Slashdot Mirror
China Begins Monitoring Billions of Text Messages
eldavojohn writes "The Telegraph is reporting that China has begun monitoring 'billions of text messages' in order to increase censorship. However, a People's Daily article claims they only monitor users who have been reported, and only shut down their message service if the complaints are true. Anything considered pornographic will require the user to bring a letter of guarantee to the local public security bureau promising to never again send such messages before service can be reactivated."
private text messages are being recorded in the US as well, by the government and possibly private enterprises too. Recall the text messages sent on 9/11, which was posted anonymously on wikileaks.org. The only difference between the west and china is that they act upon the monitored data more extensively, the breach of privacy is the same.
Ok, exactly how Evil is the Chinese government? I'm all for trade with them because it keeps our relationship stable so we don't actually start killing each other but my opinion of their government style is that it has to go. Their government is Evil from my value system and I would love to see the Chinese people do something about that. Hell, I would even provide material support electronically but I wouldn't go there.
Shh.
Score:-1, Facepalm
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
No. They live in China, they don't have your fancy 1st Amendment.
It's a similar procedure, but when you go down to the local public security bureau with your letter of guarantee they shoot you in the head and harvest your organs.
The Chinese government is clearly fixed upon the value of censorship. Censorship is what they're trying to promote, clearly. Cutting naughty or unacceptable words out of daily conversation is their endgame. They're certainly not monitoring billions of texts messages to identify and locate dissidents, increase their understanding of social networks that may work against them, or to increase their control over their citizens. Censorship is totally what they're after.
China and the US both need to upgrade to Constitution v2.0
Remember all those laws the US passed? Communications Decency Act....
With the right party in power (unfortunately), I could see the US having gone down the same path.
There's already much precedent in this area.. think FCC regulations and TV/radio broadcasters, talk shows, etc.
The reason would be the same as usual.... think of the children!
But in the us you don't go to jail for being a part of the religion that is not the one the sate forces you to be in.
When people are willing to give up sovereignty of their sex lives, they'll give up pretty much anything. That is why the emphasis is there. It's not like the state gives a shit about what people do with their naughty bits. It's just a test to make sure people comply with the absurd. Those who resist are likely to be troublemakers elsewhere.
Human rights and the well-being of their population, they probably wouldn't have half the dissent and problems they have now. Which would, in turn, require less effort to police the people and would result in much less of a need to 'control' their population. You cannot completely control a population the size of China's. If you want them to conform you have to win them over.
Here are some examples:
Down with CCP
Free Tibet
Free Xinjiang
Rule of law
Down with the Great Firewall
Human rights
Multiparty sytem
Accountability
Melanine
Children crushed by crumbling schools
Forced abortion
Chapter 08
You have nice pecks baby.
Just think of the children!!
before the people revolt and the blood of these assholes runs in the streets. Sadly, i'm leaning towards the believe that the people will probably take it. They know no other way.
Ethical concerns aside, it would be extremely interesting to see how censorship on this large of a scale is implemented.
I wonder how effective automated modern systems will be at filtering, and how much of the censorship will have to rely on human employees. Total cost? Effectiveness? Cultural implications?
I think it'd be hard enough for computers to decipher English LOL-speak, much less Chinese.
Sooo, who is going to offer the first hardware encryption in handsets...and how soon would THAT be forbidden?
No. ECT and all that does not work as well as traditional thought reform. Brainwashing, done properly, is a process almost completely devoid of physical coercion... Here's a chapter from a book on the topic (Brainwashing in China). Interestingly enough, the structure of Chinese thought reform is more or less identical to that used by many cults (which isn't to imply a causal relationship... similar structures can form in parallel). Also, the term brainwashing was first coined by the Chinese.
... by the parallels between the Chinese and American right wingers' war on pornography. I'd think that the Chinese would be more intent on stamping out possible challenges to Communist rule (Falun Gong), independence movements (Tibet) and threats to national security. The American conservative logic is more understandable. The economic conservatives don't care about porn per se (its just another business after all), but in order to assemble a viable voting block, their 'deal with the devil' (the religious right) requires that they adopt their position that every ejaculation must have a name. The Chinese don't suffer from the same political pressures as the GOP does. There's no opposition party espousing sexual freedom that could benefit from the circulation of porn. Sitting at home wanking in front of the computer screen is not an activity around which groups tend to organize.
