2021-05-01T09:13:32+02:00

May 1, 2021 · 1 min read
post

The following article from The Economist China’s aversion to encryption technologies — which would make mass surveillance more difficult — makes the country’s networks vulnerable to foreign spying:

Weak security is the rule, not the excep­tion, in digital services for the Chinese public. Email and social media must all fa­cilitate state access, as must industrial net­ works used to run factories and offices, even if the extent to which the government uses that access varies. In August it banned the most up ­to ­date version of a protocol used to encrypt web traffic, known as TLS, from the Chinese internet, because it makes online surveillance harder.

(…) The government has responded by promoting programs for companies to improve customer­ data pro­tection, even as it simultaneously enforces weakness in the security of all systems. But as long as the government demands access to data on Chinese people, those data can never be robustly protected.

Surveillance (In)security
Wouter Van Rossem
Authors
Wouter Van Rossem
Wouter Van Rossem is a researcher on the intersection between social science and computer science. He previously worked on the European Research Council (ERC) funded project, Processing Citizenship, where he investigated how data infrastructures for population processing co-produce citizens, Europe, and territory. He completed his PhD at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and is still working on publications stemming from these impactful projects. In addition to his academic pursuits as a PhD at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, he brings a diverse background as a software engineer, having worked in various companies and at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Italy. His diverse background, spanning both theoretical and hands-on knowledge, reflects his keen interest in exploring the intricate interconnections between technology and society.