The 7.0 peak from the Haiti earthquake indicated by a seismic analyst at the Caltech Seismological Laboratory. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
On Tuesday, January 12, I went into a meeting at 3:00pm PST, and when I came out, about an hour and a half later I quickly discovered that something had happened in Haiti during those 90 minutes of radio internet silence. As everyone in the connected world now knows, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake (the worst in 200 years) hit Port-au-Prince, the capital of the small Caribbean country. Twelve aftershocks greater than magnitude 5.0 followed, destroying basically a third of the entire city, displacing millions, and killing possibly thousands more.
From the Boston Globe photo essay on the aftermath of the quake:
(Tequila Minsky for The New York Times)
(LISANDRO SUERO/AFP/Getty Images)
The badly damaged presidential palace – the center portion formerly 3 stories tall. (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz)
Displaced residents sleeping in the street after the earthquake.
(REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz)
People looking at earthquake victims lying on the street, Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)
And those are some of the less disturbing images of what’s going on.
Scrolling through the photo essay I know I got just a small inkling of the immense devastation in the already impoverished country, but then came shots of something that struck me as even more profound:
Venezuelan rescuers loading medical equipment onto a plane heading to Port-au-Prince, on January 13, 2010 at the Simon Bolivar international airport in Caracas. (JUAN BARRETO/AFP/Getty Images)
British Search and Rescue teams preparing to leave Gatwick airport, West Sussex to provide assistance to relief and rescue teams in Haiti. (CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images).
Taiwan rescue teams standing by at the fire department in Taipei as they prepare to head to Haiti. (SAM YEH/AFP/Getty Images)
Los Angeles County Fire Department urban search and rescue team loading equipment before traveling to Haiti to help with rescue efforts (REUTERS/Gus Ruelas)
Rescue dogs awaiting departure for Haiti at the Torrejon military airbase in Torrejon de Ardoz, Spain. (AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)
It’s like stills from the third act of a Roland Emmerich movie, except it’s not. This is the future, now. Decry globalization all you want, but to me this is the true significance of the word. A tragedy in a place of no real political or economic interest, can literally overnight mobilize the aid and compassion of the entire world. According to TechCrunch, within just a few hours of the earthquake the Obama administration set up a special number and got the major U.S. carriers on board to allow people to very easily donate $10 to the Red Cross to help with the relief effort. By January 14th, 2 days after the earthquake, the program had raised over $5 million from over a half million different mobile phone users, with donations said to be coming in at the rate of $200,000 each hour. Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti Foundation has also been running its own text donation drive, and by Thursday had raised another $1 million, According to ABC News. Albe Angel, founder and CEO of Give On the Go, the company helping process the Yele Haiti donations, said, “Never has so much money been raised for relief so soon after a disaster. This is a watershed moment. It’s historic.”
It’s also intensely futuristic. Six years ago, when natural disaster struck Indonesia, what’s happening in 2010, in the support effort for Haiti simply did not exist. Even by 2008, text donations raised by charities only amounted to $1 million total. Yele Haiti got that in one day.
If what’s happening in the Haiti relief effort is accelerated, then the current situation between Google and China is basically prophetic. At almost the same time as the earthquake struck, the following was posted on the Official Google Blog:
A new approach to China
Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis. In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.
First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.
Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.
We have already used information gained from this attack to make infrastructure and architectural improvements that enhance security for Google and for our users.
We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.
We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”
These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.
The decision to review our business operations in China has been incredibly hard, and we know that it will have potentially far-reaching consequences. We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States, without the knowledge or involvement of our employees in China who have worked incredibly hard to make Google.cn the success it is today. We are committed to working responsibly to resolve the very difficult issues raised.
So basically, after discovering a Chinese security breach, Google, a multinational corporation, is now essentially sanctioning the Chinese government either with the threat of uncensored access to information for its citizenry, or otherwise, with a withdrawal from the market altogether. Not to be left behind, the Secretary of State of an actual government, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has issued the following statement:
We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy. I will be giving an address next week on the centrality of internet freedom in the 21st century, and we will have further comment on this matter as the facts become clear.
Once again, Cyberpunk predicts the future, one in which multinational corporations replace governments as centers of political and economic power. Though in this case, in a particularly literary twist of cyberpunk fate, the multinational corporation in question (which is, itself, actually made up of hackers — the erstwhile anti-establishment protagonists of the genre), whose informal corporate motto is “don’t be evil,” is wielding its might by imposing a threat of increased access to information against a totalitarian regime. It’s enough to make William Gibson suddenly seem like a contemporary satirist rather than a science fiction writer. But, then again, Cyberpunk stories have also been seen as fictional forecasts of the evolution of the Internet, describing a global communications network long before the World Wide Web entered popular awareness, and that hasn’t necessarily led us into a dark dystopia…. yet.
In the meantime, though, what it has done, is allow us to become more united as humans, on a global scale. Jay Smooth articulated the underlying sentiment driving the response behind the Haiti relief effort on his Illdoctrine vlog: “We, as human beings, have a responsibility to act.” A century ago, the situation in Haiti would have been considered a Haitian crisis. A decade ago it would have been an “international” crisis. Now, it is simply, immediately, instinctively a human crisis.
Welcome to the future.
Ways to help Haiti:
Donate $5 to Wyclef’s Yele Foundation by texting YELE to the number 501501
Donate $10 to the American Red Cross by texting HAITI to the number 90999
Or donate online to: