YouSaid · the spoken record

James Griffiths

lines on the record: 39
first: 2021-08-17
most recent: 2021-08-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It is one of those things that you can build not to sound hippy dippy, but you can build a better version of the internet at home and that could affect that could spread in a way that this negative version of the internet is being spread by China.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think people should be advised to pay more attention to this stuff that when we have conversations around encryption, we have conversations around internet freedom and people's ability to say things online, even when it comes to things like extremist content or very negative content being shared online, that people need to pay attention to that because that's where you get this kind of slippage into governments taking greater controls into security services, increasing their abilities to surveil people. And essentially, if you see the great firewall as a kind of lodestar for authoritarian leaning governments as a model to build their internet on the kind of counter to that would be for democratic government.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More people flee overseas, and you start to see the kind of center of conversation around Hong Kong political activism become moved to the diaspora, as we saw with kind of Uyghurs, with Tibetans in the past. I think it's much more foreseeable that the government will start to find it wants to block certain websites or it wants to block certain services. And that's something that happens very quickly because once you block something, you then have to decide, well, do I want to block every way that people use to get around this as well? And you suddenly find yourself with a very long list of things to block and then you need to improve your technological capabilities to do so. And you very quickly get to the point where you need a system like the great firewall to do that.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. And this has happened incredibly quickly. I think my book first came out in 2019. And I think if you'd asked me at the time, was Hong Kong in imminent danger of kind of going under the great firewall, I'd have confidently said no and said this was still years off if not potentially decades off. And yet since the passage in 2020 of the National Security Law in Hong Kong, which has had a huge effect on people's ability to speak freely here, on political groups active in the city, it is not out of the bounds of possibility that we will see far, far more censorship of websites online here. It's still something of a transitional phase because a lot of the organizations and a lot of the speech being cracked down upon is happening within Hong Kong. But as that happens and there's more”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sharing disinformation about vaccines for a long time, which we saw happening through state media, through state-controlled outlets. And so you see how there's the kind of propaganda side of this has also damaged the conversation around coronavirus as well as the censorship side damaged our original knowledge of it within China itself.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll never really know how that might have played out if when a doctor raised the alarm in Wuhan, he could have gone straight to a newspaper and told them and been on front pages. We'll never know what effect that might have had on how the virus developed and how it spread in the early months of the pandemic. So in the second, so obviously China's handling of the coronavirus has been greatly criticized. And the kind of second, the outward bound, let's say, version of the firewall or the section of the firewall, you know, the umbrella or internet censorship and control in China, we send that kick into action when it comes to shaping the narrative globally around any kind of responsibility people might believe China has for how the pandemic developed, for pushing very, very aggressively pushing conspiracy theories about U.S. biochemical lab for”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could have prevented information getting back from Wuhan to Beijing in a clean way that might have made the central government authorities react more quickly. And so you really see how censorship was detrimental not just to political speech or to not just anti-government activity, but really it was detrimental to doctors and health workers being able to raise the alarm about a potential epidemic and which became a pandemic.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, and it's useful to think of this in kind of two main stages, both of which have kind of been detrimental to the global conversation, but also potentially to even really exacerbating the spread of coronavirus. So in the very early weeks and months, as information was starting to come out of Wuhan that there was a virus circulating, that as concern was building, that this was something similar to SARS, as doctors were starting to raise the alarm, they were pretty aggressively censored on the Chinese internet. Chinese state media even reported on police cracking down a rumor among us who actually turned out to have just been sharing completely accurate information from a medical perspective. And that could have stopped people from receiving information that might have made them act differently.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To get the benefits economically of the internet, they kind of had to take the maybe speech that they didn't like being spread in their countries. And now they're seeing that there is this alternative model that China is advancing and that China will help. On the converse of that, we might see democratic countries shift away from it, particularly amid concerns about influence operations and hacking and various other cybersecurity concerns.