U.S.-China Surveillance

An interesting post in the Financial Times today talks about a new online surveillance trend in China, led by the Beijing-based company TRS Information Technology, that shifts from searching for politically sensitive keywords to “advanced text mining solutions enabling censors to monitor and forecast public opinion.” The article appears to takes a negative view [...]

A new policy for Internet cafe users to register with their real names, announced last March, appears now to be implemented on a widespread basis within the city. First time visitors to a particular Internet cafe locale must have their pictures taken and their national ID cards scanned before sitting down at a terminal. The [...]

The San Franciscos Chronicles’ “TheTech Chronicles,” along with a number of other media outlets, is reporting that Google has will “halve the time it stores logs of user web searches” from 18 to 9 months. Charitably, one could call this a misleading statement, but it really is just plain wrong. Google keeps its search logs [...]

Just in time for the Olympics, the Guardian is reporting a development in how the Tor network diffuses that appears, at least temporarily, to obviate any established methods of web censorship. The Tor network was developed by the US Naval Research laboratory to anonymize (but not necessarily encrypt) Internet traffic. The Chinese government has been [...]

I’ve been following this fascinating story about a major breakdown of propaganda controls at the the popular newspaper, Beijing News. The paper, apparently inadvertently, published a photo of Tiananmen victims taken by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Liu Heung Shing in its July 25th print edition. The whole story of how it happened and the predicament [...]

There’s an excellent, informative article by David Bandurski about what has become known as China’s “Fifty Cent Party” in the latest issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review. This growing group of state-financed “web commentators” has been attempting to monitor and influence public opinion via online chat rooms and BBSs since the spring of [...]

More details:
INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS
WORLD VISION
U.S. TAX DEDUCTABLE TO CHINESE RED CROSS
IN CHINA/IN CHINESE

From today’s Seattle Times:
Microsoft device helps police pluck evidence from cyberscene of crime
By Benjamin J. Romano
Seattle Times technology reporter
Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.
The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB [...]

The Information Office of China’s State Council released an English-language report on human rights in the US today. Section III of the report, On Civil and Political Rights, deals with issues of surveillance and data privacy. Here are some excerpts:
From January 2005 to September 2007, Verizon provided data to federal authorities “on an emergency [...]

According to a report today in the London-based online journal, The Inquirer, net cafe patrons in metropolitan Beijing must register with their real names starting later this year. Beijing, to my knowledge, becomes the second Chinese city (Xiamen was the first, in the wake of the successful PX Chemical plant protest) to attempt to impose [...]