A new anti-terrorism law in China may soon affect U.S. vendors in selling technological products in the country. This is due to a requirement that vendors should provide the Chinese government with sensitive corporate and user data in their services and products. This will take effect on January 1 as part of broad criminal investigations in China.
IB Times mentioned that the controversial law was passed on December 27 which requires technology companies to help investigators access encrypted information to be able to prevent terrorism-related messages. Further, CNET mentioned that the law intends to identify people and activities, as well as those discussed online that threaten public and government security. This is going to be the first anti-terrorism law to be implemented in China.
More so, Xinhua commentary stated that: "Nowadays, the Internet is increasingly used by terror groups to spread their extremist ideas, recruit fighters, channel fund and plot attacks." Evidently, one of the shooters in recent killing in South Carolina is found to be radicalized via Internet.
The commentary also mentioned that United States expressed its serious concerns saying that such anti-terrorism law would instead do more harm than good to the threat of terrorism. In addition, the U.S. worries about the technical requirements that would lead to breach of privacy and infringement upon intellectual property rights for the U.S. firms. Not only that, the law might also bring tighter regulation on media when reporting terrorism-related news events.
In the related report, Adam Segal, director of the Digital and Cyberspace Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the upcoming book The Hacked World Order said, "How it's going to be implemented is still vague, but it's part of a trend going back 15 or 20 years where there's a Chinese focus on keeping technology secure and controllable."
Meanwhile, it is recommended that the U.S. companies should allow the law to be implemented prior to making any major decisions. American hardware makers like IBM, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, as well as networking gear specialists like Cisco are some of the companies that will be affected too.