Although the battle cry of our right wingers has been "Godless Commies", it seems that these two groups share quite a bit of ideology.
Have gnu, will travel.
I believe that in the worst part of the USA you have about equal actual rights as the best part of China. Different worlds, most of the time I bet its ok to live in China but for the times when you piss someone off in power I'd much rather live in the USA.
Shh.
Cutting naughty or unacceptable words out of daily conversation is their endgame.
Look. What they are doing is persuading people to censor themselves, and to think conservatively. The endgame is behaviour modification.
You don't actually have to read every message. You simply tell people that everything they write or say is monitored.
It's literally FUD.
Deleted
Anyone who doesn't think every SMS in the US (for example) is passed into the NSA is naive beyond belief. The difference is that in the west doing this snooping is still a 'dirty secret', while in china they see value in the people knowing they're monitored. Keeps everything calm. In the west being open about this would have the opposite effect, and we all want everything to remain calm, right? They all do it "for the people" of course.
The EU as a whole isn't there yet, but the infrastructure is coming up as fast as the laws can be pushed through.
Even if your local government quite dislike the idea of Total Interception, they'll still do it because information is the currency in the global military industrial information complex. If moscow will trade you information about Al-Qaeda for information about some chinesee dissident in your country...
Sheesh, nowadays you can't talk about the world we live in without sounding like a friggin nutcase.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
No. They live in China, they don't have your fancy 1st Amendment.
You're right. All citizens of China have is Article 35, translated: "Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."
Complete freedom to do it, and enjoy the consequences before, during and (if conscious) after!
Governments are rarely evil, in real life they are misguided trying to do what they think is the right thing but going about it wrong.
Terry Pratchett's "May you life in intresting times" touches on it briefly. A rebellion is forming in the counterweight continent (china) seeking to overthrow the government and liberate the peasants... and who will then lead those peasants? The leaders of the rebellion, who will for the greater good of the peasants tell the peasants how to lead their life, how to farm, despite those peasants have hundreds of years more experience with farming.
Leaders have a plan for the future, they see it not working, human nature then tries to find something that is wrong without looking at the plan itself. China needs it people to work hard, without demanding more then can be given, and do so effeciently and properly within the limits of society and available resources. This is all perfectly sensible and reasonable. Take the one-child policy. Westerners often critize it, but what else are China leaders supposed to do? Have the population explode? Invade other countries to be able to feed its out of control population? Allow mass starvation? The one-child police, with all its problems is the only workable solution. But it only works if everyone follows it, to many exceptions and things break down and you MUST control it. What happens if you do NOT control your people is clear, look at the US where the average citizen consumes 9 times the average amount of a world citizen. People starve because americans binge eat (europeans do the same but slightly less). The US has the resources to have this happen, China does not.
And when you got a plan and are convinced the plan is right and the people don't follow your plan, you start looking for reasons. Any reason. Maybe they are being subverted by hostile agents (the examples are countless. Recently shown in Iran but of course the famous McCarthy witch hunts in the US are very much the same. Later anti-vietnam protests could only have been organized by communist agents, free will of the people? Only when they do what you want them to do, the Chinese ain't unique at all).
Sex, sex is just one of those things where people are very disruptive, almost no idea about sexual activity held by the ruling elite is correct. 30+% of children are not of the father that thinks he is the father. The fast majority of teenage girls got an STD... these are not the figures you want when you are plotting the future of your country.
Sex, drugs and Rock&Roll are the enemy of the planners all over the world. Every leader who has had a vision for the future has sought to control them. And in a way, you got to. Take again, the one-child policy. Would be a far greater problem with rampant teenage pregnancy. Women who have children by multiple fathers are a problem in a one-child culture. Would you marry a woman who already has a kid if she is not allowed to have yours?
This is why a clamp down on sex and drugs and music is always a part of a government that has a plan for its population. Check history (and don't forget to check your own) and you will this is true.
And history has also shown that there is precious little opposition to it.
Else, why did the US not rebel after nipple-gate? You are probably an American, protesting about censorship in a country where the word "fuck" is not just bleeped out, but a mosaic put over the mouth of the person who said it. Why does the US government fear porn?
