As a Chinese, I really wonder whether the Chinese government is doing the same thing (or maybe several countries' governments are doing this?) I did have a friend who received immediate warning phone call from Ministry of State Security just a few minutes after he posted something controversial about government's ethnic policy. It was 2009 and he was using a campus computer. That's why I never put personal data on campus computers back in China.
You wonder if the Chinese government is doing the same thing?
I guess the answer is technically 'no', insofar that the NSA isn't doing anything like what the Chinese government is doing. I feel weird giving you these links, because frankly you should know more about this than I, but here you go anyway:
And a request to the site admins: could you rewrite all http links to wikipedia as https? This occurrence is common, and https-rewriting cannot be easily automated on all client browsers/platforms.
The Chinese Government has certificate authorities that are trusted in most browsers, and could easily MITM him from within the Great Firewall of China. How is HTTPS going to make a difference? :(
In the U.S. from about 1999 to 2013, we heard quite a lot about Chinese state control and monitoring of the Internet. In fact, it became a kind of paradigmatic, ideal example of a "bad" state that didn't trust people and had to practice control and monitoring of communications. People would say that restrictive policies and proposals were "like China", and that was a powerful way of criticizing them.
We also heard that the Chinese state was so disrespectful and unreasonable that it was hiring hackers (in the sense of people who break security) and hacking computers all over the world. This was also an example of its commitment to control and monitoring of communications, and its unwillingness to let people have freedom and autonomy.
Since then we learned that Western states are also committed to having the technical means to control and monitor the Internet, although the policies for which they apply these means have usually been different. (The Western states almost never want people to know that they're watching, and they tolerate speech that might threaten social harmony much better.)
Now that we're hearing about a wider range of states building up the tools to monitor and control Internet communications according to their various state policies, there will be an important challenge. Can we transfer the kind of outrage that we felt against the Chinese government to everyone else, or will state control of the Internet be normalized and accepted as inevitable? (The Chinese government often responded to criticism of its Internet control programs by arguing that all other governments did analogous things, maybe just in the context of somewhat different domestic legal systems, and that it was normal and inevitable for states to be able to know and control how people use computer networks.)
Most people here will tell you without hesitation the Chinese government is doing the same thing, and worse. It's common knowledge that Chinese aren't number one when it comes to human rights.
It's an interesting comment though because it reminds us we tend to be more suspicious with other governments than ours. Most americans don't see NSA activities as an issue. After all, they're the "good guys".
The PRC also has a written Constitution which includes provisions guaranteeing freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association (article 34), protection against unlawful arrest or unlawful search (articles 37 and 39), privacy of correspondence (article 40), and other many other important civil liberties.
That Constitution was adopted in 1982, over three decades ago.
I see it as extraordinarily important to ponder why the rights set out in the U.S. constitution often constrain state power so much more than the rights set out in the PRC constitution.
It's also worth noting that the modern understanding of much of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and especially a Supreme Court willing to use it to grant strong substantive relief against the government (and to use the fourteenth amendment to apply the same rules to state governments!) mostly came about during the 20th century. David Rabban wrote a paper ("The First Amendment in Its Forgotten Years"), later expanded into a book (Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920) that talks about the courts' extreme reluctance to understand the first amendment in the way we now do.
There are lots of theories about why civil liberties became more substantive, more cherished, more protected, and more a part of the culture in the U.S. -- but I don't think it can be merely a matter of their having been mentioned in the Constitution.
There is a lot of speculation that the Chinese govt has infiltrated its' network hardware company, Huawei, though I suppose there is also speculation the US govt has infiltrated Cisco and other vendors.
For those concerned about the original poster, it's relatively clear she or he is no longer in China, based on use of the term, "Back in China"..
Possibly a student who will return, and there's no telling whether their computer is hosting Chinese government spyware already. It seems like it would be a good idea to target anyone who has travelled over seas for additional screening, so not being in China may put them at even more risk.
I'd like to think that the Chinese government would be more targeted about what they infiltrated in this way, unlike the NSA. Would I be the least bit surprised if it was revealed that both Chinese and Russian state sponsored teams have hacked large swaths of the routing and SCADA control tiers in the US? Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me at all as it is in their best interests. This is the world we live in sadly.
The one upside of this is that as technologists, this gives us the ammo we need to really work on crypto and proactive security from the beginning. Things that were previously thought of as tin-foil paranoia, such as ssl communications from data center to data center on leased fiber lines, are now par for the course after it was shown that Google traffic was being intercepted at crossing points. As a US citizen, I almost see it as a duty to work on proactively securing things where possible, not just to prevent my own government, but potentially less friendly governments or organizations from snooping.
