[121369] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: more news from Google
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Fred Baker)
Fri Jan 15 18:05:52 2010
From: Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com>
To: Anthony Uk <uk-nanog@dataway.ch>
In-Reply-To: <4B4DF570.6090100@dataway.ch>
Date: Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:05:07 -0800
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Jan 13, 2010, at 8:31 AM, Anthony Uk wrote:
> The ability to automatically discern users' political positions from
> their inbox is not one that any email provider reasonably needs.
I'm not Chinese, but putting myself in their position...
I would be surprised if they were trying to determine anyone's
political positions. Google's observation that the targeted parties
were dissidents suggests that they are known to be dissidents without
looking at their gmail content. If I were of the specified mindset and
were looking at their mail, I think I might be mapping dissident
networks to identify potential dissidents I was unaware of and looking
to see if they mentioned any specific plans or pointed to specific
content.
