China casts glare over 750 million mobile phone users - Feature

Mon, 12 Apr 2010
Bill Smith

Beijing - Yao Lifa was halfway through a recent lunch with his wife, two friends and a journalist when four men walked into the private room at a restaurant in China's Hubei province.

The men stood stood near the circular table, listening to the sporadic conversation about the food, and refused to leave despite Yao's protests.

As a rights activist for more than a decade, Yao is well used to such invasions of privacy. He had invited the journalist to the lunch via text messages.

In a similar case, Beijing police summoned church leader Chen Tianshi in February after he received a text message from a European Union diplomat who wanted to meet him.

The growing monitoring of mobile phones reflects "increasing repression" of Chinese rights activists in recent years, Lucie Morillon, head of the Internet Freedom Desk for Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, told the German Press Agency dpa.

"Clearly it's one more way for the Chinese authorities to monitor these human rights activists," Morillon said. And it shows one more way that industrious officials can use new technology to keep an eye on citizens.

Despite the threat of arrest, in a country where heavy controls remain on all forms of political dissent, activists continue to use mobile phones to organize opposition to China's local and national governments.

Text messages are also one of the few media that allow Chinese people to poke fun at the ruling Communist Party and top state leaders.

Yao, like many activists, removes the battery from his mobile phone if he wants to avoid police attention. Some activists use only word of mouth to arrange sensitive meetings, while others use unregistered SIM-cards or public telephones.

After Iranian activists used text messaging and social networking applications such as Twitter to organize anti-government protests last year, China is "worried about this kind of mobilization," Morillon said.

In a parallel with Iran, the Chinese government suspended all mobile phone and internet services for some 20 million residents of its far western region of Xinjiang for five months last year, following the death of some 200 people in ethnic violence.

Nur Bekri, chairman of the regional government, said the services were suspended "because they were believed to be the vital tools used by ringleaders to instigate violence."

High charges and bureaucratic delays over the installation of fixed telephone lines helped China's mobile phone market to grow rapidly in the 1990s.

Mobile phone subscriptions have doubled again in the last five years to some 750 million, more than twice the estimated number of internet users.

With greater use of multimedia mobile phone messages sent via the internet, and rising mobile internet access, surveillance of mobile phones increasingly overlaps with internet controls.

At the end of last year, 233 million, or 61 per cent, of China's estimated 384 million internet users accessed the internet through mobile phones, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

China Telecom - which has some 500 million mobile phone subscribers - and another of the country's main service providers recently announced a system of draconian fines and suspension of service for users who send "pornographic" or otherwise "unhealthy" messages.

The government has discussed banning anonymous pre-paid subscriptions, which reportedly make up about half of all mobile phone accounts, and requiring all subscribers to register.

The state-run telecom firms cooperate "very closely" with the police and other authorities, Morillon said. "They are working together, basically," she said.

Surveillance tools include keyword filters and close monitoring of all activity on phone numbers used by known activists. The "unhealthy" category encompasses messages with political content.

In theory, anyone who sends a political message or even a joke to a few friends could be banned from the service.

One Beijing-based writer said his text messaging service was suspended without notice in January after he sent friends a message in support of dissident Liu Xiaobo, who is serving 11 years in prison for subversion.

Large-scale monitoring of mobile phones dates back to the late 1990s, when the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement used text messages to organize meetings and oppose the sometimes brutal government crackdown on the group.

The spreading of rumors and the maintenance of "social stability" remain the government's main justifications for controlling text- messaging.

"Spreading rumors by mobile phones is a hot topic," said Zhang Qingyuan, a legal researcher at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences.

"The rumors sent by mobile phones lead to social panic, and cause huge danger to society, and may bring difficulty to an industry," Zhang said, highlighting recent text messages carrying apparently exaggerated warnings over poisonous bananas and water pollution in a major lake.

In 2004, Reporters Without Borders said China had 2,800 dedicated centers to monitor text messages, using a system supplied by Chinese digital security firm Venus Info Tech.

These centers are now part of a "localization of censorship," Morillon said, in which local officials sometimes also censor material that is more personally than politically sensitive.

Several local governments have imposed laws and regulations on text-messaging, which are "suspected of running counter to the country's constitution," Zhang said.

Some activists have tried to challenge the authorities' right to censor text messages and internet content, and state media have aired some public discussion of related privacy issues.

But any new privacy law would be "unlikely to make a difference," Morillon said, because political concerns always take precedence for the Communist Party.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/318188,china-casts-glare-over-750-million-mobile-phone-users--feature.html.