China censoring billions of phone text messages

[DC09]

SHANGHAI, China - Chinese authorities plan to use new technology to improve surveillance of mobile phone messages amid efforts to intensify policing of private communications, reports said Friday.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the campaign was aimed at cleaning up "pornographic, obscene and fraudulent" phone messages that have "infiltrated short messaging content."

According to the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders, the campaign also aims to widen surveillance of political dissent.

Beijing already screens e-mail, censors Internet chatrooms and blocks access to foreign Web sites considered subversive. But mobile phone messaging — known as short-message service, or SMS — is a newer technology, and the government has struggled to develop ways to control it.

Reporters Without Borders issued a statement protesting news that a Chinese company, Venus Info Tech Ltd., was authorized by Beijing to sell a "realtime surveillance system" for SMS messages.

The technology uses filtering algorithms created by the government-run Chinese Academy of Sciences to identify key words and combinations of words that might be associated with political rumors and "reactionary remarks," the group said.

The new surveillance systems can automatically alert police and keep records of suspect messages, it said.

The Xinhua report did not directly mention politically unacceptable messages but noted that violent text messages or those that could "harm economic interests" were also cause for concern.

It said providers of phone and Internet services were expected to participate on a basis of "self-discipline."

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