Tuesday, June 04, 2019

China, June 4th, Tiananmen Square Massacre, VPN shutdowns, arrests, digital surveillance, “996” schedule and social media censorship.



Ever since Tiananmen Square Massacre, every year on June 4, China's government ramps up VPN shutdowns, arrests, digital surveillance, and social media censorship. This year is no different—and to mark the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, the controls are even tighter.
So you must be thinking Chinese Government is a one bad entity compared to USA, don't wear your laurels tight;

One of the biggest companies in the world, Apple get danced around like a puppet.

Apple censors music and applications alike in China.

Since 2017, Apple has removed VPNs from its mainland Chinese app store. These application bans have continued and worsened over time. A censorship transparency project by GreatFire, AppleCensorship.com, allows users to look up which applications are available in the US but not in China. Apart from VPNs, the Chinese Apple app store has also censored applications from news organizations, including the New York Times, Radio Free Asia, Tibetan News, Voice of Tibet, and other Chinese-language human rights publications. They have also taken down other censorship circumvention tools like Tor and Psiphon. Apple even took out songs, that sing freedom.
Twitter is not far behind;

Chinese Activist accounts caught in Twitter sweep

On May 31st, a slew of China-related Twitter accounts were suspended, including prominent activists, human rights lawyers, journalists, and other dissidents. Activists feared this action was in preparation for further June 4th related censorship. Since then, some of the more prominent accounts have been restored, but many remain suspended. An announcement from Twitter claimed that these accounts weren’t reported by Chinese authorities, but were just caught up in a large anti-spam sweep.
Google at least has put it's Dragonfly, censored search engine for China in the back burner.

Google’s sleeping Dragonfly

Late last year, we stood in solidarity with over 70 human rights groups led by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, calling on Google to end their secret internal project to architect a censored Chinese search engine codenamed Dragonfly. Google employees wrote their own letter protesting the project, some resigning in protest, demanding transparency at the very least.

You can read more comprehensive article at EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation. Thank you EFF for all the hard work ensuring digital freedom

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