All Your Skype Belong To Us

Imagine this... A Communist Government is SPYING on it's country's citizens and censoring what they can see and say...

Surveillance of Skype messages found in China

A group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

The system tracks text messages sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay, the Web auctioneer that owns Skype, an online phone and text messaging service.

The discovery draws more attention to the Chinese government's Internet monitoring and filtering efforts, which created controversy this summer during the Beijing Olympics. Researchers in China have estimated that 30,000 or more "Internet police" monitor online traffic, Web sites and blogs for political and other offending content in what is called the Golden Shield Project or the Great Firewall of China.

The activists, who are based at Citizen Lab, a research group that focuses on politics and the Internet at the University of Toronto, discovered the surveillance operation last month. They said a cluster of eight message-logging computers in China contained more than a million censored messages. They examined the text messages and reconstructed a list of restricted words.

The list includes words related to the religious group Falun Gong, Taiwan independence and the Chinese Communist Party, according to the researchers. It includes not only words like democracy, but also earthquake and milk powder. (Chinese officials are facing criticism over the handling of earthquake relief and chemicals tainting milk powder.)

Birds of a Feather at UN

Here's no surprise. Russian and China won't condemn something they want to have the option to do in their citizens get uppity too. Imagine, demanding freedom! The nerve.

Russia and China dig in their heels over Burma as the West calls for UN sanctions

China and Russia signalled last night that they would block any UN sanctions against Burma as a UN envoy headed to Singapore to try to get a visa to enter the country.

The UN Security Council gathered in emergency session to discuss the crackdown on street protests in the country, amid calls from the US and the European Union nations for international action. After separate talks in New York, US and EU ministers condemned the violence against peaceful demonstrators and asked the 15-nation Security Council to “consider further steps including sanctions” against the junta.

But Wang Guangya, China’s UN ambassador, told the closed door Security Council meeting that, while Beijing favoured stability and national reconciliation in Burma, the crisis was an internal matter. “We believe sanctions are not helpful for the situation down there,” Mr Wang said.

Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s UN Ambassador, said what Burma needed first was a “return to security”.

Ibrahim Gambari, the UN troubleshooter, was due to fly to Singapore to press for a visa to make his first visit to Burma since he met the democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi last year in an unsuccessful attempt to secure her release from house arrest.

Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, urged the Burmese regime to co-operate with Mr Gambari's mission and repeated his call for the “utmost restraint toward the peaceful demonstrations taking place”.

Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington's UN ambassador, also called on Burma to let Mr Gambari in without delay. “It is very important that this be done on an urgent basis,” Mr Khalilzad said. “It would not be good for Mr Gambari to visit grave sites after many more Burmese have been killed.”

Gordon Brown had earlier added his voice to the growing chorus of criticism, when he warned the reclusive regime in Burma that “the whole world” was watching the stand-off.

“Its illegitimate and repressive regime should know that the whole world is going to hold it to account,” the Prime Minister said, speaking at the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth. “The age of impunity in neglecting and overriding human rights is over.”

The pro-democracy demonstrations and crackdown by the army could not have come at a worse time for the reclusive military leadership in Burma.

World leaders were assembled in New York when the demonstrations in Rangoon gathered momentum and the struggle has dominated the debate at the UN General Assembly.

President Bush has announced fresh US sanctions against Burma, the European Union is strengthening its measures against the regime and further action may follow from the UN Security Council meeting.

France, which currently holds the presidency of the UN Security Council, appeared eager to set the example. President Sarkozy called last night on French businesses, including the oil giant Total, to freeze investments in Burma in response to the crackdown.

Burma was forced on to the formal Security Council agenda last September by a procedural vote. China, Russia, Qatar and Congo voted against. China and Russia also vetoed a US-sponsored resolution in January calling for Burma to stop persecuting minority and opposition groups and to start a political dialogue.

China, Burma’s largest trading partner, is regarded as crucial to the international response. In the past it has refused to interfere in the country’s internal affairs but may be softening its position.

The West hopes that Beijing, which is hosting next year’s Olympics, will take a tougher stand against Burma, as it has done recently in relations with Sudan and Zimbabwe.

“China has made some significant concessions recently on its links with Sudan, but it has not gone that far on its links with Burma,” said David Mathieson, a Burma consultant for Human Rights Watch.

“If things heat up, that is not going to look good for China in the lead up to the Olympics at all,” he said.

China Puts Dissident Blogger In Nut House

China's human rights record is almost as good as their safety standards.

Dissident blogger in China put in mental hospital

The Chinese dissident blogger He Weihua has been confined in a psychiatric hospital in a detention his family blames on his criticism of the government, a press freedom group said Friday. "It is unacceptable that the Chinese authorities use such methods to silence citizens who have just expressed their views peacefully online," Reporters Without Borders said. "... How can the authorities expect us to believe that a mentally ill person is capable of detailed investigative reporting?"

