Category: surveillance

Hunt, through a non-sexist prism

So, did ya ever want to know social network analysis metrics on the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport’s special advisers during the spring of 2011, as Rupert Murdoch’s interests in the UK feverishly lobbied Jeremy Hunt and his staff and we raced towards the epochal eruption of Hackgate? ‘Course you did.

In June, 2011, Adam Smith, Hunt’s special adviser and the man who took the fall for his boss, attained a gatekeepership score of 1.42 – that is to say, people who lobbied him achieved a 42% greater improvement in their influence as measured by weighted network degree than the average lobby achieved. He did this on a personal weighted network degree of 0.175, which is piss-ant. His score on the West Point GREEDY_FRAGILE metric, which calculates how much more or less centralised the overall network would be without him, is -6.21635100991e-06.

In May, 2011, his colleague Sue Beeby achieved an even higher gatekeepership, 1.56, and the month before, she was actually the most powerful gatekeeper in the system after excluding the Scottish and Welsh Offices, at 1.928 on a network degree of 0.0875, and a GF of -7.92399753226e-06.

Who was getting this access? The answer is in Smith’s case, “big sport”, the FA, the ECB, and the RFU, although the Rugby League did manage to see him too. It turns out Beeby is far more interesting. In the first 6 months of 2011, she saw The Times 37 times, the Sunday Times 37 times, and Sky TV 8 times.

She also met “sports journalists”, the Daily Telegraph, the Financial Times, the English Cricket Board, and a PR company called Good Relations which only occurs in the dataset 5 times, all meeting her in March of that year. In the aggregate, the vast majority of influence going in here came from Murdoch.

She moved on with Hunt to the Department of Health, and lists herself on LinkedIn as a Conservative Party press officer. I don’t remember there being anywhere near as much fuss about her, though, as there was about Smith.

(Inspiration, of course, here.)

A very Blairite disaster

So, the Kenyan Police counter-terrorism spokesman has this to say:

“Kenya’s government arrested Michael Olemendis Ndemolajo. We handed him to British security agents in Kenya and he seems to have found his way to London and mutated to Michael Adebolajo,” a Kenyan counter-terrorism spokesman, Muthui Kariuki, told the Associated Press. He added: “The Kenyan government cannot be held responsible for what happened to him after we handed him to the British authorities.”

Assorted relatives and friends seem to think the question is more whether the British had any business asking him questions while he was under the control of the Kenyans, who are alleged to have brutalised him in various ways. Further, the security service’s approach to recruiting informers seems to involve following them around and repeatedly buttonholing them, openly, in the street.

It sounds like an out-take from Four Lions – secret intelligence with a GOLF SALE sign. Perhaps the aim was actually deliberately overt, public, in your face surveillance, rather than recruitment, as a deterrent or an example to others. Either way, I think we can all agree that the situation has not developed to our advantage.

Which reminded me of this classic Daniel Davies post:

young Muslim men are exactly the ones who are vulnerable to being drawn into violent extremist movements, and their parents have both much better information about this happening than we do, and a powerful interest in stopping their sons turning into suicide bombers. In actual fact, [the launch of the CONTEST strategy was] yet another god-damned own goal which had the effect of getting peoples’ backs even further up.

How could this have been sold better?

Well, it seems to me that if the action that you want to achieve is “hand your children over to us”, the very most obvious message that you need to add to that is “we promise that we will keep them safe”. However, since our government currently has as its policy that it wants to hold people for 90 days without trial, and to extradite them without hearings to the Americans, who in turn might subject them to extraordinary rendition and waterboarding, we are not currently in a position to make that promise. We need to get into a position to make that promise, and fast.

A policy recommendation – if an allied police force catches someone like this, treat it as a consular matter and fetch the guy back to the UK. Then it can be a police matter. Or the secret services could try to persuade him to inform…in secret. Just letting the Kenyans or whoever batter him is just as bad and fools nobody. It also makes the UK look duplicitous and underhand as well as ruthless.

I suspect this is better advice than any of the barrage of availability entrepreneurship spewing from the surveillance industry, Hazel Blears, Hitchens Minor 2.0, or the swarm of assorted grant-seeking missiles this sad event has released.

Not this shit again. In which I praise a Tory

Remember the magic lie-detector voice analyzer? It’s baaack. Also, Cornish Tory councillor Fiona Ferguson is a mensch.

