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."

Comments

That's repression for you

[EricWright]

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!

BIG BIG BROTHER

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:China and Human Rights Abuse

[blibbleblobble]

"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

Re:Mod Parent Up Informative

[iamdrscience]

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.

And Boston

[SolemnDragon]

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...)

Scary Very Scary

[Plug1]

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.