Beijing Olympics 2008: The flame of freedom is dimming.

The website net.china pushes China's digital abuse full circle -
they're now taking out online activists online. In addition, the climate of fear is hightened by "asking" good Chinese citizens to inform on anyone they think might be a cyber-terrorist. Of course, their definition of a cyber-terrorist may be slightly different to ours, seeing as how they only recently detained Cheng Yizhong without trial for the past five months for reporting a suspected case of SARS. Released in the last few days, his freedom has been attributed to the online activism and pressure of everyone from occasional net-users to the most hardcore of online liberals.

In addition to the wonderful tell-tale website ethics China now employs (under a guise of shutting down pornographic content - is that why the majority of the sites mentioned on net.china are usually freedom of speech / political foums?), they're now pushing their ability to monitor text messages. In the same way that words entered into Chinese search engines such as 4 June (the date of the Tiananmen Square crackdown), human rights, independent Taiwan or Tibet, and Falun Gong will be blocked, the same ethic is being applied to text messages, only in this case an alert will be sent to police and you'll no doubt be locked up witout trial and not see the light of day for at least a good six months or so. Fair? Absolutely not. Yet another amazing invasion of privacy by the Chinese Government on its beleaguered citizens? Absolutely.

The technology, created by Venus Info Tech, works by filtering algorithms based on key words and combinations of key words. Designed to stop another incident where the Chinese leaked information about the Government's cover up of the SARS outbreak, it will be getting into full swing in time for the Beijing 2008 Olympics, alongside their continual jamming of foreign radio stations. It will be interesting to see just how far they push digital technology to censor these games - combined with their obvious relish for setting about people's heads with billy clubs and you have a guaranteed international incident ready to explode.

Moscow 1980, anyone?

Links:
Boycott Beijing 2008
Olympic Watch.org
Seven years of supervision
Falun Gong Information Centre