Here’s the story; it seems the council hired Capita aka Crapita to put the fear of God into people claiming single person’s council tax discount (THE BASTARDS!). Capita, which is the sole UK distributor of 100% guaranteed pure snake oil Nemesysco’s patent voice-stress analyzer that doesn’t work, proposed to ring ‘em up and wave the dead chicken at them.

Fiona Ferguson remembered the story, (I presume) googled, noted that the Department of Work & Pensions had tried it and found it useless, and decided to tell them to bugger off. But it was too late…

“I have discussed this matter with the monitoring officer. He has advised me that, as this is an operational matter in relation to a contract that the council has already entered into, he strongly advises me that I should not require that this software is not used. If, contrary to his advice, I maintain my stance that we must not use this software then officers will comply, provided you also agree.

You [Jim Currie, the council leader] have made it clear to me that you will not agree. Indeed, you have said that I will be ‘sacked’ if I inform members [of the council] that this software will be used. That will not be necessary. Please accept my resignation with immediate effect.”

M-Health apps that don’t suck.

Pretty much everyone in the mobile business loves “m-health” these days. There are a couple of reasons for this – they imagine there’s money in it, it’s great CSR/public relations/lobby fodder, and it’s the sort of thing futurists chinstroke about. But I think we’re all barking up the wrong tree.

Here’s the problem. The typical use-case is as follows – it’s something integrated in a special-purpose medical device, that is sold, and whose function is monitoring. What it monitors, in particular, is the patient or as we know her, the user, or indeed you. It is of course telling that you’re not considered the user. Partly, what’s going on here is that we’ve just repackaged 1980s SCADA technology. Here’s a SIM, here’s a cellular radio, and let’s have the flood level gauge text headquarters every five minutes. You’ll also note that there is no user interface.

The stereotype application could be defined as “bugging granny”. We’re going to check some metrics at intervals, stick them into a control chart, and then badger you about it.

Who does this really benefit? Obviously, device vendors, and telcos. It also benefits doctors, both in an absolute sense, and in a relative sense – a lot of this stuff would otherwise have been carried out by nurses, who are icky, girls, and in the union. It also attracts pseudomedical systems like insurance companies.

The underlying mental model here can be characterised as the surveillance-compliance model. The basic idea is that patients’ problems are their own stupid fault, and if they remain ill, it is because they didn’t comply with instructions. Monitoring generates metrics. They can be judged on the metrics and badgered. You get some lip service to patient autonomy, but to some extent all this does is to demand that the user internalises the surveillance. It is very depressing the extent to which doctors talk about “managing” their patients these days.

Now, there is obviously some truth to this. Giving up smoking is a really good idea, as is taking your damn pills. But it is also highly problematic. For one thing, it assumes that the problem is non-compliance. In that sense, it transfers your problem from the domain of reality – a physical problem to be solved – into the domain of morality – a statement about good and bad. Rather than being poor, stressed, addicted, etc, the problem is that you are wrong and a bad person. As a rule, this is normatively evil, and of course it only works if the problem is not actually a real problem.

Another problem is that it assumes that the medics are always right. They aren’t. And replacing the front-line carers with SCADA technology can be see as a way of hiding from criticism. You can shout at the box but it doesn’t record your voice and report that back.

Also, there is the surveillant temptation. If the surveillance itself doesn’t work – and it won’t, for reasons we have seen – the answer is usually to enforce it. Perhaps your sick pay might be cut, or your premiums hiked. I’m sure we can all name politicians who would fucking jump at this.

So, Cap’n Swing he say LUDD SMASH. Or…Stafford Beer, he say redesign system. What would a user-driven m-health app look like? One that was pro-you? One whose design brief began “Don’t be evil”?

Well, I would start by thinking about how to manage your environment in hospital. This is notoriously vital and difficult, and the current staff-solution is to get a really tough, intelligent, and assertive woman to visit every day and whip the piss out of the medics. But having someone like my partner around is a rare privilege and one which is unavoidably class-skewed, because it really helps to be of similar or higher social status than the doctors and also to know their code-words.

At this point you might think we’d stumbled into a TV show called Operationalise This!

But let’s consider this from a systems perspective. Most of the time, what is it that you’re actually doing by monstering the doc? It’s usually either trying to extract information, or else to intervene in the ward’s operational routine on things like hydration, food, sanitation, and nursing care.