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the splinter net's a bit of a fuzzy term because it's very easy to define it in a way that says that it's already been happening for a long time, you know, arguably since at least when Beijing started developing the Great Firewall and set a big filter between it and the rest of the world that you already have two versions of the internet. But yeah, this is definitely something which is advancing that the existence of the firewall and the success of the firewall and the success of China's domestic internet, not just in terms of sensory information, but also from a kind of business standpoint and there are alternative Chinese services to much of the blocked ones that really emboldened a lot of countries that I think in the past would have believed that they were too small to sense their own internets or that this was kind of a Faustian bargain they had to make with”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, absolutely. And both, this is a helpful service that Beijing can provide its allies and it shores up any effort by Beijing at the international level to promote its vision of the internet because it has a bunch of people that are fully on board with that vision and will be ready to support it against the US or the EU or whoever is trying to push for a more open one.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chinese officials and tech companies. And we've also seen a lot of places in Asia, Cambodia introduced in the midst of introducing something that is basically a Cambodian version of the Great Firewall, Vietnam as well. And China is basically ready and willing if any country comes to it and says, hey, we want to control our internet. China is happy to provide both the technical expertise and from a legal basis of kind of helping to draft laws which can clamp down on speech online and the Vietnamese cybersecurity law is almost word for word that which China passed previously.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All over the place. Most authoritarian-leaning country that is allied with Beijing has at this point started to buy up tech from Chinese companies. We've seen in particular parts of Africa. I talk about Uganda in my book, which is a country that has kind of pursued an aggressively anti-internet freedom approach in recent years, blacking out the internet and also investing in kind of Chinese filtering tech and surveillance tech. We've seen Russia, which has never been a great fan of an open and free internet that's shifted from its kind of own take on internet censorship in much more of a Chinese direction, the way that they've been approaching it legally, the way they've been approaching it technically is far more Chinese in practice and is happening with the assistance of”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They will start to cut off these open platforms themselves because from similar desire to have control and to censor what people were able to read.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I would argue that probably Wikipedia is not at too much risk given its size and the apolitical nature of it and that it wouldn't, I don't think it would necessarily be such a target because this is always already blocked in China. And Wikipedia isn't going out of its way to get past those blocks or to try and undermine them or to lobby against them and stuff. You generally do have to take an extra step to earn that kind of attention. But what's, I think, more pernicious is that this model of the internet that China has is spreading around the world and so that while Wikipedia and other open source communities or other open flows of information may continue to be available in the US or the UK and various countries, similar countries, that as more and more nations adopt a Chinese approach to the internet and control it a lot more,”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. And that's really part of that shift from just seeing if you just saw the great firewall originally as more of a defensive model and more of a domestically focused thing about shoring up the Chinese internet and separating it from the rest of the world and filtering what comes through to it, that now you see from behind that firewall influence operations being launched in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, in Europe, in the US, and also concerted hacking of not only kind of traditional intelligence targets, but also activist groups, dissidents, exiles. And that's something that really has changed. And that's something which really also then, I think it then kind of doubled.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and we've already seen this pretty much every year there is, you know, from very kind of basic levels of academic conferences being pressured to cancel certain guests or drop certain topics. The Tibetan Exile community in particular now increasingly as well the Uyghur exile community have come under huge pressure from being harassed online and also being targeted by hackers and having their communications spied on. And that does chill speech because it really raises the potential costs of speaking out even when you fled China, let alone for people who are still within Greater China or still based in China themselves, it really the hand of the state or the sense that the hand of the state can reach anywhere in the world is far more palpable.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China's standing in terms of controlling their security situation. Beijing is not satisfied to stand by while the internet is used or any form of communication is used to malign Beijing or herd its interests no matter where the person doing that might be around the world.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either there was a sense that this was just not something you could control, say how people organize against Beijing in Washington or Berlin or London, that this wasn't something that Beijing could try and influence, or there was a sense that it wasn't something that maybe Beijing should care about because ultimately it didn't affect the security situation too much within China itself. And that viewpoint has completely shifted to there is an effort both through lobbying of various governments around the world to kind of take a harder line on anti-China operations and then to pressuring companies to kind of conform to what we might call Chinese political correctness. A Chinese state-backed hackers going after dissident groups overseas and after governments critical of China, the export of Chinese tech to various allied countries in a way that kind of improves”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's just us talking to us, they don't care too much. But if it's anything that impacts China, there is a new attention to this and a desire to control this in a way that did not exist, say, 15 years ago. It was once felt that”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Democratic countries where we would hope that our own governments would give those protections to us anyway. But certainly in countries that are semi-democratic or authoritarian that maybe don't have the same tech built in already as China, but it gives them coverage to do so in future or gives them potentially a model for following along the Chinese path.