by the National People’s Congress, China’s parliament?

“China has only been accusing the United States,” but is silent its own surveillance, Mr. Xie said in a Skype interview. “I don’t oppose the government legally managing the publc’s interest,” said Mr. Xie. “But it should not overstep its powers. I hope this will make people face the problem here too. China’s surveillance system is extremely wild, there are no rules governing it that are worth speaking of.”

Mr. Xie, a lawyer at the Beijing Kaitai Law Offices, who said he filed the request as a private citizen, said there were three programs in particular he wanted to know more about: Golden Shield, Great Wall and Green Dam.

Golden Shield is the over a decade old, an overarching monitoring network spun by the state that encompasses the colloquially-named Great Firewall of Internet censorship (today its made up of many different projects with different names); Green Dam is a now-defunct program to install software on computers to filter information. It wasn’t immediately clear if Great Wall was a separate program, or if Mr. Xie was referring to the Great Firewall.

Chinese surveillance is extensive and invasive, say security researchers, dissidents! and rights activists. Cities are installing large-scale security systems that encompass telephone, text message, Internet and car number plate monitoring, facial recognition software and a range of other methods, according to this report about one such “Safe City” program called “Project 3.20,” in the central-eastern cities of Taizhou and Jianjiang.

Since Mr. Snowden’s leaks earlier this month, Chinese state-run media have loudly criticized the cybermonitoring practices of the U.S., especially following allegations that the N.S.A. hacked into at least one backbone in China’s Internet, at Tsinghua University, and targeted people and organizations in Hong Kong and the mainland of China.

Its all got ordinary Chinese talking, said Mr. Xie - many for the first time. Because it was happening elsewhere, and the state itself was talking about it, ordinary people could join in the discussion. “You could call this an ‘enlightenment moent’ for many people,” he said.

“After Prism started we could openly talk about it, on bulletin boards, on Weibo,” China’s popular microblogs. “Most people were critical about the U.S. and supported Snowden. They felt the U.S. had overstepped its boundaries,” he said. “The Chinese government was very happy.”

Then the discussion shifted to take in China’s own surveillance issues. “But after a while people began to talk about domestic surveillance,” with some of what is being said about China’s system censored, or “strongly controlled,” he said.

While China has so far focused its criticisms on U.S. “hypocrisy,” and not criticized the intrinsic concept of surveillance, recent remarks by a Ministry of National Defense spokesman, Col. Yang Yujun, and a surge of commentary in state-run media “appear aimed at persuading Chinese citizens that their government holds the moral high ground in Internet issues,” wrote my colleague Chris Buckley.

One cybersecurity expert disagreed that it does.

“There are some stark differences between the United States and China when it comes to surveillance, transparency, and the rule of law, particularly as it relates to access to information requests,” said Greg Walton, an Internet specialist formerly at the University of Toronto, now a cybersecurity consultant based in India.

“Mr. Xie won’t receive meaningful answers to his request for information because of absurd state secrets laws that trump regulations on open government,” Mr. Walton predicted. “Human rights researchers in the West know remarkably little about the surveillance state in China. The Chinese people know very little.”

Mr. Xie said a key aim of the information request is not only to learn more about his government’s surveillance activities and their legality, but also to try to further what he says is a gloal cause: the need for a new security architecture aimed at protecting citizens’ rights to privacy. That included protecting intellectual property rights, he said. A key U.S. complaint against China has been that China has for years engaged in the large-scale theft of commercial and military secrets.

“We are all facing a new challenge,” he said. “We need a United Nations treaty, an international framework for this.”

Said Mr. Walton via Skype chat from India: “It is hypocritical for China to use Mr. Snowden’s leaks to attack the U.S. internet freedom agenda, just as it is hypocritical for the U.S. to restrict the ‘rules of the road’ to the theft of intellectual property â€" claiming that it doesn’t engage in economic espionage against its competitors â€" or even allies.” He said, “According to the European Parliament, for example, the N.S.A. has spied on Airbus to the benefit of Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas.”

“We are all in this together, and where we do ! need inte! rnational norms first and foremost is in defense of the right to openly debate and discuss global issues such as surveillance,” he said. “Civil society has got to be protected from state-sponsored espionage â€" and in this area China has a dreadful record â€" a decade of aggressive digital spying against anyone who they feel challenges them â€" from the Dalai Lama to foreign correspondents, scholars to human rights activists.”