Someone close to me was recently in hospital and needed various post-surgical care, which they were only insufficiently getting because they were in the wrong ward and being taken care of by people outside their specialisation. As a result they were in serious pain, and their recovery was making no noticeable progress. The problem was to find out what instructions had been actually written down and compiled into the ward routine, make the specialist aware of this, and get them to insert correct ones into the system. These are not, in fact, tasks that can’t be operationalised.

This is rather like Doc Searles’ notion of Vendor Relations Management or VRM as the opposite of CRM. The problem is getting a look at the invisible infrastructure of instructions, records, and organisation that defines the hospital environment.

When another relative of mine was seriously ill not so long ago, I got into the habit of photographing all the paper that crossed his bedside, so as to have copies for reference and also so as to distribute them to other members of the family. (At one point, I half-inched the case file and perched on a bed to photograph it page by page, like Olga the beautiful spy with her microfilm camera.)

Medical systems are very papery, and they do have their reasons – if you have to evacuate the flooded building into ambulances with the power out at 3am, you can just take the file along with each patient and you’ll be able to read it at the far end, and a lot of information technology still can’t really say that. However, there’s a lot of interesting stuff you can do with paper and mobile devices.

The really depressing thing here is that had we gone a different way in 2002 we could have had an Open311 or FixMyStreet for hospitals. But we don’t have sensible data exchange formats, privacy/authorisation models, or URIs for any of this stuff because Tony Blair said so, and by the time Gordon Brown was listening to people like Tim Berners-Lee and Tom Watson, the NHS NPfIT (like the National Identity Register) had become a bureaucratic-industrial monster so big it took a government-killing nuclear bomb to stop it. And the Tories…well, you’ve never seen people who are more suspectible to Atos Origin lobbying them to make sick pay conditional on adequate five-a-day performance, have you? Really? No.

Now, the other problem from my point of view is that my customers, over on the other side of the fence, still believe that this time, it’s going to be like they thought it would with ISDN and IMS and so on and so forth. Everything is a network service. Delivered by us. But I don’t think it will happen. As an industry, we have a terrible record of pushing things that make sense from our point of view but just suck, so badly that they never happen.

Lib Dems: not quite useless

So, Wired writes up three West Point professors and their algorithm to decide which members of a terrorist network to zap. Apparently they implemented it in 30 lines of Python. The paper is here, with some pseudocode and the tantalising hint that they used NetworkX, but no Python. However, even the Wired piece tells us enough to reverse engineer it.

The key idea here is that whacking terrorist leaders is often stupid, because it causes the enemy to adopt a flatter, more decentralised, and therefore less vulnerable network structure. Also, they point out, the leaders are often forces for restraint and points of contact for negotiation.

Being who they were, they decided that they could fix this with a better optimisation. They looked at the network-wide degree centrality, a measurement of the centralisation or otherwise of the whole network which is defined as the fraction of total nodes in the network an average node is connected to. They then asked how this changed when they removed a node from the network. And they reasoned that increasing it was desirable, as it rendered the network overall more fragile and unstable.

Now, the Lobster Project uses weighted betweenness centrality – the fraction of the shortest routes through the network that pass through a given node, with more important nodes being accounted for as such – as its centrality metric. There is no particular reason to think that this would work differently.

So I thought I’d implement it. Their implementation used 30 lines, but I presume that includes the test harness to generate or load a specimen network as well as the analysis. Here goes:

def greedy_fragile(mgraph, month, mini, nodes):
...network_wide_centrality = float(sum(nodes.values())/len(nodes.values()))
...mgraph.remove_node(mini[0])
...n = centrality_nodes(mgraph)
...nwc = float(sum(n.values())/len(n.values()))
...mgraph.add_node(mini[0], mini[1])
...return {'Minister': mini[0], 'Title': mini[1]['Title'], 'Department': mini[1]['Department'], 'Date': month, 'Greedy_Fragile': network_wide_centrality - nwc}

mgraph is the NetworkX graph object, month is the month, mini is the minister (or lobby), nodes is the precomputed list of nodes and their centrality values. Obviously, if it wasn’t for the weird datastore thing I’d have done this recursively and made it return the values for the whole network rather than calling it for each node.

And it works. The first result was that one particular minister was slightly reducing the overall centralisation (and therefore fragility/instability) of the system as a whole. And he’s Ed Davey. As the point of having Lib Dems is meant to be reducing the centrality of Dave from PR and paddock-boy in the system, this suggests that we shouldn’t get rid of him yet.

