Online discussion forums have become dangerous traps for Internet users as a result of a system of surveillance and censorship of cyberdissent put in place by the Chinese police apparatus. One young Internet user, Liu Di, 22, has been held in an undisclosed location for the past six months by the Beijing police for the crime of posting ironic comments about the country¹s communist leaders in chat forums. More than 30,000 people are employed in the execution of ³Golden Shield,² the government¹s Internet control programme. (博讯boxun.com)

   Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières) today published a report on the censorship techniques used on Chinese discussion forums and the kind of content that is banned. The organisation was able to determine these with the help of a journalist with the Chinese service of the BBC World Service who spent a month posing online as a Chinese Internet user.

   More than 60 per cent of the messages sent in the course of this investigation appeared on the chat forums. The initial acceptance rate fell to 55 per cent for messages with a controversial content. Of the 55 per cent, more than half were withdrawn by the webmasters (³Ban Zhu² in Mandarin) in charge of monitoring sites. In other words, only 30 per cent of the messages with a controversial content were accepted by the sites. Messages about SARS were very likely to be censored. Similarly, messages directly questioning the communist leaders rarely got through the filters or, if they did, were quickly removed from the forums.

   Internet sites, including those run or financed by international companies such as Yahoo!, have become Chinese police auxiliaries. They enable the authorities to arrest dissidents or ordinary Internet users. At least 35 Internet users are currently detained in China.

   Full reporthttp://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=6793 (博讯boxun.com)