How might this weeks move by Google to encrypt searches, impact regular folks here and in China?
For me... nothing much. If I want to search for information about Mao Hengfeng, a woman human rights activist in China, I can do so here in the San Francisco Bay Area. But very likely I won't get any results with the same search in mainland China.
Google's new implementation of search encryption could mean that my search will no longer be waylaid by government censors. Whether at home or abroad, I should now be able to bring up her wikipedia, and other, web pages.
But there's another way to carry out this search in China, and it uses techniques (Do we notice the connection to technology?) that have been in use since power struggling between people first began. Anybody whose ever read Sherlock Holmes or a WWII spy-thriller knows how this works. The method involves someone in or outside of the community setting up coded words and phrases. If I want to search on Mao Hengfeng in Peking, very likely I know, or I ask around, until I find out her alternate name. And once the censors figure out the code and ban it by digital censorship, than the word gets out in the underground about a new name or phrase that brings up the same information.
Chinese censors are probably already at work figuring out a way around Google's encrypted searches, but regular people, using technology as old as the hills, are one step ahead of Google's white horse.
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Web Resources
NPR Avoiding the Great Firewall Internet Censors: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=220106496
Mao Hengfeng: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Hengfeng
NPR Avoiding the Great Firewall Internet Censors: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=220106496
Mao Hengfeng: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Hengfeng
Great Firewall's Next Hurdle http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/12/google-is-encrypting-search-worldwide-thats-bad-for-the-nsa-and-china/
Silicon Valley Tech News http://www.siliconvalley.com
