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SMS, SARS, And Censorship
angkor writes with a link to this article about "How SMS messaging in China forced the government to acknowledge the 'fatal flu in Guangdong.' And the steps the Chinese government is taking to make sure it does not happen again."
Nothing like addressing a deadly disease by imprisoning anyone who gets worried about it and sends a message to a remote family member to have them send "a cure." I guess I should say it once again... Information wants to be free!
16.06.2003
By HENRY HOENIG in Beijing
By early February the people of Guangdong province had begun to panic, pouring into stores and clearing out supplies of Western antibiotics, vinegar and Chinese herbal tea, all of which were rumoured to fend off a mysterious virus the world would come to know as Sars.
But the virus had not yet been given a name. In fact, its existence had not even been acknowledged by the Chinese Government or by the media.
Yet by February 10 news of a "fatal flu in Guangdong" had reached 120 million people through text messaging, say some reports, and an untold extra number through email and internet chatrooms.
Chinese authorities had little choice but to acknowledge the outbreak and try to restore calm.
The Government had been taught a painful lesson about controlling the news in a burgeoning high-tech society.
That message would be repeated under similar circumstances two months later, when it was forced to admit it had been covering up the number of Sars cases in Beijing. In return, it has since sent a few painful messages of its own.
By mid-February, officials began complaining about the use of text messaging to spread "rumours", deeming them subversive activity and a threat to stability. Then they began arresting people.
By the end of May, 117 people in 17 provinces had been arrested and charged with disturbing social order by spreading Sars-related rumours, the Xinhua news agency reported.
The official People's Daily said on June 8 that 108 Falungong followers in Hebei province had been arrested for spreading rumours that hindered the Government's bid to control Sars, but did not state how those rumours were spread.
In the past, such arrests would probably have received little publicity. But this aspect of the Sars crisis and the following crackdown illustrate the enormous challenges Beijing faces in trying to maintain control of news and information in the age of communications technology, and the strategy it has developed to meet those challenges.
With its control slipping, the Government's response has been to combine cutting-edge technology with "low-tech Leninist" repression. Its technology allows it, for example, to search the country's entire volume of email traffic for words such as "Falungong", or to monitor any individual's text messages.
Anyone snared in its high-tech web can expect surveillance, intimidation, arrest and prison.
The publicity surrounding the arrests and prison sentences helps the Government achieve what experts say is its strategy of creating a climate of fear in which the people begin censoring themselves.
"Self-censorship is a much more effective way of controlling the internet," said University of Hawaii professor Eric Harwit, author of Shaping the Internet in China.
"They obviously can't arrest everybody who criticises the Government but they can publicise the penalties people could face."
Greg Walton, an expert on surveillance technology in China, said surveillance was crucial to the Government's goal of implementing self-censorship.
Of course, Beijing has hardly abandoned its efforts to censor the internet. But blanket censorship is reserved for extreme situations, and this fact reflects its long-standing dilemma: while it desperately wants to control the flow of news and opinion, especially dissent, it also wants an open, modern and efficient economy, including a state-of-the-art telecom and information infrastructure.
Its solution has been selective censorship of the news and increased monitoring of internet chatrooms, email, text messaging and individuals' surfing habits for "subversive activity".
Even before the Sars-related crackdown, at least 35 people had been arrested in the past few years for posting "subversive" writing on the internet, said Amnesty International. Five of them had been sentenced to a combined 41 years in jail.
"The cyberpol
Well ... China has around 30,000 government employees whose sole function is to monitor and censor communications over the Internet.
The fact that SMS was used in this case isn't a big deal. The current cellular platforms deployed in China do not allow filtering, tracking, etc. at the basestation level. However, as someone who worked on these danged things, the new base stations have features that track and filter all SMS traffic.
At the end of the day, network communication is not anonymous and it is sad that people who do not have a total understanding of technology get others into trouble.
> did a single mainsteam journalist criticize the government's plan?
What channel were you watching? The way the media covered it, we were losing the war during the first weekend.
> did a single mainsteam journalist
> criticize the government's plan?
Yes, many mainstream journalists criticized the Bush administration. Here's a Peter Jennings quote:
âoeItâ(TM)s no secret, now, that a great many American allies are very opposed to attacking Iraq unless the President makes a better case for it.â?
The Army reading list
"Btw, The US also has censorship problems. Just look at how american news sources acted over Iraq - did a single mainsteam journalist criticize the government's plan?"
More info about media coverage: basically just an extension of the white-house press office.
The military is also worthy of attention, having deliberately killed several independant journalists
US covers up just as much, maybe more.
Before the Cuban missile crisis, the US was bombing Cuba day and night, trying to undermine their economy by destroying sugar fields, trying to start an uprising against Fidel. Was the covered in the news? no.
... that's just one example, there are thousands that are known, and probably 10 times more that aren't.
The US is just as guilty as China is, the USSR was, and any other country out there is... you just don't hear about it =)
These black boxes. The ones that keep a diary of the car's last moments to testify at court (for or against you, it doesn't matter). Most people aren't aware they have them, or that their car can be made to testify against them. They exist in most if not all vehicles that have airbags, which is nearly all cars made in the past decade or so.
A lot of excellent restaurants got extra health inspections and red-tape harrassment for the first week- and then, after the hoax was demonstrated to be a hoax email alert that someone sent (probably a variant on your california one) they still faced weeks of harassment- at the hands of the general public. It's been a bad time in Boston for the gainfully employed, and they had it even worse for a time. I'm betting that there are an awful lot of small-regional economic crunches because of hoaxes like these. (this was before the public pan on smoking in Boston went through, so now they've just been hit again, while everyone adjusts.)
Is this (sars hoax) affecting other cities? (I'm sure that it is; i'm just curious which ones...)
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Fascinating point, wholly taken, but I won't call Amartya Sen as a 'philosopher'. His job spec is more development economics than anything else. :-)
More than mere navel gazing.
http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/3669.html
I was in Hong Kong in January and February when SARS was just starting. At the time the government was covering it up and the news reported it as a bird flu outbreak in Guangdong province. The really scary thing is that our entire time there no one knew the real threat this disease posed. I was allowed to enter the US and Canada no questions asked. Thankfully no one on the trip got sick, but this case shows that supression of information can have far reaching consequences. Had someone on our trip contracted the illness they could have possibly infected an entire college campus, with little information on what the disease was the result would have been a disaster. I hope this experience teaches the chinese gov't that information needs to be shared not hidden. Had they been honest SARS would have never spread as it did.
The same Noam Chomsky that once said Osama Bin Laden could be taken at his word? Sure thing, real criticism, right...