WANG FONG
ALS-162
12/5/14
With the development of the technology, some criminal individuals and groups begin to make use of the internet as a way to do online criminal activities. Since the information is available online, the criminals can use the internet in many kind of ways such as websites, chat rooms and discussion groups to steal the useful and valuable information that they need. From my personal experience, Chinese authorities block sites including Twitter and Facebook by the Firewall. When I stayed in China, I also cannot read any news from many other foreign websites since our government control the internet environment by strong censoring or monitoring system. As the same situation in China, many other governments from all over the world attempt to monitor the internment with the purpose of tracking down the internet crimes or avoid terrorism activities. Some people think it is necessary for the government to monitor the internet activities in order to protect the security of the internet. However, others consider the government monitoring of internet activities to be a threat to personal privacy and security.
According to Katie Hunt and CY Xu in the article “China employs 2 million to police internet”, Chinese government hired millions of workers just to monitor the online activities. Hunt &Xu (2013) reported that the Chinese authorities aimed to eliminate the critical online opinions of the government from those anti-corruption protests or other rebel groups. Hunt &Xu (2013) also pointed out that the Chinese government spent a large amount of money on purchasing the technological equipment for searching the sensitive words or comments which may cost the reputation of the government. Hunt &Xu (2013) also employed an expert opinion from the Ministry of National Defense, who maintains that “The ranks of online censors outnumber China's active armed forces, which total 1.5 million”. This is a very persuasive evidence because it shows that the Chinese government concerned about the importance of the online security as much as the military security. Hunt &Xu (2013) also used an anecdotal story from Tang Xiaoxiao, who had been employed as a monitor for less than six month by a company that works on government projects and mentioned that his job is to “search for key words specified by his company's clients, monitors negative opinions and then compiles a report. Tang’s personal experience shows that the Chinese government made a lot of effort to train his staff to help to conceal any criticism of the government which exited online and the scale of the Internet monitoring business expanded.
In the article “UN response to surveillance must strike balance between privacy and security” written by Michael Bochenek, Brazil and Germany blamed for the overwhelming surveillance from United States and called for the government to protect the citizen’s privacy since the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) had “spied on 35 world leaders”. Bochenek （2013） argues that the increasing governmental monitoring activities through mobile apps ,emails or websites seriously threat the individual privacy. Bochenek （2013）mentioned that people are seems to be exposed to the public since the government can know about everything about our personal life from our dating mate to our health situation. Bochenek （2013）said that even though the governments claims that they may not share the information with others, their real movement is susceptible because they may trade those private information with other countries. Bochenek （2013）believes that the government should put the right of privacy as the priority and the strict governmental monitoring is not really necessary.
In the article “Governments Grow Bolder in Blocking Online Freedom”, written by Doug Bernard, more and more countries chose monitoring systems to know about citizens’ movements. Bernard (2014) mentioned that, according to a new report which is an annual survey of 65 governments