China Begins Monitoring Billions of Text Messages 178
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by
Soulskill
from the that-would-be-a-terrible-job dept.
from the that-would-be-a-terrible-job dept.
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."
Evil. (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? This is designed to increase censorship? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Doesn't this violate the 1st Amendment? (Score:3, Insightful)
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!
Re:Why does China dislike porn so much? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Monitoring is universal (Score:2, Insightful)
And then bring a letter of guarantee to the local public security bureau promising to never again use encryption before service can be reactivated.
If they put half their censoring effort into.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder how far they can push it (Score:4, Insightful)
Run over with a tank subjective? (Score:3, Insightful)
Self censorship and conservative thought (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Self censorship and conservative thought (Score:2, Insightful)
English companies will help... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Monitoring is universal (Score:3, Insightful)
It's actually a very appropriate, even polite, method of communication in many circumstances. One that doesn't scream at you "ANSWER NOW! I DEMAND TO TALK TO YOU RIGHT NOW!!!"
Re:Wait for it... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
why do you think it is valid (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Monitoring is universal (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Monitoring is universal (Score:3, Insightful)
Voicemail still has much larger potential of being abused, of disrespecting time of the recipient. Especially since people too often don't give up with trying to contact you directly, and try another time...and another.
SMS tends to be more to the point; and people can read several times faster than somebody can speak.
Re:Monitoring is universal (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly, and with voicemail the recipient still has to turn it on. And I don't always want to talk to everyone even if I'm basically free (playing a game, watching a movie or whatever). Sending a sms on a non-urgent and not-so-important issue is a lot less intrusive and a lot more polite.