Friday, October 17, 2008
Chinese surveillance one-ups itself
Chinese citizens must now must have their picture taken and id card scanned when entering an Internet cafe. This in addition to, you know, being constantly monitored by their government while on the internet, being monitored by big mamas and the whole blocking access to any kind of information that interferes with the regime's dogma thing. Oh, and these details are entered into a city-wide database. Just when you thought Chinese surveillance couldn't get any more intrusive...
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2 comments:
hahaha, the world is too small. I was telling a colleague an unfortunate passport-plus-internet-cafe-in-china story and instead of believing me, he googled the issue at hand and sent me a few links. One of these links, as you might now imagine, brought me to this site. And, uh, I think I might know you.
Since I am here, let me throw in my two cents.
Rather, three cents/facts about how this "mandate" actually plays out:
1. Scanning is too high-tech for most hole-in-the wall internet cafes, which usually consist of: a large dark, warm room full of computers; tween boys playing video games; girls chatting online and watching wang lee hom videos; and candy wrappers and sunflower seeds littered about (sometimes). Reality: employees write your name in a book that resembles the guest book at a bed&breakfast. It's procedural rather than anything capable of being referenced or searched post-facto in any efficient manner.
2. Anyone with a brain to do something potentially illegal will not likely do it in a cafe. Regardless of security cameras or computer tracking, there is no culture of privacy in China and people sitting 1 inch from you spend 47% of their time staring at your screen rather than their own. (That percent jumps to 102% if you're a foreigner). Someone would be more concerned with another person noticing and blabbing than they would about their id number being written somewhere in a book.
3. Internet controls are over-emphasized as something hindering normal people's ability to know the truth. Don't let weeping Olympic journalists get to you. Sure, the wikipedia site may never load and just return a blank screen, but there was no news site I could not get on in China. Moreover, I enjoy and am interested in the country, but I also talk a lot of shit, none of which was censored in my emails or blogging.
For the educated, English-speaking person who knows what they are looking for, they can find it on the internet. With that being said, if you are looking for Chinese history in mandarin, you're very right, you will be misled. However, in terms of protecting regime and CCP messaging, we should be much more worried about what text books publish and what museums and bulletin boards say about history than we are about the internet. (Museums will periodically close and re-open with a surprisingly new take on history and most older people brush-up on current events by crowding around local bulletin boards that post "news"). China fuels ethic and nationalist messages through schools, culture, and normal printed news and fliers, not via the web. CCP legitimacy efforts are less focused on the few people scouring the web, albeit a growing focus.
...And the passport story that led me here: after being in a million bootsie internet cafes, one of which I used to post images of an attack, I finally got rejected because they would not take my passport. This was because they could not read English to verify it even after I translated the silly thing. Really? That's not security, that's a lame new-hire teenager (the age-range which usually works in these places) who takes their job way too seriously. They are surely attempting security, but how successful Beijing is in reaching the vast and rather decentralized and corrupt country is less certain.
Small world indeed. To respond to your points...
1) I can appreciate that most of these places are gaming dive bars. That does not mean that effective control can not be maintained. See every authoritarian regime before the computer revolution. Inefficient does not mean impossible. You might be surprised how efficient the control over the populace was under the regimes of Stalin, Mao, et al.
2) No culture of privacy = what do you have to hide? We know where that leads. And keep in mind that people do not always have brains, especially when it comes to preserving their privacy.
3a) Well, I hope for your sake that this behavior goes undetected by the Communist Party.
3b) Censorship is still censorship. I can't imagine any defensible justification for blocking citizens' access to information, especially a resource as valuable as Wikipedia.
3c) Your point is well taken that the web is a new frontier viz. how the Chinese people acquire knowledge and that most Chinese learn via traditional means. However, this development is still something to be concerned about. Increasing numbers are flocking to the web as a means for learning. When the official (read: historical revisionist / fictitious ) position is taken as fact, the Chinese people are mislead. It remains an open question whether the leadership can continue this deception of the populace for years to come (that is, over the Internet).
Regarding your last paragraph:
Lame new-hire teenagers who take their jobs way too seriously are often the first and last vanguard of state security (like the anal girl who insisted that I take my baseball cap off when taking the GRE. But seriously folks, all moral relativism aside...). If you look at who is employed in the front/last line in security (at least in this country, it seems China is similar) it is not the best and the brightest. Don't look now, but they might be reporting you to their bosses for unusual behavior.
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