The Urban Dictionary defines a monkey trap as a snare for “animals too smart to fall for an ordinary trap i.e. monkeys and people. It works by appealing to their greed such as a job that sucks but pays to well to let go of, or a relationship which is empty or destructive but offers certain perks which make it hard to escape.
The original monkey trap involves a hollow coconut chained to a stake and baited with food. It has a hole large enough for the monkey to put its hand into, but too small to remove its hand while holding the bait. The monkey needs only to let go to escape, but gets caught because it refuses to let go in its panic to keep its precious find.” For those who would laugh at the stupidity of monkeys the Urban Dictionary article notes that humans have been known to fall for the same snare. One prime example is that of a job that the employee hates, but is too well-paid for him to quit.
The Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Crovitz suggests using a monkey trap — China’s desire for profit — to moderate its authoritarian tendencies in information technology. The latest proposal from Beijing is to build surveillance and control devices into the hardware of personal computers.
Beijing recently announced that starting on July 1, all computers sold in China must come installed with government-designed software to block pornography. Testing by Internet experts shows that the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, also is designed to censor political and religious Web sites, disable programs when people input sensitive words, monitor personal communications, and track where Chinese citizens go on the Web.
In essence, bureaucrats in China want the world’s computer makers to make it easier for their Thought Police to block access to news and information from the outside world, and to punish citizens for the sites they visit and the views they express online.
And as we all know, when Beijing wants something, its market power makes Western governments, suppliers and service providers fall into line. The Green Dam-Youth Escort system provides all the hints necessary. Suddenly sensitive people will discover the virtues of restrictive chips because it is “for the children” or is good for power management. With the words “Green”, “Youth” and “Escort”, a spinmeister can create a justification for anything. What will stop China from insisting on its plan? Crovitz has little faith in the power of politicians to resist the Beijing and no illusions about China’s desire for control, but he does see one motivation which may moderate it: greed.
Yet when the interests of foreign businesses coincide with the interests of the Chinese people, the kowtow may not be the only corporate option. Consider a precedent from the 1990s. Xinhua, the state news agency, demanded that foreign financial-information providers let government bureaucrats decide what information could be reported and also demanded a big share of the revenues. Dow Jones, which publishes the Journal, and Reuters teamed up to fight the regulations.
James McGregor was the top Dow Jones executive in China at the time. (I was responsible for the company’s financial-information operations in Asia.) Mr. McGregor recounts in his book on doing business in China, “One Billion Customers,” how two years of lobbying headed off the regulations. The focus was on Chinese ministries such as foreign trade and foreign affairs, as well as Chinese stock-market regulators and central bankers who understood that Chinese financial professionals need access to sound information to make investment and trading decisions.
In other words, in order to have any chance to stop the Green Dam-Youth Escort system, the West must make the case that censorship, at least in its most repressive forms, is expensive and unprofitable. That’s the only thing that will work. Appeals to morality, human rights and the ideals of ancient Greece are unlikely to make much impression on the men in Beijing. But the sound of a cash register sounding — or at least the prospect of a cash register not sounding — may have a greater effect.
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21 Comments
1. Blindman:Gumption Traps:
These can be created if you tell the Chinese to build their own computers preferably with their own state run corporations.
“Throughout the process of fixing the machine things always come up, low quality things, from a dusted knuckle to an accidentally ruined ‘irreplaceable’ assembly. These drain off gumption, destroy enthusiasm and leave you so discouraged you want to forget the whole business.”- Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig.
What the Chicoms really want is to have their toll house cookies and eat them too. I suppose that you can call that a chip trap.
Jun 22, 2009 - 9:23 pm 2. Lifeofthemind:A simple lesson. Behold the Islamic world, subtract transfer payments from energy extraction.
Do you want your country to end up like that? Now that you understand the impact of stultifying thought control on wealth creation perhaps we can find a better model to emulate.
Think of the children
Jun 22, 2009 - 9:27 pm 3. Robohobo:I can see the current crop in DC liking this development. They would want to implement here for Power & Control. It’s for the ‘children’ you know.
Chilling.
Jun 22, 2009 - 9:27 pm 4. bits:mmmmmmm coconuts
‘ the Green Dam-Youth Escort system ‘
thanks Ritchard, this on made my day complete
Jun 22, 2009 - 9:48 pm 5. Tcobb:In other words, in order to have any chance to stop the Green Dam-Youth Escort system, the West must make the case that censorship, at least in its most repressive forms, is expensive and unprofitable. That’s the only thing that will work. Appeals to morality, human rights and the ideals of ancient Greece are unlikely to make much impression on the men in Beijing. But the sound of a cash register sounding — or at least the prospect of a cash register not sounding — may have a greater effect.
Jun 22, 2009 - 10:30 pm 6. Alexis:Perhaps. Just perhaps–but there is something about ruling political classes that resonates through time–once entrenched enough they cannot even conceive of a political order that does not include them, let alone one which would consider them to be insignificant people. They actually begin to believe their own lies, and when you start doing that the Angel of Doom will fly down upon you. And time and time again, such idiots are hurled into the dustbin of history.
I think one form of the monkey trap is a politician who lets his desire for political power cloud his political judgment.
