Your Rights Online: China To Photograph All Internet Cafe Customers

[Bob Hubbard]

From Slashdot


Your Rights Online: China To Photograph All Internet Cafe Customers 2008-10-17 09:22


Posted by kdawson on Friday October 17, @09:22AM
from the papers-please-and-smile dept.

Gwaihir the Windlord writes "Not only is the Great Firewall of China back up and running, but now if you visit an Internet cafe, your photo will be taken and your identity card scanned. And the friendly officers of the Cultural Law Enforcement Taskforce make those details, entered into a city-wide database, available at any other cafe. So much for the new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in."

 

[girlbug2]

I am not clear as to their stated reasons for this. How will it "benefit children" as the article quoted?

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Good question. My guess is with internet access limited to controled monitored points, they'll look for less kiddie porn online, but that's just a guess. I figure it's more "sounds like a good excuse to use" stuff.

 

[Archangel M]

Makes the Patriot Act look like parking code law huh?

 

[Bob Hubbard]

Pretty much. The Chinese have always been paranoid when it comes to the internet, even going so far as to run a seperate "sanitized" version only viewable from within China. They even have a copy of MartialTalk running bootleg software.

 

[Nolerama]

China could be monitoring their internet cafe users because they need to meet farming quota for American Massive Multiplayer Online games.

 

[Xue Sheng]

It's China... not America.. Deal with it.

As to the "new levels of openness and transparency that the Olympics were supposed to usher in"

What planet does that author live on? It is China.

China is better than it use to be by far but it is not America, nor is it likely it will ever be, so deal with it. The Chinese are dealing with it, they are INCREDIBLY aware of their laws as to how to and when to follow them and how to circumvent them.

And think about this for a second.

"your photo will be taken and your identity card scanned. And the friendly officers of the Cultural Law Enforcement Taskforce make those details, entered into a city-wide database, available at any other cafe."

Beijing is (greater 2X in population of Beijingren, not counting those that are from other areas of China) larger than NYC and many cities in China are considerably larger than NYC. If this is in fact true do you have any idea how many people we are talking about here and how much data entry and server space we are talking. Also how many internet cafes are there in China anyway and if a lot frequent them then you are talking a number so big it is mind boggling. "EDIT" Per article 250 million

And available for what at any other internet cafe?

And does anyone have any idea how many people are running off of open wireless connections just becuase they know how?

Bootleg software is rampant as are hackers and all sorts of other Internet nastiness in China.

And yes China censors a lot of the internet but they censor a lot of tv to so expect this, its China.

EDIT

The story without having to log into slashdot
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24510571-2703,00.html

China also let the today show setup a satellite broadcast truck in the Forbidden City and they never allowed that before either and I am guessing they will never allow it again. The Olympics where there, they had to open up a bit for all the media and now they are tightening things back down. This is not really all that surprising to me.