The Paris-based organization said He was sent to the hospital in the southern province of Hunan early this month after making a posting in July on his blog www.boxun.com/hero/hewh that criticized an increase in pork prices by Hunan officials and predicted corruption within the Communist Party would soon cause its collapse.

Reporters Without Borders described itself as outraged by He's detention and called on the central government to intervene with Hunan authorities for He's release.

"We fear that this case shows that the Chinese authorities have still not abandoned the use of punitive psychiatry against those who expose abuses and defy censorship," the group said.

He's relatives told the group that he is not mentally ill.

"He has written an enormous number of articles on human rights, especially on Boxun. I think he has all the qualities of a person of sound mind," one relative was quoted as saying by the group.

He was confined after receiving a judicial summons from the Public Security Bureau, and it was not his first stint in a psychiatric hospital, Reporters Without Borders said. He was also held in 2004 and given injections against his will by member of the State Security Bureau, it charged.

He was also run down by a motorcycle in September, and the driver told him to stop his human-rights writings, Reporters Without Borders said.

In June, the State Security Bureau searched He's home in the city of Hengyang, confiscating his laptop and warning him he faced consequences if he continued writing about human rights, it added.

China Blocks Activist's Wife at Airport

They were worried she'd "Cause harm to the country". They certainly don't need any help with that.

China Blocks Activist's Wife at Airport

Chinese authorities on Friday barred the wife of an imprisoned human rights activist from leaving the country to accept a humanitarian award on his behalf, a friend said. Yuan Weijing's passport and telephone were confiscated as she attempted to pass through security at Beijing airport, said Hu Jia, an AIDS advocate who himself has been under house arrest for months.

Yuan had planned to fly to the Philippines to accept a Magsaysay Award, Asia's version of the Nobel Prize, for her husband, Chen Guangcheng, a self-trained lawyer who helped farmers with grievances file court cases.

Chen, who is blind, was sentenced to four years, three months in prison in 2006 after he documented cases of forced abortions and other abuses by local family planning officials in his native province of Shandong in eastern China.

Barring Yuan from leaving shows the extent to which China's authoritarian communist rulers will go to prevent government critics from drawing attention at international forums to human rights abuses within the country.

In an interview Thursday, Yuan said: "I haven't done anything wrong, so I'll give it a try, and if they stop me then it's not my problem."

Yuan said authorities in Shandong had attempted to prevent her from coming to Beijing and were blocking her from leaving Hu Jia's apartment where she had been staying. About 30 policemen blocked her on Friday, but she was eventually able to leave after about 45 minutes, possibly due to the presence of foreign reporters, Hu said.

Yuan called Hu to let him know her passport had been confiscated but the call was quickly cut off. Attempts to reach her again failed. It was not immediately clear whether she had been detained.

Hu said Philippines Airlines service personnel told his wife that Yuan's baggage had been taken off the plane by police - a likely sign that she would be forcibly returned to Shandong.

"The biggest loser here is not Yuan Weijing and not the Magsaysay Foundation but the Chinese government," said Hu. "This just really shows how bad the human rights situation is here."

China also blocked two previous winners of Magsaysay prizes from collecting their awards, including army doctor Jiang Yanyong, who embarrassed the government by revealing the true scale of the 2003 SARS outbreak.

Also blocked was crusading AIDS activist Gao Yaojie, who has been repeatedly harassed by provincial officials seeking to squelch news about the epidemic and government malfeasance that aided the disease's spread.

Hu said Yuan told him authorities cited a statute blocking people who may cause harm to the nation from leaving the country when they took away her passport.

Molten Aluminium Spill Kill 14

Safety first!

Human error blamed for molten aluminium spill in China

Workers' negligence has been blamed for the molten aluminium spill that killed 14 and injured 59 others at a factory in east China's Shandong Province on Sunday, the provincial work safety watchdog has said.

The inner lining of an aluminium container at the factory in Zouping county fell off because it was mishandled by workers, which led to the spillage of aluminium at a temperature of 900 degrees Celsius, the Shandong Provincial Work Safety Bureau said.

Only three injured workers have been discharged from hospital so far, Xinhua news agency reported.

Four months ago, 32 workers were killed and six others injured at a steel plant in Liaoning Province when a ladle transporting molten steel broke.

Chinese Poet in Exile

Please take ten minutes to watch this short film of Chinese poet Huang Xiang who fled the Peoples Republic of China to Pittsburgh PA.

If his poetry and shouting annoys you remember that it annoyed the overlords in China enough to want to kill him.

I don't know what the woman in the video is talking about when she says that speech in America is being restricted. I suspect she doesn't know what she's talking about either. Huang Xiang knows about restricted speech though as do many in China.

Kudos to Josetxu for telling this story.