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. So as the firewall was became very, very secure and was essentially unassailable from within China itself. And as I think the census realized that a lot of the problem was coming from overseas and also this coincides with China generally engaging more in the international community, especially the UN, there has been a concerted effort by China in concert with Russia and a couple of other countries to reduce protections for speech in global internet governance, to give governments more power to control all aspects of internet technology and kind of business within their borders. And I would say that a lot of this is mainly about shoring up the firewall and giving the census more powers over the Chinese internet. But the effect it has is undermining protections, maybe not so much in”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kind of things we take for granted in terms of protecting speech online or governing how websites work around the world could suddenly be very fundamentally changed.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one good example I would say actually is especially for people in Europe listening that if you think about the GDPR, the European privacy bill, that a lot of people were not aware of this thing that had been ticking along at a European level for ages before it came into force. And suddenly every single website in the world was asking them, can I take your personal information to keep serving you this website? And if you think about that, that there are proposals far more negative than GDPR, not to suggest that GDPR is negative that are being made at bodies that people are paying even less attention to than the European Parliament or European bodies. And that the worst case scenario that the Internet Freedom Groups will kind of paint out is that one of those proposals gets through a body like the International Telecommunications Union, which is governed by the UN, and suddenly a lot of”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let alone when it's a subsidiary body of the United Nations dealing with the technical matters of how we assign IP addresses around the world, you know, this is an incredibly difficult thing to sell people on, even though it's governing technology which we use every second of our day and which is hugely important.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Model and the multilateral model, which the fact that those two words, how we call them both sides, shows how technical and boring this organ can be and why it's hard to get people interested in. But multi-stakeholder basically means you have companies and activists groups and NGOs involved as well as governments and multilateral means you just have the governments, which is what your authoritarian countries that are controlling the internet, like China and Russia and other states would much rather have because it gives them way more leverage and it gives them more standing. And it's often very hard that when you have these internet freedom groups, you have anti-censorship organizations, when they're trying to alert people to any shift away from the multi-stakeholder model for them to sell that to people as something they really need to be concerned about, you know, think about how hard it is to get people concerned about things that happen at the United Nations at the best of times.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, internet activists have complained about this for a long time that there is Internet governance as a kind of broad issue is done both kind of through governments interacting with internet companies within their borders, but also obviously internationally and supranationally. And it's very, very difficult. Like you said, it's complex. It's pretty boring. It's technical. It's not necessarily always easy either, even when there is a real threat to speech coming down from that kind of multinational international level to explain to people how this could affect them in their personal lives in Europe or in the US, let alone in an authoritarian country. I talk a bit in my book about this kind of quite prominent fight that's been going on for about two decades now between what is called the multi-stakeholder.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Baidu, as a search engine, you know, since these big internet firms, Chinese internet firms have come up, they also are pressured by the government to invest a huge amount of money in censorship and in controlling what people are saying and in monitoring what people are saying. So you have this public-private partnership working against, say, a scattered group of dissidents and activists around the world who have fought a very good and long fight against the censors in Beijing, but it's one that is very, very difficult for them to ever win in the long term.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Proponent of anti-censorship technology for a long time after the Chinese government crackdown on them because they saw this as a key way to continue to proselytize inside China in kind of say the last decade or so it's become more the realm of programmers and of people trying to find a technological solution to this who come at this from maybe more of a pure tech background than a lot of the early people who were political dissidents who kind of were forced to try and find ways around censorship because otherwise they couldn't get anyone to read what they were saying or hear what they're saying but you know this has always gone up against a huge party state which has incredible amount of money and resources to throw at this and also since the evolution of the kind of Chinese commercial internet and we start to see huge social media companies like Weibor, like WeChat.