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."

Comments

Well, technically...

[b96miata]

Your personal details *are* being made quite transparent and open here.

Seems to me

[Bai jie]

Seems to me that the Chinese Government is being very open about the amount of surveillance they are using on their citizens.

Hardly a Chinese issue

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hardly a Chinese issue

[base3]

Yes, Kent State was a full-on riot (though how much of that was false flag we'll never know). But the students shot weren't all even INVOLVED in the protest, and even if they had been, .30 rounds are never an appropriate response to unarmed students. Those national guard soldiers along with those in command should have faced firing squads.

Re:Hardly a Chinese issue

[MightyYar]

I agree that the response was way out of proportion, and the guard were out of line. The students were also out of line, however - which is the key point I was trying to make.

In Beijing, there was no violence at all until the troops rolled in. The protest was brutally suppressed using troops from the countryside. The citizens of the city tried to blockade and were mowed down. The next day, all was quiet in China as the leadership made it very clear that even peaceful protest would be met with deadly violence.

In contrast, after Kent State, millions of college students across the US protested with no significant interference from the government.

Kent State was a criminally bungled response to a riot, whereas Tienanmen was a premeditated government response to a peaceful protest. The violence was part of the plan.

Re:Hardly a Chinese issue

[NotBornYesterday]

Honestly, how the hell can you compare the two? Four people died at Kent State. Estimates of the dead at Tiananmen ranged into the thousands, but we'll never know due to a Chinese government coverup.

Re:Hardly a Chinese issue

[Trailer Trash]

Try googling "Kent State" from your computer here in the US. Now, try googling "Tianamen Square" from China.

Any differences?

Did you really believe the Olympics do anything?

[NoNeeeed]

So much for the new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in.

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.

Openess

[Jaysyn]

"So much for the new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in"

Who sold you that lie?

We can't pick on China.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[bugeaterr]

How many people casually compare the Patriot Act to Nazi-facism on their way to buy a cart full of Chinese products at Target?

Re:Nothing wrong with that

[ShadowRangerRIT]

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.