TYR Rewind. So, those logs.

TYR Rewind. I wonder if there was ever an audit of the UK mobile network operators’ lawful intercept logs?

We know that the network of private investigators around the NOTW were able to locate mobile phones, by paying a corrupt copper £500 a dip.

If the copper could do that, they could also listen to the calls or, to be honest, do what they liked. Who was the copper? Was she or he the only one? Do we know how many requests came from them? What measures have been taken to secure the lawful intercept interfaces of UK mobile networks?

the intersection of Leveson and political plane-spotting

So, the Southern Investigations wing of the Murdoch scandal just woke up again. It seems that Jonathan Rees, the guy whose business partner in the dodgy detective agency run by moonlighting cops got axed to death and the cop investigating the case took his place before he went to jail as a kiddy fiddler – that guy – you know, says the News of the World hired his firm to watch the then head of the Met, Stevens.

Because of the killing and the planting evidence on the lady and a lot of other stuff, the Met was trying to spy on Rees’ firm at the time, by planting an undercover cop with them. As the firm consisted entirely of undercover cops, this has a distinct taste of The Secret Agent about it.

Anyway, the cop, Derek Haslam, isn’t happy and is in fact suing the Met. Haslam claims that News International were spying on Stevens in order to exert influence on him. This isn’t too crazy, as we know Rees’ long term customer at the News of the World, Alex Marunchak, had Rees’ business follow Dave Cook, the detective investigating the Morgan case, using News vehicles. He also says Rees was hired to spy on, well, Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, and John Yates, who of course was one of the cops who decided there was nothing worth investigating. And he ought to know, as he was in place up to 2006, when he suspects his computer was hacked.

Now Rees claims the surveillance was directed against a rogue group of cops, at the wishes of the Met leadership, and that’s why there was a police informer placed within his company. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he even believes it. A lot of the people involved are obviously beyond anything as obvious as allegiance. Rees is probably going to try and rebrand himself as one of the victims.

Here’s something interesting, though. Rees:

“We were given instructions and an allegation that he [Stevens] was using a Met police plane from Biggin Hill to see his mistress in Northumbria.

“Now we did organise a surveillance team because it’s what the News of the World wanted and we had team in Northumbria and here, but he never showed so whether the allegation is true or not, who knows.

“The allegation was that he was using…a Metropolitan police federation plane bought by donations from charity, and the petrol, the fuel, to travel up to Northumbria to see his mistress. You can see why people wanted…that story.”

A Met Police plane? This reminded me of something. In October last, in the full flight of the scandal, the Torygraph reported that the Met was operating some fixed-wing aircraft secretly. Supposedly, the two Reims-Cessna 406 were platforms for communications interception, which sounds more like the slack-dozen of RAF and Army Air Corps Islanders that operate from Northolt and elsewhere.

More to the point, as the paper put it, the planes had never been mentioned to the Met Police Authority or as far as I can make out, anyone else. Even more to the point, their registration with the CAA was rather unusual. A nonexistent leasing firm, based at a not-my-address mailbox firm. One of the names is a cop, and then there was the bent copper turned fake Scottish laird..but that’s the Torygraph’s scoop.

So here are the aeroplanes registered to “Nor Leasing”. G-BVJT, serial number 0073, and G-TDSA, serial number 0096. JT has been with “Nor Leasing” since 1995. The names associated are Peter Bennett, Richard Gray, John Charles Carnt (that’s the copper), Stephen Frank Herbert, Mark Evans, and Andrew Jay. SA was registered to “Nor Leasing” in December 2008. Names associated are William Johnson and Mark Evans. So there’s a common mode, even if he’s probably not the Sky News guy.

A footnote: Rees described the aircraft as a “Met Police federation” one, which may be interesting or may just be garbled or possibly sarcastic.

There is no post-liberal future; there is only a post-liberal present

FCR is wondering if we face a Post-Liberal Future. Unfortunately, his sources are David Goodhart and Michael White, two men who have been vigorously promoting the unpopular populism of very real concerns ever since it became fashionable in about 2004.

I associate the phrase “unpopular populism” with Jamie Kenny or possibly Daniel Davies, but Google tells me it’s been independently rediscovered many, many times. Here, it means a form of political pandering to the supposedly reactionary instincts of the public which is in fact directed at the elite, as a means of ideological policing. For example, a politician might suddenly discover a need to hate the European Union just-a-bit rather than discuss why median wages were stagnating. It’s commonly called populism, but not many people actually care much about the EU, so it’s not popular.

