China Moving to Real Name Registrations for Blogs

dptalia writes "China is moving to require people to use their real names when blogging. The proposed solution, arrived at by the Internet Society of China (affiliated with the ministry of information) would allow bloggers to use a pseudonym when blogging as long as they used their real name when registering."

Re:From the ... dept

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 [penny-arcade.com]

Re:Annoying, yes, but...

[xSquaredAdmin]

The society, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Information Industry, said no decision had been made but that a 'real name system' was inevitable.

Judging by that quote, I get the impression that they aren't necessarily going by real names, but some sort of identifier which would allow them to determine which individual posted content, which could very well be the ID number that you speak of.

Good luck with that

[opencity]

Reminds me of The Stainless Steel Rat. When the blogging gets tough, so do the remaining bloggers.
When I was in China in the 90s they had blocked cnn.com but only the front page.

Re:It's a different society.

[Unordained]

To reinforce the parent's point -- consider the concept of "social contract", particularly with the clause that a lack of effective resistance is tantamount to consent: the people of China silently agree to let themselves be governed this way, in exchange for the (possibly unequal in value) "benefit" of knowing that most of their fellow citizens are mostly equally deprived of those rights, forming a more homogenous, calm society -- and it's worth it to them not to revolt en masse. You can sign away some of your rights in contracts, you can also imply away your supposed basic human rights to your government. So long a nobody's willing to fight for it, it's not really a basic right -- just the empty declarations of a piece of paper.

Re:It's a different society.

[Anonymous Coward]

As for enforcing it, you just need to hire a few thousand people to work at the Ministry of Information, reading blogs and checking the registration of the blog.

No need -- China has a long history of propagandizing its own people to rat each other out. They were very successful in having the old women in the village spy on the others and report back anything the local police wanted to keep track of -- notably young women who had unauthorized pregnancies.

Remember, this is an authoritarian society where people will do whatever it takes to make sure the child who is allowed to be born is a male.

Re:It's a different society.

[thule]

And just how does the military (NSA) bring a warrant request to a civilian court? This is why the NSA monitors known terrorist numbers (the target) and reports them to the FBI when there is a possible connection to a US Person/Citizen (not the target of monitoring). The FBI then has to get a FISA warrant. It has been reported in the Washington Post that FISA judges will not issue a warrant to the FBI solely based on a NSA lead. The FBI must first provide some further reason/evidence for a warrant.

This is similar to a situation where you called a known criminal that had their number tapped. You are not the target of the tap, but they will listen in on your call to/from the target of the warrant.

The change that happened after 9/11 was that the Bush administration felt that the NSA should pass intelligence data to the FBI legally. Nothing has changed as far as what calls were monitored by the NSA. What changed is that they could tell someone about it.

Re:China -- thanks for the perfect example

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

The Supreme Court agrees with you (as did the Founding Fathers who published the Federalist Papers under a pseudonym).

McIntyre vs. Ohio Elections Commission (514 U.S. 334 (1995)) ended with the Supreme Court deciding "an author's decision to remain anonymous, like other decisions concerning omissions or additions to the content of a publication, is an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment." Talley vs. California was decided with the comment "[p]ersecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all."

Nor is fear of persecution the only issue. The Supreme Court also noted "On occasion, quite apart from any threat of persecution, an advocate may believe her ideas will be more persuasive if her readers are unaware of her identity. Anonymity thereby provides a way for a writer who may be personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her message simply because they do not like its proponent."

Anyway, I don't envy the Chinese authorities investigating a blogger and having to walk through the country going "Is there a Chang here? We're looking for Chang."

Re:It's a different society.

[hunterx11]

Different societies have different values, and in the growing homogenization of the West, that's lost sometimes.

Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration. [people.com.cn]