Slashdot Mirror
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."
It seems odd that other cafes are given this information. Is this so that cafe owners can track down lost customers, or find out who does the best Mocha? And the punters are leaving themselves open to all sorts of abuses. What do find in chinese cafes? China Mugs!
Smivs on the intertubes!
Apparently it doesn't take very many Greeks to keep out hordes of Persians, so that shouldn't be too much trouble.
Go to an internet cafe in Italy, and you will be asked for your identity card or passport, which will be recorded.
This is, you'll be relieved to hear, to combat terrorism.
Philip Agee was a CIA case officer whose conscience troubled him so much with regards to his involvement in supporting dictatorships in Latin America and putting down popular worker movements, that he exposed what the CIA up to. The CIA did everything it could to try to prevent publication. In 1979, his passport was revoked. In 1982 Congress passed a law in an attempt to prosecute him ( a law which tripped up Scooter Libby in the Bush administration incidentally - but Bush commuted his prison sentence - the law exists to ensnare only the left, not the right, obviously).
While we should damn China's censorship, we should definitely first stop /. from censoring contents it does not like. I have a track records of successful story submissions. Many of my submissions are related to China -- both POSITIVE and NEGATIVE. However, it couldn't help me to notice that SLAHSDOT would always put on hold and eventually reject any story that deems put a positive light on China's political and online freedom, even if the cited source is a rather conservative ones like The Economist. See my latest hanging submission (here is the original article) for example. The only "positive" stories the /. editor will post are those purely about technology -- like about their space development.
I hope that's only my illusion. But one can't stand on a moral high ground unless one acknowledges or at least open to all facts.