Big technology companies may already be complying with secret Chinese requests for user information held in Hong Kong and ought to “come clean” about the vulnerability of the data they hold there, a senior US state department official has said.
The allegation of possible secret cooperation between major companies and Hong Kong authorities follows the implementation of a sweeping and controversial new national security law that allows Hong Kong authorities to demand sensitive user data from companies if it is deemed to threaten national security.
While some tech and social media companies, like Facebook, Google and Microsoft, said in the immediate aftermath of the law being implemented in June that they would put a “pause” on complying with any Hong Kong data requests, interviews with activists, legal experts and a current and former US government official have raised doubts about their ability to fend off such legal demands and their right to disclose if they have received them.
Photo: Bloomberg
The state department official said: “There is a possibility that things are happening but because of the restrictions put on by the Hong Kong authorities, they [companies] would not be able to divulge this.”
The official added that if the request was “detoured” into the mainland legal system it would fall into a “black hole.”
“The company would be told by mainland authorities ‘you will be breaking the [law] if you reveal the fact that I’m asking for this information,’” the official said.
Photo: Bloomberg
Facebook and Google did not respond to requests for comment.
Microsoft said: “As we would with any new legislation, we are reviewing the new law to understand its implications. In the past, we’ve typically received only a relatively small number of requests from Hong Kong authorities, but we are pausing our responses to these requests as we conduct our review.”
Microsoft declined to comment on the remarks by the state department official.
Photo Bloomberg
For Hong Kong activists like Glacier Kwong, who is living outside Hong Kong at the moment but is a vocal pro-democracy advocate, the threat of having her information turned over to Beijing is reminiscent of the 2004 incident in which Yahoo complied with a Chinese request for identifying information about the journalist Shi Tao (師濤) after he used a Yahoo account to send information about how China was restricting coverage of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre to a human rights forum in the US.
Shi was arrested and spent nearly 10 years in prison as a result of Yahoo’s disclosure, an act that was later described by a US congressman as akin to corporate collaboration with Nazi Germany. Yahoo had also shared information about the dissident Wang Xiaoning (王小寧), who had been posting his writings on Yahoo forums anonymously. The activist was sentenced to a decade in prison after he was identified. He was released in 2012 and Yahoo publicly apologized for the disclosures.
Kwong says it would create “huge problems” for her and fellow activists if their most “highly sensitive and intimate” data — collected over many years of using Facebook and Google — was handed to Beijing.
Photo Bloomberg
“I don’t want to put it that way but I will,” she said. “If Google or other technology companies comply with this national security law, it is actually helping indirectly the Hong Kong government, the Chinese government, to oppress or crack down on the civil society.”
Activists like Kwong are not calling for the companies to abandon Hong Kong, but said all companies ought to minimize the data they collect or store, and end to end encrypt the data that gives even the companies limited access to the information.
Another dissident, Yaxue Cao, who is based in Washington, said companies ought to remember the 2004 Yahoo case, and the reputational damage and lawsuit that Yahoo eventually had to settle with Chinese dissidents, as they navigate the new Hong Kong security law. But there was one major difference between then and now: neither Hong Kong nor China would likely now acknowledge in court, as China did in the Yahoo case, that it had obtained sensitive data from a major technology company.
“It will therefore be that much more important for the tech companies to be honest and to have integrity,” she said.
But one former US government official, who has discussed the issue with affected groups, said it would be problematic to rely on companies with a vested interest in expanding their business in China to essentially act as whistleblowers and reveal if they have been asked to turn over information.
“Within companies [the issue] is pretty well understood but companies want to keep it quiet, they want to keep it hush-hush, they want to make their own decisions about what is best for their business,” the person, who asked not to be identified because of possible repercussions, said. “To have data that is from south-east Asia, regional data, or data from Europe or the US, in Hong Kong, at this point, is just nuts. Or, at least, if you have it and don’t have a plan in the next year to get it out … then you’re either naive or you just don’t care.”
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
RSS