Anyway, there is no Post-Liberal Future, except in the sense that near-future science fiction is about the near future. We are living in the post-liberal future. The unpopular populists – the people I call the modern thinkers – have made their choice. They aren’t thinking of backing off on economic liberalism, or rather, neoliberalism.

They do, however, dislike some manifestations of a liberal society, and they consider this to be a political program. The anxiety and resentment of living in the neoliberal economy can be relieved by the consolations of social illiberalism. However, there is a hook here. It is true, as Rick says, that social liberalism won beyond its wildest dreams. Rolling this stuff back is a pain in the arse and not obviously good for business. Overt racism, homophobia, and some forms of sexism are out.

But there is more to freedom than the absence of the Klan. The modern thinkers target a complex and hard-to-summarise gaggle of ideas, more an aesthetic than an interest group or an ideology. It is easier to sum up what they want – basically, they simultaneously want conformism and the diversity they claim to value. This involves: economic neo-liberalism, but only up to a point. Exclusivity comes before actual competition, which is well known to be a force that can disrupt and change hierarchies of authority, for good or ill.

Phenomena like the London Olympics brand exclusion zone, perhaps the only advertising project to include its own anti-ballistic missile system, China’s urban management personnel or chengguan, a system which combines elements of low-level social policing, planning enforcement, and organised crime, or the deranged plan to embed thousands of “Emmas” from A4E into individual families in the UK, are all manifestations of the post-liberal environment.

The logic is circular. It is assumed that the instincts of the people are reactionary. Therefore their interests do not need to be served. Therefore, should they be discontented, the way to stay in power is to offer them the spectacle of the kind of people the elite think they think ought to be punished (an example of the Keynesian beauty contest) getting their deserts. And if the people remain discontented, they are obviously union extremists, paranoids, conspiracy theorists, the authors of anti-social behaviour. And we know what’s good for them.

not at all defanged

Remember that thumbsucker I did on the Great Firewall? Well, here’s some data, via this post (thanks, Jamie). It seems that Fang Binxing, China’s Chief Bellhead, boss of the Beijing University of Post & Telecoms, and king of the great firewall, really is in trouble due to his special relationship with Bo Xilai. He briefly came up on the web to threaten to sue a Japanese newspaper which thinks he was detained for investigation. Then, the former head of Google in China (who obviously isn’t neutral in this) prodded him, and he denied having the power to block the offending story.

The FT, meanwhile, thinks Zhou Yongkang, the head of the security establishment, is on the out. That shouldn’t be overstated because he’s due to retire, but he has been doing a rubber chicken circuit of second-division official appearances, and his key responsibilities have been taken over by others.

Fang is supposedly being replaced by Yan Wangjia, CEO of Beijing Venustech, who was responsible for engineering the Great Firewall. Her company’s Web site is convincing on that score. Here’s the announcement that they got the contract to provide China Mobile with a 10 gigabit DPI system:

Recently, Venustech successfully won the bid for centralized firewall procurement project of China Mobile in 2009 with its 10G high-end models of Venusense UTM, thus becoming the first company of its kind to supply high-end security gateway to telecom operators.

It is said this centralized firewall procurement project is the world’s largest single project of high-end 10G security gateway procurement ever implemented, drawing together most of world-renowned communication equipment vendors and information security vendors such as Huawei and Juniper. Through the rigorous test by China Mobile, Venusense UTM stood out, making Venustech the only Chinese information security vendor in this bid.

Looking around, it sounds like they are the hardware vendor of the Great Firewall, specialising in firewall, intrusion detection, and deep-packet inspection kit for the governmental, educational, and enterprise sectors “and of course the carriers”. Well, who else needs a 10Gbps and horizontally scaling DPI box but a carrier? Note the careful afterthought there. Also, note that they’re the only people in the world who don’t think Cisco is a leading network equipment vendor.

