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."
Your personal details *are* being made quite transparent and open here.
> So much for the new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in.
Oh you thought "openness and transparency" was for the government? no no, they meant for the citizens
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
...your license and registration please. Your other license and registration.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Couldn't they stop to give ideas to the Britons ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
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!
Slashdot poster with thing for Asians?
Where's the moderator option for "cliche"?
I sense an opening in the market for false moustaches in China!
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
Quoting from http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/11/0512216&tid=158
"CNN is reporting that a new Italian law requires that all businesses offering public internet access, such as web cafes, to identify and record all customers. While supporters of this law trumpet its anti-terrorism potential, still others see no such advantage and bemoan this invasion of personal privacy. 'They must be able, if necessary, to track the sites visited by their clients. [...]"
And yes, the law is pretty much alive and well. Also you can't stay anywhere in Italy unless they copy your passport and send it to the police. Free wifi providers (think Starbucks like) have been already fined/prosecuted. You can't get a prepaid SIM card in many European countries without showing your passport and in some cases your "registration" (i.e. the fact that you're a local resident with a "registered address").
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.
We need an option for "-1 Didn't get the joke".
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
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?
I better take off my Free Tibet button first.
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
If you're going to follow that line, then I could say that if you want to participate in the Greek Olympic tradition, then, by Zeus, you should have to abide by the principle of neutrality and suspended hostilities in the context of the Games.
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.
It's not hypocritical because the government and individual citizens are not the same thing. The government is endowed with great powers to control and regulate the lives of citizens, therefore it should be subject to higher standards and limitations to constraint abuses of those powers.
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.
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.
the Munich olympics didn't stop WWII
That would've sucked. Fortunately, WWII ended way before the 1972 Olympics.
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).
we do it "for the children" in the US!
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.
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++;
More power to you, Eagleman, the hypocrisy of these nations is quite clearly apparent. Also while everyone seems to think this is a horrible thing, how about you look at India? We've reached this level and passed it. Allow me to explain:
And because everyone seems to be fighting China at the moment, you're missing their neighbours to the South West, us Indians. Things have changed for the worse in quite a few places. A law association in Lucknow took a resolution to not represent anyone who was suspected of terrorism. These lawyers assaulted two others who did represent suspects and showed irregularities in police reports. There are many things occurring in today's 'democracies' that are simply in violation of those countries' constitutions and international human rights laws and privacy guidelines.
Sure the Chinese are doing horrible things, but we are no angels, and if we mean what we say, we should take the beam out of our eyes first.
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.