China is expanding its censorship controls to cover text messages sent using mobile phones.
New regulations have been issued to allow mobile phone service providers to police and filter messages for pornographic or fraudulent content.
But analysts fear the real targets are political dissidents.
China’s authorities are gradually tightening control over the spread of electronic information, particularly on the internet.
A Paris-based group, Reporters Without Borders, says the Chinese authorities are increasingly using new technology to control information.
It says one Chinese company marketing a system to monitor mobile phone text messages has announced it is watching for “false political rumours” and “reactionary remarks”.
Venus Info Tech Ltd said in a press release that its surveillance system worked by filtering algorithms based on key words and combinations of key words.
China’s plans to censor SMS messages was alluded to last year and now it seems ready to put into place. China Mobile, which controls 65 percent of the PRC’s mobile phone market, is the first to adopt the new filtering system, and you’d think it’s only a matter of time before China Unicom follows suit.
Of course, SMS text messages played a prominent role in spreading both truth and rumors during the SARS fiasco, and it probably drove the CCP ballistic that there was a medium over which they could exercise no control. Luckily for all, those days are over.
Whoever’s going to do the censoring is going to be very busy. Many in China spend a good part of the day SMSing their friends, so that’s a lot of messages to filter and police. This should open up new doors for citizens who want to join China’s army of Internet censors, already estimated to include about 30,000 foot soldiers. Your tax dollars at work.
Keep those reforms coming, Mr. Hu.
1
By Angry Chinese Blogger
It’s a good thing that my family don’t read this kind of news, they were already worried enough about me living in China, this would fuel their anciety even more
July 2, 2004 @ 6:07 pm | Comment
2
By Angry Chinese Blogger
It’s a good thing that my family don’t read this kind of news, they were already worried enough about me living in China, this would fuel their anciety even more
July 2, 2004 @ 6:07 pm | Comment
3
By SMS
“News of the disease [sars] reached the Chinese public in Guangdong through a short-text message, sent to mobile phones in Guangzhou around noon on Feb. 8. “There is a fatal flu in Guangzhou,” it read. This same message was resent 40 million times that day, 41 million times the next day and 45 million times on Feb. 10, according to the Southern Weekend newspaper…”
“Figures show that in 2002, 90 billion text messages were sent through China Mobile and China Unicom, two major telecommunication service providers in China. That works out as an average of about 246 million messages per day. And the figure rose to 300 million a day during the SARS outbreak.”
And then there’s SMS-hua, substitution of filtered words, code, and so on. Can’t see it working very well myself…
July 2, 2004 @ 6:34 pm | Comment
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By richard
Check the article; while filtering all of the billions of SMS messages sent in China sounds near-impossible to me, the article makes it sound quite doable:
“Filtering text messages is relatively straightforward because all SMS messages pass through a small number of gateways to get on to a mobile network and to another phone.”
July 2, 2004 @ 7:18 pm | Comment
5
By Conrad
Thank God China is reforming. THere’s been no news whatsoever lately on the SARS doctor. It looks like he’s going to suffer a fate far more serious than merely being kept off the streets during the Tiananmen anniversary.
July 2, 2004 @ 9:08 pm | Comment
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By The Asia Pages
China Censors Mobile Phone Text Message System
Once again The Duck delivers, this time on China censoring mobile phone text messages…
July 2, 2004 @ 11:02 pm | Comment
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By wayne
What’s with all of the “Mr. Hu, what a reformer!” comments? From the articles that I’ve read over at Adam’s site, Hu and Wen seem to be as high up the chain of command as I am. OK, that’s a bit of an exagerration, but I think it’s clear that it’s Jiang who’s still calling the shots.
July 3, 2004 @ 3:44 am | Comment
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By richard
“What’s with all of the “Mr. Hu, what a reformer!” comments?”
Last I heard, Hu was the No. 1 man in the PRC and has been vigorously promising reforms from day one. It’s not inappropriate to call him to account. If Jiang is really running the show and Hu is an impotent puppet, then we all need to be even more concerned about the promised reforms. (By the way, Joseph Kahn writes on the SMS censorship issue today, and Jiang’s name never comes up. I guess he didn’t read the post to which you refer.)