Canalising the marshes: tidying up the people

Well, this is interesting, both on the Bo Xilai story and also on the general theme of the state of the art in contemporary authoritarianism. It looks like a major part of the case is about BXL’s electronic surveillance of Chongqing and specifically of top national-level Chinese officials:

One political analyst with senior-level ties, citing information obtained from a colonel he recently dined with, said Mr. Bo had tried to tap the phones of virtually all high-ranking leaders who visited Chongqing in recent years, including Zhou Yongkang, the law-and-order czar who was said to have backed Mr. Bo as his potential successor. “Bo wanted to be extremely clear about what leaders’ attitudes toward him were,” the analyst said.

That’s Zhou Yongkang as in the head of the whole Chinese internal security structure, cops, spooks, and all. Bo’s police chief (and future sort-of defector) Wang Lijun is described as being “a tapping freak”, addicted to the productivity and hence apparent power of electronic intelligence. Not only that, Wang eventually began tapping Bo, who was also tapping the CDIC feds who came down to keep an eye on him.

The practicalities are, as always, interesting.

The architect was Mr. Wang, a nationally decorated crime fighter who had worked under Mr. Bo in the northeast province of Liaoning. Together they installed “a comprehensive package bugging system covering telecommunications to the Internet,” according to the government media official.

One of several noted cybersecurity experts they enlisted was Fang Binxing, president of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, who is often called the father of China’s “Great Firewall,” the nation’s vast Internet censorship system.

It’s worth pointing out that the provincial networks belonging to China Mobile, China Telecom etc. are usually organised as companies in their own right, and they often have their own AS numbers, and indeed they often contract for substantial network development projects with Western vendors (Nokia Siemens recently had a big mobile network contract in Sichuan, notably) on their own right.

Anyway, Fang’s involvement is very interesting indeed. He is responsible for the state-of-the-art authoritarian solution to the Internet. This is not just, or even primarily, a question of blacklisting websites or turning off the Internet. The Great Firewall’s detailed design, as the Cambridge Computer Lab found out a while ago, is specifically intended to be a semi-permeable membrane. Rather like Hadrian’s Wall, it is more about the gates through it than the wall itself, and the defences point in both directions.

When a computer within it tries to initiate a TCP connection to one outside that is classified as dodgy, the Firewall sends an RST message back to kill the connection. This permits much higher performance than the DNS-based blacklisting typical of, say, the UAE.

It also means that it’s possible to ignore the RST and look through the firewall by using your own firewall utility (specifically, set something like iptables to drop any RSTs for connections in states other than ESTABLISHED before a suitable time has elapsed). However, it would be a fair guess that any traffic doing this is logged and analysed more deeply.

Further, there is a substantial human infrastructure linking the media/PR/propaganda system, the police system, and the Ministry of the Information Industry. This uses tools such as moderation on big Web forums, direct recruitment, harassment, or persuasion of important influencers, the development of alternative opposition voices, and the use of regime loyalist trolls (the famous wumaodang).

The firewall, like Hadrian’s Wall or the original Great Wall, also has an economic function. This acts as a protectionist subsidy to Chinese Internet start-ups and a tariff barrier to companies outside it. Hence the appearance of some really big companies that basically provide clones of Twitter et al. Because the clones are inside the firewall, they are amenable to management and moderation. 

And none of this detracts from the genuine intention of the people at 31 Jin-rong Street, the China Telecom HQ, to wire up the whole place. Iran’s surprisingly important role providing broadband to Afghanistan and diversionary links to the Gulf reminds us that providing connectivity can be a powerful policy tool and one that you can use at the same time as informational repression.

So, Fang’s achievement is basically a package of technical and human security measures that let whoever is in charge of them command the context Web users experience.

Last autumn, several of the Chinese web startups were subjected to the combined honour and menace of a visit from top securocrats. Tencent, the owner of QQ and the biggest of the lot, got Zhou Yongkang in person. In hindsight, this will have been around the time the CDIC landed in Chongqing.

So, where am I going with this? Clearly, there was serious disquiet that somebody was usurping the right to control the wires. Even more disquieting, the surveillance establishment in Fang’s person seemed to be cooperating with him. And the systems he set up worked just as well for someone increasingly seen as a dangerous rebel as they did for the central government. (In fact, the people who like to complain about Huawei equipment in the West have it the wrong way round. It’s not some sort of secret backdoor they should be worrying about: it’s the official stuff.)

I do wonder, depending on what happens to Fang (he’s still vanished, but his Weibo feed has started updating again), if we might not see a relaxation of the firewall, which the pundits will consider “reform”. In fact it will be no such thing, rather a cranking up of internal chaos to facilitate a crackdown on opposition.