Posted on 07/02/2004 5:48:28 AM PDT by tdadams
SHANGHAI, China (AP) - Chinese authorities plan to employ new technology to improve surveillance of mobile phone messages amid efforts to intensify the policing of private communications, reports said Friday.
The official Xinhua News Agency said the campaign was aimed at cleaning up "pornographic, obscene and fraudulent" phone messages that have "infiltrated short messaging content."
According to the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders, the surveillance is also aimed at extending surveillance of political dissent to mobile phone messaging - known as short-message service, or SMS.
Beijing already screens e-mail, censors online chatrooms and blocks access to foreign Web sites considered subversive. But SMS is a newer technology and the government has struggled to develop ways to control it.
Reporters Without Borders issued a written statement protesting news that a Chinese company, Venus Info Tech Ltd., recently was authorized by the Public Security Ministry to sell a "realtime surveillance system" for SMS messages.
The technology uses filtering algorithms created by the government-run Chinese Academy of Sciences to identify key words and combinations of words that might be associated with political rumors and "reactionary remarks," the group said.
The new surveillance systems can automatically alert police and keep records of suspect messages, it said.
The Xinhua report did not directly mention politically unacceptable messages, but noted that violent text messages or those that could "harm economic interests" were also cause for concern.
It said providers of phone and Internet services were expected to participate on a basis of "self-discipline."
So far, 11 companies have been penalized for using the Internet to provide illegal services such as online prostitution rings as a result of the crackdown, it said.
Separately, a newspaper reported that China's biggest mobile phone company will start screening text messages for pornographic content.
The Beijing Daily Messenger didn't say how China Mobile would screen messages sent by its 153 million customers, or whether it also would target politically oriented messages. The company says customers sent 40 billion messages last year.
According to the Ministry of Information Industry, China's 260 million mobile phone users sent a total of 220 billion SMS messages last year.
Although cheap and convenient, the proliferation of SMS spam has provoked debate over abuse by companies that bombard cell phone users with unwanted messages, often in the dead of the night.
During last year's outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the government arrested some people accused of causing panic by spreading what it said were "rumors" about the disease via SMS at a time when the authorities were still denying its existence.
They'll go farther than we can imagine here, with no real organized opposition and little ability to communicate with the outside world. Hopefully Hong Kong will turn out to be too big a bite for the Dragon to swallow.
Eventually, the communist government in China has got to go. If not from internal revolution then from our military. The ChiComs are the paymasters of the terrorists, and sooner or later they'll require an attitude adjustment.
Seacrest out.
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