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Echelon Watch
Worldwide Surveillance Syatems
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SOURCE
Echelon Watch
Worldwide Surveillance Syatems
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SOURCE
China to Target Mobile Phone Messaging
Fri Jul 2, 4:53 PM ET
By ELAINE KURTENBACH, AP Business Writer
SHANGHAI, China - Chinese authorities plan to use new technology to improve surveillance of mobile phone messages amid efforts to intensify 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 campaign also aims to widen surveillance of political dissent.
Beijing already screens e-mail, censors Internet chatrooms and blocks access to foreign Web sites considered subversive. But mobile phone messaging — known as short-message service, or SMS — is a newer technology, and the government has struggled to develop ways to control it.
Reporters Without Borders issued a statement protesting news that a Chinese company, Venus Info Tech Ltd., was authorized by Beijing 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, including online prostitution rings, 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 did not 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.
During last year's outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the government arrested people accused of causing panic by spreading what it said were "rumors" about SARS (news - web sites) via text messages, at a time when the authorities were still denying the disease existed.
