{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","title":"State Platform Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781009619714","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","id":"d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","uuid":"d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","title":"State Platform Capitalism","normalized_title":"stateplatformcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781009619714","isbns":["9781009619714","9781009446594","9781009446587"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":98,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/State%20Platform%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d06b946b-6924-4f30-afbd-92f915edbae4/search"},"page":{"printed_page":50,"pdf_page":55,"physical_index":55,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0d4e357d4993bf72ea94f1254e3b9b03c49137614f10786200f8ad645bdabef0"},"chapter":"Cambridge Elements","content":"Internet cables represent an important source of intelligence for those who have access to their data. However, securing them is a monumental task because new market entrants are emerging to meet spiralling demand. While dominated by US platforms, telcos and cabling firms, Chinese operators have also recently become important players in the subsea cabling market. HMN – a spinoff of Huawei now owned by Hengtong (a Chinese private-sector national champion) – is now the world’s fourth largest cable supplier. Moreover, China’s telcos like China Telecom and China Unicom have become major players in international cable consortia. China’s firms privilege cable projects in the Asia Pacific and Eurasia. Alongside their direct commercial objectives, these cable projects can be understood as boosts to China’s Digital Silk Road strategy for expanding the activities of its platform giants (Pitron, 2023).\n\nThe NSA’s experience with tapping landing stations and co-opting cable providers drives concern that China could use similar mechanisms the more it cements its role as a global connectivity provider (Brock, 2023). The United States has sought to contain China’s control over internet infrastructure in a number of ways, including inhibiting its firms from investing in projects which interconnect with China. In 2021, for example, the US FCC withdrew permission for Google and Meta to activate the Pacific Light cable – which ran between LA and East Asia – due to its passage through Hong Kong (FitzGerald and Purnell, 2021).\n\nUS pressure has also been extended internationally. The SeaMeWe-6 cable, currently under construction, will connect Singapore and France via nine other countries. The international consortium that planned to lay the cable initially involved Chinese firms including HMN. The project was disrupted in 2023 when the United States sanctioned HMN and successfully pushed for SubCom to replace HMN as a supplier. This drove Chinese telcos out of the consortium, and they subsequently announced their own project, EMA (Europe-Middle East-Asia). EMA is a \\$500 m project that will connect Hong Kong and Hainan with Singapore, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and France, and thereby undermine US efforts to isolate Hong Kong from the global internet (Brock, 2023). However, currently no new subsea cables are planned to connect either mainland China or Hong Kong internationally beyond 2025. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the US campaign to limit China’s connectivity (Takeda and Ban, 2024).\n\nIn addition to the upstream cable-tapping programs revealed by Snowden was the downstream ‘PRISM’ program – mass data-gathering conducted directly from platform companies’ servers with their full cooperation. Because platform firms remain domiciled within the United States, they are effectively defenceless against such state claims upon their data. Section 702 ofthe Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA) provides legal pretext and a framework for the NSA to gather communications data from foreign citizens and (to a more limited degree) access US citizens’ data. Recent reports show that Section 702 is in widespread use for gathering US citizen data (Ackerman, 2023). It was also recently reported that another key plank of the PRISM program, XKeyscore, ‘continues to operate with no judicial and limited congressional oversight despite its potential to capture Americans’ communications’ (Nakashima, 2021). XKeyscore gathers data on individuals’ emails, social media activity, and browsing history from internet service providers and platforms to build detailed user profiles searchable by intelligence analysts. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 permits state access to any US-domiciled cloud provider’s overseas data servers (if not contested in court). Since over 70% of global data flows through Loudon, Virginia, due to the intensive clustering of data centres in the city, such provisions are rarely required. Executive Order 12,333 – a piece of Cold War legislation subsequently updated by George W. Bush – offers another legal avenue for surveillance activities to be conducted outside of the FISA framework and rulebook.\n\n50\n\nReinventing Capitalism","previous_page":49,"next_page":51}