It has nothing to do with decency of puritanism, it has to do with the idea that it is corrupting/influencing the population away from the destiny you have planned for them.
China is undergoing great changes, and the government seeks and needs control to keep it all together. Don't forget that China KNOWS its own history. Almost conquered by the Japanese a tiny primitive nation that was so insignificant that it never developed its own language. 2000+ years it was nothing and then it almost steam rolled over them. The
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
With a project of this scale, and with the wallet and determination of the Chinese government, it's more than likely that an advanced Western IT company is going to be helping out with this monitoring task. They helped out with Iran, after all, which is much more taboo than helping out China.
Google Voice and other similar sites will be used to create generic SMS accounts that smartphones will then be programmed to send random 140 character junk messages at random intervals just to skew the results and make it more difficult to track individuals sending pornographic texts. We may not have privacy anymore, but what does that really matter when we can just hide in the torrent?
This causes minor confusion for a short while until someone figures out a fairly straightforward pattern to the artificially-generated messages, manages to filter them out, then goes back to looking at all the *real* SMS messages sent by people under a false sense of security.
It really annoys me how naive and shortsighted the people who propose all these "swamp them with bogus data" schemes are. Even if something works in the short term, the messages have still been recorded and can easily be re-filtered and re-examined (possibly using improved data mining techniques) once the scheme has been identified. Bingo, you've been incriminated on something you sent a couple of years ago when your scheme *wasn't* known about- but it is now.
And, of course, to give lots of people the benefit of the scheme, you've got to be open about it anyway, so unless it's *very* cleverly- and truly randomly- designed, the government- or whoever- is going to know how it works and spot it quite quickly anyway. I can assure you now that some random smartass twonk designing a plugin to Firefox that sends periodic generated queries to Google in an attempt to "hide" someone's browsing probably *isn't* going to cut it.
If you're not bothered about the evidence being incriminating in the medium to long term (e.g. if you're planning on being a suicide bomber), this might not be an issue, but that's not much good for those who want to use SMS to help conduct their lives or run a campaign without government oppression.
Incidentally, watch out in the next few years for all those people who mindlessly put personal data "out there" on the likes of Facebook having this come back to bite them. (Even *now*, even *without having logged in*, I could screen-scrape Facebook pages that tell me who's friends with who, and build up a complex picture of social networks if I was willing to program an app to do that). This is going to be a major "shit hits the fan" type thing if future governments are as pathologically obsessed with violating people's privacy in the way that current ones are, and even those who think they're being clever now (see above) may well get a shock.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Sent from Longh Whang...
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
to compare what a western government does to its citizens to what a country like china does to its citizens?
western governments are democracies, they rule by consent. therefore, there is a natural limit on what their citizens will tolerate before the government is voted out. china is an autocracy. a small select class of elites rule by fiat. fear and force is therefore how they rule. it doesn't matter what the citizens think, it matters only what a few grumpy technocrats in beijing think. furthermore, china has no promises on free information. everything is subject to censorship and control of all media is centralized. meanwhile, the west has a long standing cultural, legal, political and social obligation to protect the free flow of information, by law and by popular decree
fact: no government, historical, present day, or hypothetical, will not snoop for one reason or another, good or bad
therefore, that you can find some snooping a government does is therefore without probative value. they all do that, and they all always will. so you are left instead with an examination of the SCALE of the snooping, WHY people are being snooped on, and what kind of PUNISHMENT those who are snooped on receive
only then can it be said that you have some sort of intellectual honesty about your opinions. until then, it is simply a matter of intellectual charity to explain to you why what the chinese government does to its citizens is far, far worse than what any government in the west does to its citizens
please, by all means, let this be your invitation to recite the usual litany of the crimes of the west. and completely miss out on those amazing elementary school level concepts most of us learned, like compare and contrast
quantitative and qualitative fact: the crimes of the west are NOT equivalent to the crimes of china. china is FAR, FAR worse to its citizens and you have FAR, FAR less freedoms as a citizen of china than a citizen of any western country
that you do not understand this simple obvious truth is merely a mark of profound ignorance, bias, or propagandization on your part
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No one posted that...it was a joke. Read the damn comments, there were only 2 of them that you had to go through, and based on the topic headliner, the one that got modded up wasn't a response to anyone.