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China Will Monitor, Censor SMS Messages
maggeth writes "Early reports on the AP (via Yahoo) indicate that China will begin monitoring and censoring SMS communications in real time. China's 'great firewall' is infamous, but the move to censoring SMS has been slow due to technological roadblocks. Algorithms are used to identify key words and combinations of words that might be associated with 'political rumors and "reactionary remarks,"' and the system automatically notifies local police. Something to think about on your Fourth of July weekend!" Reader ackthpt adds links to coverage at the BBC and The Register, asking "What next, a massive government database system to track every message and contacts between people?"
Good thing programs like Trillian allow encryption of instant messages, largely defeating such a system (not only do the messages need to be scanned, but cracked and then scanned)
"What next, a massive government database system to track every message and contacts between people?"
Like this, or maybe this, or this
I don't know if the Chinese have a system like this yet, but we already have Echelon, so were set.
(For those of you to lazy to read all the articles, Echelon is a global communications spy network run by the NSA (with cooperation, in the form of listening posts, from the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. It gives them the capability to listen to and monitor any broadcast transmission on the planet.)
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thraktuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
I'm sure, almost POSITIVE that Echelon reads SMS messages in the US. They don't censor them, but I'm sure if you're up to something they notify authorities. How else will they achieve the New American Century? ... yes you know.
... yes we know.
I'm sure they have tons of backup plans. Including
Sharks with freakin
*DrugCheese rants*
From here
From a CNN special about the NSA: While it's not "normally" permitted, it's hard to say if they ever get turned down.The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
You sure? An alleged counterexample:
/ 84
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/12/20/211923
$ openssl enc -1337speak -d 'd1Z NU c3N50R5h1P 5uX.\
D G0v3RNm3n7 5ux. m40 5UX.\
D 0NL3 7ru7h 1Z PH4Lun D4F4.\
l37Z g0 8uRN 0Ur53lV3z n pr07357.'
This new censorship sucks.
The government sucks. Mao sucks.
The only truth is Falun Dafa.
Let's go burn ourselves in protest.
I just ended a vacation in China, and pre-paid SIM cards could be obtained over the counter at the local supermarket with no ID check or anything. Then you could recharge it with other cards similarly bought over the counter. So how's one supposed to control anything when you don't know who's sending and to whom?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
One of the reasons the Chinese mooncake is famous (though why is it translated into English as "cake" when the Chinese word for the mooncake is closer to what they call "cookie/biscuit"? The Chinese word for "cake" is something else entirely. I guess "moon cookie" doesn't sound as great in English) is because it was used in the Han revolt against the Mongolians. As the harsh Mongolian rulers cracked down on normal communications the Han rebels hid messages inside the moon-cakes detailing the plans for the revolution and used this to co-ordinate the attack which overthrew the Yuan dynasty. Perhaps it is time for a new "moon-cake" project to facilitate secure communications in China via SMS and email with the "rebels" communicating with each other via innocent looking programs like animated greeting cards with encryted or hidden messages.
According to Xinhua, over 220 billion text messages were sent in China in 2003, making up some 55 percent of the world's text messages.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
Nope, the phones themselves have a unique identifier, the IMEI code, which are quite trackable. Once you know who's using which IMEI, you can listen to them pretty easily even when they're using a prepaid account.
I hate to be a dick, but seriously... that would only be funny if China was in fact Japan, which it clearly is not. 'Domo arigato' is 'thank you' in Japanese, and Lost in Translation was set in Tokyo.
As I understand the US constitution, as preached to the rest of the World, the context would make detention a restriction of free speech and illegal.
Had he not obviously used it as an example then that would be another matter.
Actually, depending on how you count, there are between 7 and 13 different languages spoken in China. Notice that I said languages, not dialects. Not because I'm correcting you, but because each of these languages has tens to hundreds of dialects of its own in the way we understand the word 'dialect' in Europe. For example, the dialect of Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Ningbo are all different enough that they can be difficult to understand for native speakers (we're not talking British vs. American English here) and yet are all very much dialects of one language, Wu.
This should give you an idea of how different Wu is from Mandarin.