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within China, obviously not a huge amount of resistance because this is a one party authoritarian state, which has a number of levels of control against people that try to work against it. Always helps outside of the country, you did see various groups of activists, of dissidents, the Falun Gong religious movement was a major kind of”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and I think this is what takes us back to the idea that these libertarian information wants to be free thinkers of the early stage of the internet didn't really put in particularly good protections for speech. Short of the political pressures against doing so in countries like the UK or the US, you could introduce the Great Firewall in pretty much any country. It would be a political decision to do so in politics is what would stop it or legal protections we have for speech and things like that. technologically it's not too difficult to do you know it takes a lot of investment to do it at the scale that China is doing it certainly but it's not it's not overly sophisticated”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Control, and let's say it can control enough of the information, enough of the time to make internet and speech on the internet far less of a threat to Beijing.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's better to think of it in a way that this is something that's evolved in a cat and mouse game with people trying to beat the sensors that as those efforts have got more sophisticated or they've just changed over time, the sensors have had to come up with new ways of preventing them. So in the beginning, the great firewall was very similar to any firewall that probably pretty much anyone listening will have had some kind of experience with either at an office or at school that, you know, that blocks certain websites, you know, it was essentially a porn filter for a long time in China. And then as the internet started to be used for more political purposes, you start seeing more and more political websites added. But then as people started to realize that things were getting blocked and they worked to get around those blocks by having tons and tons of mirrors of websites, by using proxy servers to get through the original.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, not very long. I mean, this was as pretty much as the internet was becoming a mass consumer product in China, it was also becoming a censored former communications. There was never any point where it was available to the majority of people in an uncensored form. And from a technological perspective, that was very easy for the government to do because the way that it had been built in there was also pretty much controlled top-down by the government through various utilities. There were limited access points between the very, very rudimentary Chinese internet at the time and the global internet. So it was quite easy for them to go in and put in controls, put in filters and firewalls and start censoring stuff. Though obviously in the early days, that was a very unsophisticated process that they were using.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so as the internet began to evolve in China and as it came to be introduced to the country, it followed a similar pattern to the US. This was mainly a thing that was being used by research institutions, scientists, universities. And then following, and it was, the government was paying attention to it in a way, but as a piece of new technology, not necessarily as a speech threat or something that they desperately needed control. But then following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, you kind of see both sides of this debate, people pushing for greater freedoms in China and also the government suddenly recognized the internet as a potential platform outside of government control, dissidents who had fled overseas started to use email servers and rudimentary bulletin boards to get their messages back into China. And then the authorities responded by very quick.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly ideologically that people were very opposed to censorship and there was this big kind of free speech ethos within Silicon Valley and also in the European areas of development of the internet. But I wouldn't say from a technical perspective stuff was particularly built in there. There was just this kind of assumption that in one of the old famous slogans was the internet would root around censorship, that just the nature of the tech that they were building would do this, but they didn't, I mean, from several generations down the line, we can see that they didn't actually put anything in place to prevent this from happening. But perhaps you could argue that they maybe thought they were.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as the internet kind of moved from being a first US military funded operation and then more of a scientific operation and became something closer to what we think of the internet today, facilitating communication around the world, letting people share anything they want. libertarian dream let's say of the internet as breaking down borders of letting people say whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted and in a way that would not only work against government censorship and control but would be impossible to censor or control that this would just simply defeat any government efforts to do so”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parts of the world, and if you do enjoy it, you can find a link to pre-order the new version of James's book in the podcast description. But now let's go to the episode. Hello and welcome to”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wednesday eight Law multi award winning actor known for his roles in Sherlock Holmes, the talented Mr Ripley, and the Grand Budapest Hotel, among others, will be joining us for a live recording of the hit podcast How I Found My Voice and you can join along for free and ask Jude your questions about his life and career. To do so just click the link in our episode description or go to intelligence square dot com slash attend and use the promo code podcast that's PODCAST at the checkout to get your exclusive free access to our live recording with Jude Law. That's promo code podcast pod CAST but now on to this week's episode where we were joined by James Griffiths who all the way from Hong Kong spoke to Carl Miller about how China built and controls an alternative version of the internet. It's a really fascinating conversation touching on Hong Kong coronavirus and how the Chinese model of controlling the internet is spreading to other parts.”
2021-08-17 · Intelligence Squared · China's Alternative Vision for the Internet, with James Griffiths and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source