Chernobyl: An Internal Contradiction of Glasnost Strategy + A Look at Modern Covert Technology (2/2)

In today’s world, many would argue that the advent of the internet and other information systems has had a mostly positive impact on people’s access to information, bringing with it an increased level of transparency with governments and organizations of influence. However, there are many ways that modern Information Systems are being used to stringently control the information and news that people see, in a way that many governments of the past would have loved to leverage. This is particularly relevant with regard to the Chernobyl cover up orchestrated by Gorbachev discussed in the first part of this post.

The Great Firewall of China

Photo from (China Briefing News, 2017).

When the internet first came to China in 1994, it was relatively open and had little restrictions. However, it didn’t take long for the communist Chinese government to realise the threat this could pose to its censorship regime that allowed them to carry out atrocities such as the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 without the worry of civil unrest caused by the spread of information and media. As the Internet became more popular, the government chose to heed the advice of former leader Deng Xiaoping “When you open the door, the flies come in”. Thus, 1996 saw the Ministry of Public Security introduce the Golden Shield project and over the course of multiple stages, phased in a mass censorship regime (Bloomberg.com, 2018).

First, the government began blocking specific domain names and IP addresses so popular sites such as Google, Facebook, YouTube etc were all blocked. The next phase of the project implemented “Keyword” detection, where the government inspected content it deemed to be threatening and took action against the content creator and censored it out. In order to bypass such restrictions, users began seeking the help of Virtual Proxy Networks (VPNs), a tool that allows for anonymous and encrypted web-surfing. Naturally, the Chinese government sought to suppress this and have upgraded their “Great Firewall” to detect the irregular traces associated with VPN use. They also introduced regulation outlawing the use of such proxies, clamping down on enforcement and with those caught facing severe consequences (Wu and Lam, 2017).

The ability afforded to the Chinese government by the advancement in Firewall technology to heavily suppress Free Speech and the spread of information would have fitted seamlessly into the cover-up strategy pursued by Gorbachev with the Chernobyl Disaster.

Profiling Technologies

The advent of social media and online-sharing has exposed users to a wide range of privacy risks, especially given the advent of new Profiling Information Systems. These systems use algorithms to discover patterns from personal data and then proceed to identify correlations in these patterns among groups of individuals (Tanczer et. al, 2016). Use of these technologies is widely evident in counter-terrorism government units across the world in profiling individuals who are deemed to have displayed actions online that sympathise with terrorist causes. While this is clearly a positive use of these technologies, there has also been various cases that show how they could be equally used as a way a regime such as the USSR’s could profile political enemies and therefore quash any behaviours considered undesirable.

Photo from (Browne, 2018).

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal was a case that many argue shows the scale of global manipulation that is possible to achieve using these technologies. This scandal refers to the mass harvesting of personal data, without consent, from 87 million Facebook profiles by political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica, who worked for the Donald Trump 2016 US Presidential Campaign, then used Profiling Technologies to develop psychographic profiles of the data subjects. These were then used to design the kind of advertisements that would be most effective in persuading a particular person, in a particular location, to vote in favour of the candidate (Chang, 2018). This is a modern example of how Gorbachev could have used such a system to fuel the Soviet propaganda machine and boost his approval ratings at a time where the Soviet Union was greatly struggling to maintain its reputation, and evidently was on its last political legs.

References:

Bloomberg.com. (2018). Bloomberg - The Great Firewall of China. [online] Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/great-firewall-of-china [Accessed 4 Feb. 2020].

Browne, R. (2018). Facebook ‘concealed the truth’ of what it knew about Cambridge Analytica, lawmaker claims. [online] CNBC. Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/26/facebook-concealed-truth-of-cambridge-analytica-scandal-uk-mp-says.html [Accessed 4 Feb. 2020].

Chang, A. (2018). The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, explained with a simple diagram. [online] Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/23/17151916/facebook-cambridge-analytica-trump-diagram [Accessed 4 Feb. 2020].

China Briefing News. (2017). China’s Great Firewall: Business Implications - China Briefing News. [online] Available at: https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-great-firewall-implications-businesses/ [Accessed 4 Feb. 2020].

Tanczer, L.M., McConville, R. and Maynard, P., 2016. Censorship and surveillance in the digital age: The technological challenges for academics. Journal of Global Security Studies, 1(4), pp.346-355.

Wu, J. and Lam, O. (2017). The evolution of China's Great Firewall: 21 years of censorship | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP. [online] Hong Kong Free Press HKFP. Available at: https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/09/03/evolution-chinas-great-firewall-21-years-censorship/ [Accessed 4 Feb. 2020].