China Creates Cyber Cops

The Chinese government has created a pair of virtual cops to patrol the Internet, the state-run China Daily has reported.

The police, which appear as cartoon figures at the bottom of the screen, are set to appear on Saturday, and are set to patrol Beijing's gateway Web sites and accept cybercrime complaints about pornography and other so-called malicious content.

One of the police officers will be male, the other female. They’ll be shown in cars, on motorcycles, and on foot, appearing at the bottom of computer screens every 30 minutes to remind Beijing's 5.46 million Web surfers of Internet security. They were designed by Sohu.com, and will patrol the Sohu news portal as well as 13 other portals. By year’s end, they’ll be seen on all Web site and forums based in Beijing.

China has a history of Internet censorship, and has created a gateway, comprised of a series of servers, to act as a barrier between the Internet in China and the rest of the world. That allows the government to monitor information flow and send out fake TCP (transmission control protocol) packages to cut the TCP connections when certain keywords are detected.

Beijing residents will be able to report dubious content by clicking on the cartoon cop. If the complaint is valid, they’ll receive a callback from a real police officer.

It might seem ridiculous, but it’s a system that’s been in use in the country since January 2006, when it was introduced in Shenzen. In April the Chinese government was so pleased with the way it had worked that it announced plans to broaden the cartoon cop usage to create a virtual force that would symbolize the government's monitoring of all major Web sites and online forums, according to a state media report.

“In a perverse way, they may be from our view not helpful in the sense they are positive, but at least people then are clearly aware and have been informed that their electronic activities are being monitored and they can exercise whatever cautions they see fit,” Sophie Richardson, deputy director, Asia division at Human Rights Watch, told TechNewsWorld. “But of course this further impinges on users' freedom of speech on the Net because of course people obviously say different things when they know they are being monitored and when they know people have been sent to jail for having conversations about certain subjects online.”