<div>When US President Barack Obama met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a private California estate for a chat in shirt sleeves, a heart-to-heart chat on cyber espionage was definitely on the agenda.<br /><br />He was to tell Xi that the Americans were extremely unhappy with Chinese antics after it was allegedly found that Beijing was involved in cyber-attacks on key U.S. institutions.<br /><br />Obama probably had an upper hand in the discussions until a certain Edward Snowden decided to play hooky and give the winning card to the Chinese. When Snowden went public with information that the American administration was merrily spying on the world after pressing various large Internet companies to share information, Obama and his team lost the plot to the Chinese.<br /><br />What made matters worse was that Snowden leaked the information in Hong Kong, giving the Chinese government ample ammunition to fire cyber missiles back at the Americans. Now, a gleeful Chinese state media is at work – enthusiastically blaming the Americans for being a rogue state that peeps into emails and conversations of individuals across the world, without their permission of course.<br /><br />Companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, Facebook and Apple are being asked seriously embarrassing questions. Did you play along with the US government? Did you know this was happening? Shouldn’t you have told users? Isn’t the Internet supposed to be secure and closed?<br /><br />Errr… the truth is that these companies had as much choice to say a big fat no to the American government, as they had to not come under pressure from the Chinese who also tap their citizens’ Internet chatter. In reality, both governments are as culpable to the charges of spying and poking their nose into private lives of people. The difference is that while the Americans do it in the name of protecting themselves and their democratic institutions, the Chinese are a bit more blasé about it: they do it because they are scared of a revolt against the Communist Party.<br /><br />While there are institutions in the United States that could potentially take the government to task, in China, the game is slightly different. There is nobody to question the Chinese government within China. And that’s a problem because while the Americans now can’t question China, American citizens and China and just about everybody else across the world can definitely question the U.S administration.<br /><br />A full-throttle media onslaught by the Chinese has already begun. The Chinese are accusing the Americans of hypocrisy, and probably rightly so because while Obama wagged his finger at Xi, U.S. agencies were up to little good. The China Daily quoted a researcher as saying that while “Washington has been accusing Beijing of cyber espionage, the biggest threat to the individual freedom and privacy in the U.S. is the unbridled power of the government.”<br /><br />A country that hates whistleblowers is now happily batting for one because it is in it interest. China is now playing the victim, as it prepares to negotiate with the Americans the return of Snowden who is in hiding. Americans won’t stop their programme, as it will always find political support in a country permanently scared and scarred by the 9/11 attacks.<br /><br />That leaves individuals like us who carelessly and many times a day open ourselves to others on the Internet, without for once realizing that every time we do it somebody, somewhere is watching us. It’s a spooky feeling, if you ask me, but what’s the way out? We are prisoners of our digital environment and we aren’t going back to communicating with each other as we did some years ago when the Internet was a beast available to scientists to ponder over.<br /><br />Tai Ming Cheung, director of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, recently wrote in that the Chinese and U.S. approaches to surveillance and how each of their security apparatuses goes about organizing and carrying out such activities were fundamentally different. “It might be useful to label them into two distinct models: the U.S. approach can be described as the democratic security state model and the Chinese version is the authoritarian surveillance state model.”<br /><br />That could be one of the explanation of where things stand, but the big issue for individuals is that at the end of the day the two governments are doing the same thing though apparently for different reasons, which are open to interpretation in any case. One man’s freedom fighter can always be another man’s terrorist and vice versa. The choice is between the devil and deep sea and a glass half full or half empty.<br /><br />Just because the devil inhabits the “democratic world” and is subject to media, judicial and legal checks doesn’t make it any better than the “authoritarian surveillance state model.” However, it is not about a cyber-war between the United States and China.<br /><br />It is, eventually, about state power and its use. It is about how much a state trusts its people. And governments, by nature suspicious, don’t trust their people – not in the United States, not in China, not in Russia and not in India. There is very little that can be done to stop governments from intruding into people’s private affairs and cyber-espionage because governments can make and change laws to suit their intent and plans.<br /><br />So, the next time when you type an email or post a photograph or a video online, just remember that somebody somewhere is watching it or reading it. It could possibly be for your larger safety or because you are considered a threat. You might never know which.<br /><br />(<em>The columnist, a former newspaper editor, is President, Public Affairs, Genesis Burson-Marsteller and co-founder of Public Affairs Forum of India. He has a keen interest in China and Southeast Asia. Views are personal</em>)</div>
