Great Firewall

There was this idea of the kind of the safe city, which basically mass surveillance inside urban spaces was actually originally proposed by IBM.

The technology that goes into the Great Firewall of China, so-called, is deep packet inspection, originally developed by Cisco, an American company.

And so lots of these kinds of things are deeply related because technology moves very freely across these boundaries, at least the software version of technology does.

Hardware, obviously, as we're saying with the prototyping stuff, much more complicated question, but the software at least very fluidly moves around the world.

But we should have years ago.

built the American equivalent of the Chinese Great Firewall.

There should be a mechanism in place to block any foreign actor who shows any hostile intent from accessing any part of the American Internet, and certainly any part of American infrastructure.

But our legislators simply don't have the education or the interest.

That's our concern.

What's your concern, China? Our concern is the CCP existing at all and the Great Firewall of China being penetrated by AI.

Like, oh, I forgot all about Tiananmen Square and how fragile the entire ecosystem is over there.

That really surprised me.

So let's talk about freedom of information in China.

This is one of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately, is that It's actually not that hard to break through the Great Firewall of China.

Not at all, in fact.

In fact, we use very effective technologies all the time to help Chinese read the Epoch Times, and millions and millions of them do so.

And China essentially erased it from the internet.

Now, they couldn't do much about stuff that had escaped onto the public internet outside of the Great Firewall of China, but they were able to successfully contain the story very, very easily inside their own country.

So I don't think they're worried one bit about rumors because they could start their own counter rumors.

Like, they have such a control over, uh, over, uh, the media inside of China that, uh, I really wouldn't worry too much I don't think they worry too much about some sort of secret getting out.

At least 15 other countries have partially or completely banned the app in 2022 and 2023.

Technology Trade Protectionism Other observers argue that TikTok is caught in the crosshairs of a global technology battle, and that a unilateral US ban on any app may be comparable to China's Great Firewall.

The Great Firewall has been described as, quote, "...a system of surveillance and blocking technology that prevents Chinese citizens from viewing websites outside the country." End quote.

End footnote.

One way to potentially understand US and Chinese government actions in this dispute may be through the concept of techno-nationalism, which refers to a country's refusal or reluctance to import other countries' advanced technology, as well as to export or to allow other nations to benefit from its own advanced technology.