Stephen Harper: Tech Integration With China Incompatible
China s technology apparatus is geared to do the very things that alarm western democracies about big tech, former prime minister Stephen Harper told attendees at a defence and security conference on March 12.
The biggest single concern that Western citizens & have about big tech is about power. It s about privacy, it s about surveillance, it s about the use of personal data, Harper said, speaking at the Conference of Defence Associations Institute s Ottawa Conference on Security and Defence in a keynote discussion with his former national security adviser Richard Fadden.
The entire Chinese technology system is designed for that purpose.
Harper said he s not against Chinese consumer products, but that Beijing should not be allowed to have its technology at the core of the systems of Western democracies.
He spoke of the double edged sword that tech is: while it increases what humans can achieve in a number of ways, it can also be used as an instrument for authoritarianism.