I've a question about Chinese govt. "minders" in chatrooms.?

Question

i heard recently that in addition to blocking subversive websites, the Communist Party in China puts 'minders' in chatrooms accessible to its citizens. my question is this. i've talked to many ppl in China in several different chatrooms(English Language Yahoo!chats), and i would like to know, how does the govt keep an eye on what is said to its citizens by ppl such as myself, who live in non Communist nations?

Answer 1

As I recall Microsoft has to pay the Chinese government a fee for people utilizing Windows.  Its just a reminder that the folks who are using slave labor to have you help them prop up their government is really not as nice as we are often told.  Probably you are wearing some kind of clothing  made by people who are treated as slave workers.  You don't want to have a good trade skill there or you can end up in prison to make things for the government to export.  The Chinese Army has businesses and exports items, among them guns to the US.  Its a funny world so long as you don't pay attention.  And if you note that people often have no human rights in the cheap labor countries either a radical left lib or a radical right freak will chastise you, one because they support the one world idea and the other because they support the idea of cheap labor.  I think you could get someone in serious trouble in a chat room in China and you can certainly set yourself up for additional contact if you look like a good prospect.  Tell them you work in a computer factory and they will be at your door in the U.S. in the morning.

Answer 2

Political censorship is built into all layers of China’s Internet infrastructure. Known widely in the media as the “Great Firewall of China,” this aspect of Chinese official censorship primarily targets the movement of information between the global Internet and the Chinese Internet.

Internet censorship in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is overseen technically by the Ministry of Information Industry (MII). Policy about what substantive content is to be censored is largely directed by the State Council Information Office and the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department, with input from other government and public security organs.2 Physical access to the Internet is provided by nine state-licensed Internet Access Providers (IAP), each of which has at least one connection to a foreign Internet backbone, and it is through these connections that Chinese Internet users access Internet websites hosted outside of China.3 The individual Chinese Internet user buys Internet access from one of several thousand Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who are in effect retail sellers of Internet access that is in turn purchased wholesale from the nine IAPs.

Internet routers, devices that deliver and direct packets of data back and forth between networks, are an essential part of Internet networks. Most of today’s routers also allow network administrators to censor or block—or, as the industry calls it, “filter”—the data going through them, programming the router to block certain kinds of data from passing in or out of a network. This filtering capability was initially intended so that Internet Service Providers could control viruses, worms, and spam. The same technology, however, can also be easily employed to block political, religious, or any other category of content that the person programming the router seeks to block.4

The first layer of Chinese Internet censorship takes place at this router level. According to the 2005 technical analysis of Chinese Internet filtering conducted by the Open Net Initiative, IAP administrators have entered thousands of URLs (Internet website addresses) and keywords into the Internet routers that enable data to flow back and forth between ISPs in China and Internet servers around the world. Forbidden keywords and URLs are also plugged into Internet routers at the ISP level, thus controlling data flows between the user and the IAP. 5

This router-level censorship, configured into the hardware of the Chinese Internet, is reinforced by software programs deployed at the backbone and ISP level which conduct additional “filtering” of political content. (In many countries such censorship software deployed at the backbone and ISP level is a product called SmartFilter, developed by Secure Computing. China, however, has developed its own home-grown filtering software.)6 Such filtering programs are used globally by households, companies, and organizations for all kinds of purposes: they enable employers to block employees from surfing pornography or gambling online from the office, and enable schools to prevent young students from accessing age-inappropriate content.

It is this type of censorship or blocking that causes an error message to appear in the Chinese Internet user’s browser when he or she types, for example, http://www.hrw.org (the Human Rights Watch website) into the address field of his or her browser.

Answer 3

Like anything else with technology...If they can conceive it, they can usually do it!

Phone calls, emails and such can easily (and probably do pass) through monitoring systems that we as a general public aren't even aware of.  That's also part of security systems of nations as well.

If your q and my a gets a knock on the door from guys wearing black suits and sunglasses, then you'll know you did a good job, eh?!

Take care!!

Answer 4

They only try. The only thing they can do is the filtering incoming and outgoing traffic. If they catch anything (a word, a sentence, symbol etc) which they do not like, they can stop. But to filter everything into the bits in Internet traffic is highly impossible. They do it partially.

They can restrict access to certain web sites but cannot filter every word flying in wires.

Answer 5

I am sure the Chinese do not monitor every chat room, but the Chinese government does have an elaborate security apparatus.

Answer 6

Read Big Brother by G. Orwell.