China Demands Real Names From Mobile Phone Users 187
itwbennett writes "Starting this month, mobile carriers in China are requiring people who set up new mobile phone accounts to register with their real names as part of a new government measure to reduce anonymity among the country's 800 million mobile users. And within 3 years, the carriers must also register the real identities of all existing users, said China Telecom spokesman Xu Fei. The new policy comes as China has been pushing users to register with their real names online. In August, online gamers had to begin real-name registration under regulations that are meant to protect minors from Internet addiction and 'unhealthy' content."
Unusual? (Score:3, Interesting)
We have had to show photo id for as long as I can remember in Austraila when getting a new phone or sim card.
There really isn't that much seperating "us" and the "bad" guys these days except we are "us".
Re:Unusual? (Score:4, Interesting)
works fine in Germany (Score:3, Interesting)
You have a government issued ID with a government-issued ID number. Phone companies are required to collect this information and verify it with the government. They also generally require banking information for billing purposes, and make sure that that's consistent with the registered user of the phone as well. Yes, you can try to privately sell a SIM card registered under your name to someone else and manage to get by with prepaid cards. But that's a risky thing to do, because if the phone is used for some illicit purpose, the police will come to you. Even if you can prove you didn't do the crime, intending to get around registration requirements itself may cause trouble. There are some ways around this (e.g. roaming SIM cards), but most people are fully registered and tracked.
As for the Internet, Internet connections are also registered with the government under your name, and your provider is required to keep a record of all your connections, and it's illegal to set up open access points. Of course, it's easier to communicate clandestinely with Internet protocols, including going through foreign proxies, but if you try, that itself is often detectable and suspicious.
Where Germany wins over a place like Saudi Arabia is that they generally use all this tracking and surveillance only against actual crimes, although it's probably only a matter of time until those protections erode and governments will start using it for political purposes. Some of the people responsible for the laws and technology had plenty of experience from fascist and communist regimes.
Good! (Score:5, Interesting)
Now when they try to push the same legislation thru here in the USA all it will take is a quick comparison to COMMUNIST CHINA to get the politicians to vehemently oppose it....
Re:Wow.. these kids are pretty trusting... (Score:3, Interesting)
If so, then they learned it from the USA which learned it from Prussia which learned it from India's training for the underclasses of the Hindu caste system. The original founders of the USA system used to be quite open about this soon after the Industrial Revolution. Their biggest fears were that overproduction caused by too many independent American entrepreneurers might make them take heavy losses on their massive investments in industrial equipment and centralized production and that the poor might become dangerously discontent.
The solution they embraced was a system of schooling designed to teach the masses just enough to be useful workers but not so much that they can think critically and understand things like Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis or bread-and-circus. Other nations saw how useful this was for the ruling class (who, by the way, overwhelmingly go to elite private schools where they are taught to be leaders) and adopted similar policies.
The fact that people in Western nations tend to recognize China's use of public schooling for these purposes (because China is teh evil!) but fail to recognize the less-extreme version employed by their own countries (because we are patriotic!) is a masterful triumph of this system.
Re:Nothing new... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new... (Score:2, Interesting)
False, they'll just define something else as terrorism.
No offense, but "definition of 'any form' fail". Not that I don't appreciate your general point. Just that I carefully worded my post to account for it. You're absolutely right thought that this is the mentality with which you are dealing.