Chinese Gov’t Monitors Text Messages For “Illegal” Content
As the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in the United States addresses the first case of “sexting,” the Chinese government pressured one of their telecommunications companies to monitor and report any text transmissions that contain “lewd” and “illegal” content.
Last year, the Chinese government pledged to silence pornography on the internet, and now it appears it has extended its campaign to mobile phones and other content it deems illegal.
The Nanfang Daily (the Guangdong Provincial Communist Party official newspaper) reported that if mobile phone users were found to be in violation, the mobile phone messaging feature will be shut down and the phone – and any numbers related to the incident – will be handed over to the authorities.
The other “illegal” content includes messages of violence, fraud, suggestions of terrorism, instigations to crime and gambling.
“Sending just one unlawful text message will result in suspension of the texting service,” says the article. “To get it back, the person would have to submit a written promise to the public security authority not to send unlawful messages again.”
An employee of China Mobile, the telecommunications company working with the Chinese government, told the Global Times that the company would search for keywords and then forward the offending messages to the police to investigate.
“We will first block the user from sending and receiving messages … and the police station will then evaluate it,” said the unidentified employee.
China Mobile is the world’s largest phone operator with 518.1 million subscribers as of November, and transmits roughly 1.4 billion text messages a day.
But critics allege the scheme is another attempt to strangle dissent and curb the spread of political content deemed a threat to Communist Party rule.
Google’s top lawyer, David Drummand, announced last week that they will quit censoring Internet searches for the Chinese government and may, in fact, pull out of China altogether.
In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different.
First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities.
Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
… These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn.
Although Google didn’t come out and say it, some believe the hacking was sanctioned or even perpetrated by the Chinese government – fishing for information on anti-communist activists.
Others question why Google is acting surprised. In order for Google to be allowed to set up operations in China, which began in 2006, they had to agree to a number of government demands, chief among them was to censor a host of forbidden topics.
Evgeny Morozov, an expert on the political effects of the internet and a Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University in Washington DC, questioned why Google had made the decision after four years.
“They knew pretty well what they were getting into,” he said. “Now it seems they are playing the innocence card… It’s like they thought they were dealing with the government of Switzerland and suddenly realised it was China.”
Teng Biao, a Beijing-based lawyer, told Bloomberg that e-mails sent to his Gmail account were being automatically forwarded to another user without his knowledge.
Teng, 36, who provides legal services to individuals arrested in anti-government riots in Tibet in 2008, says he receives, on average, a once-a-month visit by government security officials.
He is also a founder of the Open Constitution Initiative, known as Gongmeng, which is an advocacy group for Chinese rule of law that was closed by the government last year.
After the Xinjiang riots on July 5 that resulted in 197 deaths, the residents in Xinjiang, were electronically silenced. Websites, mobile phone services, and long distance were shut down.
In December, 5 months after the incident, residents of the area were only allowed access to the state-run Xinhua News Agency and the People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper. Text messaging resumed for the first time today(January 18).
The Xinjiang authorities told the Global Times that other Internet services and international long distance calls are expected to gradually resume in near future.
The Chinese government blamed the violence on overseas groups pushing for broader rights for Uighurs in Xinjiang. The authorities accused organizers of using text messages and the Internet to organize the protests and promptly shut down cell phone lines and Web sites to “calm the situation.”
The Chinese government crackdown over the riots also resulted in more than a dozen people who have been sentenced to death and at least nine executions have already been carried out.
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