China Mandates Wi-Fi Hotspot Traffic Monitoring 83
hypnosec writes with an article on tightening censorship in China. From the article: "Officials in China warned businesses in the capital city to install web surveillance technology to monitor their traffic or they may have to face hefty fine or closure. ... It seems that the step to intensify web censorship in the country has left businesses with no other choice but to stop providing WiFi services.."
Re:What's the difference? (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Practical: Network surveillance enjoys enormous economies of scale. The cost, per customer, of some creepy Narus or Sandvine spook shit sitting on the line is fairly small. It is also largely invisible; buried within the more-or-less-arbitrary-and-opaque pricing structure of the ISP. Outside of a fairly small number of NOC jockies, and the feds, nobody has to see it or think about it. Joe Hotspot, on the other hand, faces a proportionally greater compliance burden, so he is likely to just turn the hotspot off. This upsets potential wifi users, and many hotspot operators are small-business types, who will talk with their customers about why there isn't wifi anymore. Incremental and largely invisible price increase vs. substantial decline in open hotspots...
2. Ideological: American Exceptionalism is a hell of a drug. By virtue of our status as the Good Guys, what we do is Good until proven evil, and often even Good after being proven evil. The sinister, repressive, communist state of the cunning chinaman, on the other hand...