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China To Photograph All Internet Cafe Customers
Gwaihir the Windlord writes "Not only is the Great Firewall of China back up and running, but now if you visit an Internet cafe, your photo will be taken and your identity card scanned. And the friendly officers of the Cultural Law Enforcement Taskforce make those details, entered into a city-wide database, available at any other cafe. So much for the new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in."
Your personal details *are* being made quite transparent and open here.
Seems to me that the Chinese Government is being very open about the amount of surveillance they are using on their citizens.
If you walk into an internet cafe in the UK you've likely been recorded by 10 different cameras on the street on the way in, and the goverment is now promising to log all your online activity in a central database.
This loss of privacy certainly sucks, but we can no longer smugly denounce the Chinese for it as if we in the west are any more respectful of privacy or any less big-brother-like. "China's internet privacy protection falls to UK level" would be just as apt a headline.
Even China's Tianamen Square atrocity has a western parallel with the USA's killing of Vietnam war protesters at Kent State University in 1970.
It would be nice if we were in a position to righteously denounce the Chinese for human rights violations, but sadly we're really not.
While I was hopeful in the early days of the olympics, four years ago, I got a reality check later on when it became obvious that the Chinese government was determined that this was going to be a very tightly controlled operation.
This isn't really a surprise, the Moscow olympics didn't end the cold war, and the Munich olympics didn't stop WWII.
China visibly and provably improving its human rights and freedoms should have been a prerequisite of being given the olympics, not just a half-hearted, vague promise (with fingers crossed) to sort of improve, without actually changing things. Expecting China to follow through once it had secured the event was foolish in hindsight. By that point the IOC had no sanction, they were never going to take it away, China knew that, so they could do what they liked.
Paul Leader
In all deference to your low UID: First, the post refers to openness and transparency, not privacy.
Second, privacy for citizens, openness for the state. Those two go hand in hand, really. In essence, this means no more than the fewest possible laws.
/you may say i'm a dreamer ...
"So much for the new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in"
Who sold you that lie?
There is a war going on for your mind.
In the grand scheme of things the democratically elected governments of the world are also cracking down hard on what their citizens view, write, and if at all possible, think.
The issue is China is the same as the issue in the West. As long as the general population believes that the government is doing what keeps the populace safe and organized then an oppressive government will not only stand, but it will grow in power. It doesn't matter if it's a complete illusion, because perception is reality in these cases.
What China seems to need, and perhaps what certain democratic countries need as well, is a peaceful uprising/organized demand for change. It worked (for a while at least) in Russia, and continues to be the catalyst for permanent changes in some of the old Soviet Bloc countries.
How many people casually compare the Patriot Act to Nazi-facism on their way to buy a cart full of Chinese products at Target?
Everyone who goes into these cafe's will have their identities made public. What's not transparent about that?
..of fucking assholes the Chinese government are. I hope I live long enough to see the day when the citizens of China kill every last one of the fuckers.
China intentionally hides the news that poisoned milk is in their distribution system to avoid any sad faces during the Olympics (R)(tm).
Thousands of children are intentionally allowed to get sick and some die while their cute little Olympic (R)(tm) mascots dance around all happy happy.
Now they hilariously submit that identity checks are justified "for the sake of children."
More lies from the big red Chinese lie machine.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Hypocrisy is overrated. Given that the goal of of democracy is to create a government subordinate to and responsible to the people, government secrecy is anti-democratic-- it the people don't know what their government is up to, they can't encourage, correct, or modify the behavior of their government.
There's no contradiction if you recognize the true relationship between the People and their government.
The government is the People's *slave*. The government was created by the People, and the People have every right to demand complete openness from it. If the slave does not comply with its Master's wishes, then the master aka the People have the right to abolish the slave (dissolve the government) and create a brand-new government that is more transparent.
The People being the Master, have the right to privacy.
The Government being the slave, has no rights, and must be obedient to the People.
