of spooks and the spooky

Interesting and somewhat disturbing: Several of the various programmes adopted by internet users in China to get around net nanny filtering are storing and offering to sell data they hold on individual users.

It’s hard to state how dangerous this practice is. These tools are acting as virtual ISPs for millions of users. All circumvention tools work by proxying the data of their users through some third machine, so all circumventing traffic is going through that third party machine. Selling the browsing histories of those users is like an ISP selling the browsing histories of its users, which is a big step beyond what companies like NebuAd and Phorm were / are trying to do.

Rebecca McKinnon also reports that the US based companies that evolved these programmes are also sharing data with the FBI in accordance with obligations undertaken in return for acceptance of US government funding. And the most prominent of these, the Global Internet Freedom Consortium, is a group founded by F*lun Gongers.

Amongst other things, FLG has declared itself hostile to Charter 08 and its supporters. Yet those supporters – and others who just want to find out more about it – may be doing so using tools developed and controlled by FLG.More generally, imagine if everything people in Western Europe and the US knew about Soviet dissidents back in the seventies had come to them filtered through, say, the Scientologists or Moonies.