China Says US Uses Facebook To Spread Political Unrest 274
crimeandpunishment writes "A Chinese government-backed think tank says the US and other western governments use Facebook and other social networking sites to spread political unrest. Their report says, 'We must pay attention to the potential risks and threats to state security as the popularity of social-networking sites continues to grow,' and calls for increased scrutiny of the sites."
Chinese firewall with open proxy servers (Score:1, Informative)
China's government lets hackers use open proxy servers in China to break into computer systems in other countries and then keep a copy of whatever is stolen for themselves.
They can keep their citizens behind a firewall but somehow cannot manage to shut down open proxy servers.
They set Chinese wages extremely low and then pegged their currency to the dollar so U.S. manufacturers could not compete.
The corporations that pay for U.S. politicians' reelection campaigns got a cheap source of labor and U.S. citizens got a huge national debt because the government's revenue base from manufacturing and exports was eroded.
Can't imagine why a Chinese worker on a subsistence wage would cause political unrest. It must be Facebook.
At the risk of being labelled flamebait. (Score:4, Informative)
Murder rate in the USA is 42.8 per 1,000,000 people (freedom of speech and right to bear arms) Murder rate in the UK 14.0 per 1,000,000 people (freedom of speech) Murder rate in Hong Kong is 5.5 per 1,000,000 people (some limits on freedom)
I'm not saying that freedom of arms and speech turn people into hate filled psycho's (certainly other countries with limited freedoms have very high murder rates) but culturally people are very different all over the world and a murder rate more than 8 times lower than the USA is not insignificant. We have no idea what the effect of radically altering someone's culture might have and like it or not, ceasing all forms of censorship in China will have a shock effect on many of the people living there. I am preferably interested to hear what people in China feel about these issues more than people in the West demanding on behalf of people in China.
Please note that I had to use the rate for Hong Kong because China was apparently so low down as to not even be on the list of 62 highest murder rates, I note also that places under Sharia law were also absent from the list
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita
Please note that I cannot vouch for either the accuracy or how recent these statistics are, but then you can say that about any posted statistics.
Personally I believe in as much personal freedom as we can get, but I felt the need to provide some kind of balance to the discussion and sometimes I wonder if we really have the right to demand and impose our freedoms on other places that work in a very different way, despite what the above poster said that all humans are basically the same and want to kill steal and rape all day, I'd like to think otherwise.
I would also like to quickly address the above poster who said "In the U.S., our constitution (or what's left of it) was written specifically, to prevent government from serving itself instead of society. It has managed to slow the progress of greedy and ambitious people who seek to limit people in order to enrich themselves."
I would like to draw attention to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org] which states quite clearly "Americans have the highest income inequality in the rich world and over the past 20–30 years Americans have also experienced the greatest increase in income inequality among rich nations. The more detailed the data we can use to observe this change, the more skewed the change appears to be... the majority of large gains are indeed at the top of the distribution."
Like I said, freedoms are good, but our own implementation of them may not necessarily be the best method when considering some of the results.
Re:The Americans are tampering with our internet! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The Americans are tampering with our internet! (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, just China and North Korea and Thailand and Pakistan and...
Yet there is also South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, India, Israel, Kuwait and loads of other places.
It is the worlds largest continent so of course it contains some dubious countries. It would be like saying the Americas (North, South, and Central) are full of dictatorships based on the few in central America and ignoring all the rest. Making accurate generalisations about the policatal make up of an entire continent is just not possible unless you are limiting them to saying they have humans living there and not talking about antarctica.
Re:At the risk of being labelled flamebait. (Score:3, Informative)
Murder rate in the USA is 42.8 per 1,000,000 people (freedom of speech and right to bear arms)
Murder rate in the UK 14.0 per 1,000,000 people (freedom of speech)
Murder rate in Hong Kong is 5.5 per 1,000,000 people (some limits on freedom)
I agree that the US isn't perfect but those statistics are kind of meaningless without context. The high murder rate isn't necessarily due to freedom of speech and right to bear arms. It may in fact go back to gang warfare and our inability to fully integrate certain aspects of our society. Obviously that's a problem but it's not due to freedoms.
I would like to draw attention to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org] which states quite clearly "Americans have the highest income inequality in the rich world and over the past 20–30 years Americans have also experienced the greatest increase in income inequality among rich nations. The more detailed the data we can use to observe this change, the more skewed the change appears to be... the majority of large gains are indeed at the top of the distribution."
Income inequality is a real concern but I think the more relevant statistic is the poverty rate. America has one of the lowest in the world. Should poverty even exist in a country as wealthy as the United States? Absolutely not. But it's not as bad as income inequality may lead you to believe.