Best Practice: Travel Light To China 334
Hugh Pickens writes "What may once have sounded like the behavior of a raving paranoid is now considered standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies as the NY Times reports how businesses sending representatives to China give them a loaner laptop and cellphone that they wipe clean before they leave and wipe again when they return. 'If a company has significant intellectual property that the Chinese and Russians are interested in, and you go over there with mobile devices, your devices will get penetrated,' says Joel F. Brenner, formerly the top counterintelligence official in the office of the director of national intelligence. The scope of the problem is illustrated by an incident at the United States Chamber of Commerce in 2010 when the chamber learned that servers in China were stealing information from four of its Asia policy experts who frequently visited China. After their trips, even the office printer and a thermostat in one of the chamber's corporate offices were communicating with an internet address in China. The chamber did not disclose how hackers had infiltrated its systems, but its first step after the attack was to bar employees from taking devices with them 'to certain countries,' notably China. 'Everybody knows that if you are doing business in China, in the 21st century, you don't bring anything with you,' says Jacob Olcott, a cybersecurity expert at Good Harbor Consulting. 'That's "Business 101" — at least it should be.'"
"Little bit ?" (Score:4, Informative)
China is 1.5 billion people. all of anglosphere and europe AND russia combined, cannot match that market. and its a growing market. not a saturated one.
Re:Pot calling kettle. (Score:2, Informative)
My cooking pots are stainless steel. My kettle is likewise stainless steel. Nether can talk and as far as I'm aware nether has racist tendencies.
Racist? The phrase has nothing to do with racism. A cooking pot or kettle, when used over an open fire, get sooty (i.e. black).
(Or, alternatively, the kettle is clean and shiny, as it's not put on an open fire. Then the pot's accusation is based on its own reflection in the kettle.)
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
Keep in mind that China has a recorded history of what, something between 11,000 and 17,000 years?
Say what ? The Qin Shi Huang Emperor "buried the scholars and burned the books" in 213 BCE so the history of anything much before his reign is exceedingly fragmentary. The oldest extant Chinese writings are the Oracle "bones" [wikipedia.org], which date from no earlier than 1500 BCE. Even Sima Qian started his history with the Yellow Emperor (~ 2600 BC), the first ruler he considered as probably historical.
So, two thousand years ? Yes. Three, four thousand ? Maybe. Ten thousand ? No way.
Re:Pot calling kettle. (Score:4, Informative)
Your question has been answered. There is no difference, there's just more of it.
I can't make a solid legal argument because it has not been tested. SCOTUS refused to rule on whether GPS tracking, as ean example of constant monitoring, is an invasion of privacy, solely because trespass was involved on placing it there. So the question of whether it is legal to record someone's movements constantly is an unresolved legal question.
It is not a foregone conclusion, as you seem to believe, that non-stop monitoring is perfectly legal. It will be done until it is challenged. Tracking software on top of automated drones makes it possible to track individuals going about their daily lives in fairly good detail at this point, were it allowed to continue. That level of detail is excessive compared to what law enforcement needs to do its job.
I happen to believe that the Constitution and Bill of Rights make it clear that as long as you're not bothering anyone, you're free to act unimpeded. When you start setting off enough flags that someone thinks you're doing something illegal, law enforcement will put together a warrant request and then are allowed to investigate. Constant monitoring, license plate tracking, internet interception, and all of the modern surveillance techniques are so far removed from what the Founding Fathers even considered that there is no way you can just assert it's fine without a court test.
In other words, the question is to you, to argue that this is not an invasion of privacy. Until it is answered by the courts, who have already trampled on just about everything else using a combination of terrorism and commerce clause to steamroll whatever we have left. One side pushes for more surveillance, the other pushes back, and then it gets resolved in a court. Until then you're going to have to bring more to the table than this as a defense.
Re:Why not an article "Travel Light to US"? (Score:2, Informative)
That's not even hard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_(signals_intelligence) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Pot calling kettle. (Score:2, Informative)
Blackadders pot is blacker than his kettle.