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SMS, SARS, And Censorship

Posted by timothy on from the beware-the-email-centralizers dept.

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."

15 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. That's repression for you by EricWright · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!

  2. BIG BIG BROTHER by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:BIG BIG BROTHER by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Why would they need to filter SMS traffic at the basestation level? All SMS traffic is sent/received by a SMSC, which is the central point where all SMS traffic is routed through.

      Logging/filtering on the SMSC is trivial and is probably already done in more countries than China.

  3. Re:China and Human Rights Abuse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    > 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.

  4. Re:China and Human Rights Abuse by tcopeland · · Score: 2, Informative

    > 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
  5. Re:China and Human Rights Abuse by blibbleblobble · · Score: 3, Informative

    "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

  6. Re:Mod Parent Up Informative by iamdrscience · · Score: 3, Informative
    62 Dams in one night? What the heck happened?
    The river flooded because of prolonged heavy rains which would normally mean you would open up the gates on your dams to let more water flow through. However, the dams which broke had not been properly designed and maintained to deal with sedimentary build up along these gates so many of the gates could not open. All of these dams which broke were built around the same time as part of the same Chinese initiative to dam the Yangtze river for hydo-electric power so they were all designed similarly, all having the same flaws.
  7. Re:China and Human Rights Abuse by oZZoZZ · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 =)

  8. Re:Hypocrisy or Censorship - take your pick... by Ioldanach · · Score: 2, Informative
    How many of the millions of car owners in the US knew that they had 'black boxes'.
    Which "black boxes" exactly?

    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.

  9. And Boston by SolemnDragon · · Score: 4, Informative
    I'm giving up the option to mod in this conversation just to add to that... Here in Boston, the hoax was about Chinatown, and he Mayor finally had to go have lunch there just to shut people up. There was no covered up mini-epidemic swweeping across Chinatown. It was frightening, how even when the local health authorities talked about it as a hoax, people started taking subway lines that didn't run by it, if they could.

    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.
    1. Re:And Boston by bla · · Score: 2, Informative

      the same thing happened in philadelphia. our mayor took his whole entourage and went and had dinner in chinatown too, and after that, things more or less seemed to calm down, at least in the media.

      although a few weeks ago, my husband (who is vietnamese) was approached by a black woman and told that she "didn't want to seem prejudiced, but it was [his] people who brought SARS over here." so i'm not entirely convinced things have backed off in public opinion.

  10. Re:Famine and Epidemic by The+Cydonian · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.
  11. Re:I wonder when.. by vr · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://www.infosyncworld.com/news/n/3669.html

  12. Scary Very Scary by Plug1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  13. Re:China and Human Rights Abuse by j_rhoden · · Score: 2, Informative

    The same Noam Chomsky that once said Osama Bin Laden could be taken at his word? Sure thing, real criticism, right...