Another form of the monkey trap comes from becoming so fixated upon defeating domestic political rivals that one can no longer tell the difference between friends and enemies abroad. There are those who regard “conservatives” or “liberals” as so inherently evil that they would regard anything that hurts such people as a good thing even if it damages the United States.
Imagine a man so consumed with hate and so fixated upon demonizing “Republicans” and “neoconservatives” that he is unable to see the situation in Iran in terms of American political interests. In particular, he becomes unable to understand how Obama’s offer of talks with the Iranian regime combined with limp protests against the Iranian government’s brutality could actually be interpreted as a de facto endorsement of the Iranian government by the time those remarks get halfway across the world.
Yes, the Iranian government seizes upon foreign remarks. You know what? The Iranian government will also seize upon every foreign remark that denounces those who stand with the protestors! How would Keith Olbermann like it when his denunciations of Americans who have voiced support for the Iranian opposition get repeated by Iran’s state media? How would Keith Olbermann like it were he to become a media darling of al-Manar? Think it couldn’t happen? Think again!
Few things embolden tyrants more than de facto statements of support or appeasement from the leaders of free countries. For political and media personalities, every statement has a price. The price may be hidden, but it is always there.
Jun 22, 2009 - 11:01 pm 7. rufus:The main reason it won’t work is, “It won’t work.” The intertubes ain’t built that way.
Jun 23, 2009 - 12:23 am 8. George Atkisson:Or perhaps, after 6 months of delivering said machines, let the NY Times ‘leak’ that all Green Dam equipped computers had back doors and Trojans installed, so that the NSA/CIA can hack any and all computers so equipped to steal data, create botnets, or simply erase the hard drive.
The Chinese leadership just might decide that requiring outsourced software is a very, very bad idea indeed.
Jun 23, 2009 - 1:01 am 9. David Boggs:I agree with Rufus: “The intertubes ain’t built that way”. It can’t work.
Also, check out this story about how some of the Green Dam software appears to be stolen code:
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/06/16/1422235/Chinas-Green-Dam-No-Longer-Compulsory-May-Have-Lifted-Code
Jun 23, 2009 - 1:46 am 10. Mark:Democracies are more inventive than dictatorships in making monkey traps.
Number of pages in the US tax code: 67,024
Unfunded Medicare liabilities: $61.6 trillion
Jun 23, 2009 - 4:43 am 11. lc:Excellent thought provoking post, as usual. I suppose the monkey trap analogy could be applied to many situations, from a number of perspectives. What comes to my mind is an incident like that of Srebinica, where those charged with protection and support end up helping the murderers and rapists carry out their outrages; a whole different quality from the True Believer – yet not really the “good German” attitude (as Hunter Thompson would put it) but something similar, and probably equally as wicked.
“One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.”
How did Frodo resist?
Jun 23, 2009 - 4:49 am 12. Brock:The “Green Dam Youth Escort” (GDYE) -is- the monkey trap for the Chinese government. They want the control it promises, but they’ll reap the whirlwind. I’m pretty sure that within a few months of the GDYE, several things will happen:
1. An open source “patch”, spread widely on the Internet, will make a home computer look like the GDYE is working and functional from the government thought police’s p.o.v., but won’t actually report any activity. This patch will also shield the computer from being hacked through any open ports created by the GDYE, possibly by creating a virtual system.
2. A whole slew of cyber criminals will exploit the poor saps which haven’t installed the above patch, leading to widespread identity theft and other mischief in China.
3. Some enterprising hackers will use the GDYE against the Chinese government, and functionaries within the Party will not be able to access government websites.
Jun 23, 2009 - 5:18 am 13. Herb:David Boggs: Do you mean that the Peoples Republic of China stole software from and American company? Say it aint so.
I think Brock’s right.
Jun 23, 2009 - 6:59 am 14. Lifeofthemind:The movie reference should be not LOTR but Brazil. The huge clanking machine will eat itself.
Jun 23, 2009 - 9:51 am 15. buddy larsen:Brock’s right.
The huge clanking machine will eat itself
Hope it don’t obliterate us li’l mammals when it finally topples over and ’splodes
Jun 23, 2009 - 10:14 am 16. blert:Everything will fall into the DRAMM hole.
Brock’s nailed it.
Jun 23, 2009 - 10:39 am 17. lc:I guess what made me think of the LOTR analogy is something I thought but forgot to add to my previous post.
Someone very dear to me once compared Jimmy Carter and his quest for the Nobel Peace Prize to Gollum’s lust for the one ring. Maybe not exactly a monkey trap, but there certainly seem to be some simiopathic similarities.
Jun 23, 2009 - 11:16 am 18. buddy larsen:Re Jimmy Carter, i’m thinking more ceboid or cercopithecoid than simian.
Jun 23, 2009 - 11:32 am 19. lc:Buddy:
Jun 23, 2009 - 11:39 am 20. buddy larsen:That would work. I had to look that one up.
lc, long ago i took an anthropology course –those two words are all that stuck –
Jun 23, 2009 - 12:54 pm 21. Mongoose:buddy: sound like you are sliding down some sort of slippery slope there.
Jun 24, 2009 - 5:24 amSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.