China about to begin realtime censoring SMS messages

[Thomas Shaddack]

On Sat, 3 Jul 2004, Major Variola (ret) wrote:

> At 06:25 PM 7/3/04 +0200, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
> >automatically send SMS messages to a list of numbers. The government 
> >already keeps statistics on number of messages sent at time period from 
> >a single number, and alerts the officials when it's above the limit and 
> >then the content is checked manually.
> 
> What you need then is also a "telephone tree" to do mass distributions
> (randomly time-delayed) without having any one source go "over quota".

I suppose it's what Falun Gong started doing in reaction to the measure.

> Could be phone meshed or use computer SMS I/O.

If the gateways are present.

> Wouldn't it be horrible if some otherwise benign, quiet worm infected
> computers to implement this?  Zombies aren't just for porn & pills,
> they can help spread the newz.

Or act as an onion-routing anonymizing network. It's a bit drastic way of 
enforcing privacy means, but it's always better to have a nuke up one's 
sleeve in case the stakes would get way too high.

I expect it to happen in couple years. Most likely it will be born either 
in some overtly restrictive regime of Far or Middle East (including but 
not limited to China), or as a reaction to some drastic measure-to-happen 
in the Demagocratic West.