However, I would not say that they differ as much as English does from French, unless you're comparing Sintic languages to Tibeto-Burmese ones (they are all in the same macrophylum, Sino-Tibetan). Otherwise, Chinese languages typically differ from each other as much as the Romance languages do from each other (or the Germanic languages if you exclude English, which is rather different from its cousins due to Norman influence on the language in the early 2nd millenium.)
The 7-13 number is fuzzy because linguists disagree on language/dialect groupings and for political reasons China would prefer that we call all local languages dialects (these reasons are also linguistic: in Chinese, the word most commonly used for 'dialect' is 'fangyan' which means place-language, and can refer to both languages and dialects -- it simply means the speech of a people sharing a common location).
so you would never know. Does the US have similar imoral laws?
Generally no. Though apparently in terrorism related cases they can ask a judge for a gag order on all involved participants.
However, all of that is after charges have been filed, not before.
I'm living in China right now, and haven't expenienced anything like you mention.
The only evidence of the Great Firewall I've seen is trying to access Google's cache -- after trying to view a cached page, Firefox gives me a "Net reset error" and I won't be able to access anything from Google.com for about an hour.
(Oh, and BBC's news site always times out.)
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
1.the CIA used to be prevented from spying on US citizens, not the NSA.
...), potential legal issues if their information is used in a criminal investigation , and to preempt inter-departmental turf wars by clearly defining the boundaries.
2.Patriot act I and II (which was quietly approved on the day that we announced the "capture" of Sadaam) stripped all that pretense away. Any
group is allowed to spy on us, with any group being (NSA, CIA, Fatherland Defense, and DOJ).
There's plenty of misbehavior to point at on both sides. But let's understand it.
From at least the mid '70s to about the mid '90s (as far as us outside the "security community" wall can tell) the breakdown was this:
- FBI was responsible for investigations involving interstate lawbreaking, kidnapping (assumed to involve intestate flight), and domestic security (including investigating spy rings and conducting security clearance investigations). Their operations often lead to prosecutions and are intermittently subjected to court scrutiny and on-the-record congressional investigation. So they must meet strong constitutional tests, or risk losing cases, injunctions, and civil-rights suits.
- CIA was responsible for spying and covert operation. Their operations are compartmentalized for security - which limits oversight and control - and are often outside the law in the areas where they operate. They were prohibited from operating inside the US at all - due to constitunal-authorization concerns, practical concerns (like coups, political sabotage,
- The NSA was charged with signals intelligence - both decoding to hunt for enemy action and protecting US communications - government, corporate, and personal - from foreign spying. As a side-effect they end up intercepting lots of private domestic communication content that the government isn't authorized to use. So they held it tightly (which also helped protect their methods) and dribbled it out pretty much only to the intelligence community (because a drop of it in a criminal case could blow the case). (Indeed, for decades the US claimed they didn't exist. Joke: NSA = No Such Agency.)
Info from NSA (apparently) fed mainly into CIA (which had the political/military implication analysis section). CIA would give info to FBI when appropriate, mainly stuff related to domestic spying and security clearances. (CIA and NSA info generally could NOT be used in criminal cases, because it's collected without probable cause or warrant. The constitutional protections would get stretched by using it to generate a "tip", telling the FBI where to look for something - but the info they developed had to come from open observation -> probable cause or warrants to be used in court.)
During the Clinton administration the wall between CIA and FBI was raised: ALL communication between them had to go up a bureaucratic red-tape chain and be handed over through a special office headed by a Clinton appointee (after approval by that office). The same set of Clinton administration officials came up with the idea that terrorism should be treated as a criminal offences rather than acts of war.
The result: No information was passed through the red-tape gauntlet from NSA and CIA to FBI. First fallout: The "nuclear secrets for campaign contributions" investigation was gutted (leading to leaks from frustrated agents.) (Some speculate that gutting this was the reason for the change.) Second fallout: Info about Bin Laden's activity didn't reach the FBI. The Clinton administration had several offers from Middle Eastern powers to hand over Bin Laden, which they turned down because the FBI couldn't make a criminal case against him. Third fallout: The mechanism hadn't been dismantled by 9/11.
The Bush administration went overboard the other direction. The Constitution's protections of the accused are relaxed in wars and the like - apparently because holding a trial in the middle of a battlefield is impractica
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way