China’s ratcheting up their state secrets laws. That’s never a good sign. NYT article.
There is an amusingly awful definition of state secrets being promulgated: they are “information that, if disclosed, would damage China’s security or interests in political, economic, defense and other realms.” Presumably the story that the Chinese had 14 year olds on their Olympic gymnastics teams would count
So anything that the government doesn’t like or might not like in the future is now not only their problem but one for all the service providers and telecos – they have to “detect, report and delete” any such shenanigans.
Part of the way the Chinese handles the gargantuan task of managing the vast flows of information through their system is by signing up IT firms to be their assistants.
Fear of being retroactively slammed for allowing some subversive piece of information to slip through will be another reason for the ISPs to make it that much harder for users to speak their mind.
