I'm playing catch-up on reading postponed by last week's "indisposition," and two particular articles from @artechnica kind of knocked together: "How Nokia helped Iran "persecute and arrest dissidents" and "China and Google playing game of Chicken over censorship."
Then I realized that it wasn't just outrage over companies like Nokia and Google going over to The Dark Side. It's also the ridiculous notions that companies are humoring tyrannical governments (or even theoretically democratic ones like New Zealand) in their delusion that they can cherry-pick technology at will. Frankly, it's as stupid as people who use the communiations smorgasbord of the internet as an echo chamber to circulate email and visit websites that reinforce their pet conspiracy theories or find (cough!) "evidence" to support quack notions.
And the bottom line is that there's no having technology both ways. The only real choice is between having technology at all or living in the Dark Ages. Not to go all Godwin, but the argument that following local laws absolved a corporation from charges of collaboration didn't hang in the last century. And if, in future decades, the dissidents (or their families) sue the shorts off the Nokias and Ciscos who dobbed them in to their soi-dissant "governments," I fervently hope that there is no mercy in the settlements. Live by the greenback, die by the greenback, you craven slimeballs.
But if the next global growth industry is technology that allows people to circumvent the snooping of their governments--no matter how democratic--so much the better.
