Will tech companies resist orders to cooperate with demands for information to root out dissidents?
by Andrea O’Sullivan
Reason.com
The Western satellite of Hong Kong had a great run. Two decades resisting the authority of an empowered and modern Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is nothing to sneeze at. But with last month’s passing of the National Security Law (NSL), which aims to clamp down on the raucous anti-CCP protests that have recently gripped the island, Hong Kong’s unprecedented experiment in pseudo-sovereign liberalism looks to be coming to an end.
This law has already threatened the prized freedoms to which dissident Hong Kongers are accustomed. With the NSL also comes an uncertain future for both individual technology companies and the landscape of the global internet.
The law grants authorities with sweeping powers to root out what they consider “secession, terrorist activities, subversion, and collusion with a foreign country or with external elements”—no new feat for a government.