Who are China's Top Internet Cops?
Last week, Foreign Policy published an interview with Li Wufeng, the director-general of China's State Council Information Office (SCIO), the agency in charge of regulating Internet content inside China.
The Foreign Policy reporter Mike Boyer called Li "China's Top Internet Cop" and then quoted Li as saying "We have neither the technology nor the manpower" to censor or filter the Internet, ...... We have just dozens of people in the Internet affairs bureau. Half of them are here today [in the room] "
In fact, Li is not a "cop," as the Information Office of the State Council is neither a public security nor state security agency. The real Internet cops are elsewhere. For starters, we could search "Internet Police" (网络警察）on Chinese search engine Baidu, and we will get 292,000 results. Page after page are Internet Police websites in different cities and provinces outlining their functions.
What about the technology that Li claims he doesn't have? Another search through Chinese blogosphere and BBS will uncover some very useful answers, including to the question, Who is China's top Internet cop?
Here is a very revealing BBS commentary at a techie BBS, loveunix.net, posted by a hacker named "sinister" in July, 2006:
I can confirm that the operating unit which is responsible for blocking and filtering the national gateways belongs to the Ministry of Information Industry. Before we can expand our bandwidth, we have to ask for their permission, and tip them a “surveillance and control fee." They are shameless.
The so-called “Information Gateway” they are working on consists of a large number of servers sitting on the international interfaces of China's Internet. The gateways monitor the information flow, and send out fake TCP packages to cut the TCP connections as soon as specific keywords are detected.
The organizations executing the gateway project are a few companies owned by Harbin Institute of Technology. Another company called VenusTech Ltd." (启明星辰信息技术有限公司) is also involved in the manufacture of a set of backup facilities.
A PhD from the Ministry of Public Security asked our company to submit a project proposal which involves building a high group computing power (hundreds of thousands billion times per second) with several thousands Tara Bits storage capacity.
As soon as the system is put into service, all behaviors of Chinese Internet users will be recorded in the huge storage. Your online account, password, and conversation records will be under tight surveillance. And your online behavior can be traced back up to a year.
http://www.loveunix.net...d=63677%20
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