July 3, 2004 @ 11:48 am | Comment
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By Simon World
Virility
Firstly it was mobile phones, now it is Hong Kong’s most popular footwear: flip-flops. No wonder Hong Kong’s population is declining. Still, China’s found a new way to employ 30,000 more censors. People often underestimate the extent the CCP is prepare…
July 3, 2004 @ 6:27 pm | Comment
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By chriswaugh_bj
As for how they’d do this, I guess Britain, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have provided a good model with Echelon (or whatever it’s called) which is supposed to vacuum up all the electronic messages sent into or out of those countries and scan them for key words. I have no idea how effective this is or how that’d translate into censorship of SMS, the numbers of SMSs sent are so phenomenal, my point is simply that the principles behind such monitoring technology have been around for some time so it’s not technically impossible.
On the up side, maybe the phenomenal number of workers that would need to be employed to analyse all the messages caught up in such a system would help put people in work, relieving a bit of economic pressure on the government.
Whatever, I hope they enjoy the messages my girlfriend and I send to each other.
July 3, 2004 @ 10:26 pm | Comment
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By wayne
Last I heard, Hu was the No. 1 man in the PRC
I’m disappointed in you, Richard. You’re being way too naive.
I have a question for you. Off the top of your head, who was the president of the PRC when Tiananmen Square happened?
If you said Deng Xiaoping, you’re wrong. Yes, Deng Xiaoping was the No.1 guy in terms of being the one guy who made the final decision as to how handle the protests. But to the outside world, the official leader of China was Yang Shangkun. One of the reasons why Zhao Ziyang was discredited and the CCP ended up sending tanks into the Square on 6/4 was because Zhao Ziyang spilled the beans to Gorbachev that Deng was the guy where ultimately the buck stopped (even though Deng’s official position was literally only being president of China’s national bridge club.)
If Jiang is really running the show and Hu is an impotent puppet, then we all need to be even more concerned about the promised reforms.
Is that to say that Hu is a powerless puppet of Jiang’s? That’s probably an extreme characterization. But Hu and Wen’s positions seem much weaker than they were back at the 16th National Congress.
This is just one of Adam’s posts on the shift inside the CCP: http://www.brainysmurf.org/archives/001092.html
He’s made several other posts, so you can check his archives.
As to your comment about being even more concerned about these recent policies if Jiang is indeed the guy in charge, I agree with you 100%. That’s why I’m frustrated with your comments. I’m annoyed that Wen and Hu are losing power. I think Jiang and Zeng Qihong are absolute scumbags, but within the next year, they’re going to have full control of policymaking.
The ironic thing is that I think the reason why Wen and Hu are losing support within the CCP is because of what’s happening in Hong Kong and what’s happening in Taiwan. Yeah, I’m cheering on the demonstrators in HK (though I’m a bit less enthusiastic about Chen Shuibian’s reelection), but I have a feeling that 7/1 is just going to swing more support within the CCP to the hardliners who think the mainland has been way too lenient towards HK and Taiwan.
By the way, Joseph Kahn writes on the SMS censorship issue today, and Jiang’s name never comes up. I guess he didn’t read the post to which you refer.
That’s a completely misleading comment. Kahn doesn’t mention any Chinese leaders. It focuses completely on how it affects ordinary citizens.
July 4, 2004 @ 9:22 am | Comment
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By richard
Wayne, don’t be disappointed, please. Sometimes I can only spend a few seconds responding to comments, so if the responses aren’t always perfect I apologize. Go look back at my comment you are responding to, and you’ll see it’s very brief, and I think you are reading into it way more than was intended.
I thought you were implying that Hu was a puppet, as you pointed out Jiang is making the decisions. Or maybe I misunderstood you. If so, sorry about that.
As to Kahn not mentioning Jiang in his article — I was just thinking that if Jiang was behind all of this, Kahn would have pointed it out. Maybe not.
July 4, 2004 @ 11:00 am | Comment
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By Anonymous
This is pretty off-topic, but does anyone know if Chinese cell phone numbers have a default text messaging e-mail address (in the format @sbcglobal.net, but with a Chinese telecom domain name)?
August 21, 2004 @ 1:06 pm | Comment