The essence of that idea is in the opening lines of the U.S. Declaration of Independence: "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Actually, racist would be if you used race as a proxy for judgment on characteristics unrelated to their race. If he finds the actual physical characteristics common to Chinese women more appealing (e.g. skin tone, hair color and character, cheekbones, etc.), it's not racist.
Now if he made comments about liking ethnically Chinese women for their advanced math skills, that would be racial prejudice with a rosy positive spin, but you needn't jump to racism simply because he *mentioned* race. Sheesh.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
U.K. will follow in 3...2...1...
And here in the U.S., we won't see for this kind of thing at least for another 3-6 months (3 if McCain is elected, 6 if Obama).
That's no joke. US intelligence agencies don't bother asking for permission; they just do whatever is technologically and economically feasible without our cooperation. I'm scared about what they might be doing right now. It's not because I'm paranoid; I think there are plenty of people in the intelligence agencies who would leak information about surveillance programs -- IF they thought they were acting contrary to the values of typical Americans.
Unfortunately, our cowardly response to 9/11, following the paranoid and anxious example set by our leaders(*), has surely made it easy for those in the intelligence agencies to believe that Americans, deep down, really don't believe in our national rhetoric of liberty, and we really want to be taken care of by a strong national security apparatus acting outside of law and morality. In other words, we want the government to act like a loving, protective parent, in whom the safety of its children overrides any concern for propriety or morality.
Could we blame them for thinking that way? Can we even blame our leaders for encouraging paranoia and unreasonable anxiety? We have proved our appetite for "scare" news stories about child abduction and Alar on apples. Television news has long been just another horror genre for a species that loves to be scared. Politics has been that way even longer.
I don't think we really want to be that way, though. Maybe in the movie theater, but not on serious issues like our freedom. I hope that if we are asked to face the issue seriously when we are not caught up in a national panic, we will follow the lead of politicians who stand up and say that everybody balances freedom against security, and Americans have a greater taste for freedom than most. If that means allowing a few more serial killers, teenage mass murderers, and terrorists to slip through the cracks and wreak havoc, so be it.
Don't get me wrong, it's obviously unacceptable that a dozen pissed off people can wreak havoc on the scale of 9/11. We should structure our society so that a few pissed off people can't cause such massive disruption. But once we reduce the amount of damage a terrorist can do down to a tolerable level, such as by mandating armored cockpit doors and good cockpit security protocols, and making it sufficiently difficult to bring explosives onto planes, we should relax and treat terrorist attacks like tornadoes. Meh, they're gonna happen, let's do what we reasonably can to make our buildings resistant, educate people to react sensibly, and react to help people after the fact. Terrorists want to affect our government policies and social mores, and we don't want to satisfy them, right? Hurricanes and tornadoes have been killing us for years, and they haven't succeeded in rolling back feminism, ending our support for Israel, or undermining our civil liberties. (Perhaps that second part is unfortunate, but....)
Anyway, we're obviously on the wrong track. Instead of treating terrorist attacks as just another hazard of life on earth, like hurricanes and tornadoes, we've given them a special power over our psyche -- exactly the special power that terrorists want. Instead of repenting of our naive vulnerability, and preparing ourselves to withstand future attacks with minimal damage and loss of life, we have taken for granted that every terrorist poses a terrible, awesome, shattering threat and must be detected and stopped at any expense.
"Safety at any cost" -- that attitude is what Americans have embraced and must now disavow.
(*) Obviously the Bush administration set the initial tone, but members of both parties followed his lead enthusiastically.
we do it "for the children" in the US!
Ok, so it's also not racism to say that I like black people for their crack-smoking skills, since it's true, as they are overrepresented among crack-smokers? Somehow that seems wrong.
c++;
Cites of western powers running over their own unarmed citizens with tanks?
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
So you took four paragraphs to say you don't have any cites. Well done.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
It's one country ruled by a government that overthrew the legitimate government. Interesting that you don't want to talk about China now; I guess you figured that it I'd point out that it's just a tad strange to criticize the ROV for an "internal-repression" campaign when they're fighting an armed VC guerilla force while giving China a pass for Tiananmen.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.