Hearing the many reports on prosecutions under section 66(d) of the Law that was enacted in 2013, I went back to my files. In the extensive comments we provided there is nothing that refers to the offenses sections. The offenses chapter is peculiarly drafted. Section 65 is similar to what is found in any law that requires a license to be obtained for a specified activity. Section 67 is again a necessary section, specifying the penalty for using equipment without a license.
It is too easy to rant about surveillance on the web (except when one is subject of a crime). I was fortunate that I met a number of FBI and police personnel who were getting into crime investigations on the web at the early Computers, Freedom and Privacy conferences and learned to see the problem from their perspective. Now there is a book on the subject. Here is an excerpt from the NYT review: “Life is a messy business on the Internet,” Anderson writes, “and we’re never going to engineer the mess out of it.” He’s right.
Crimes are committed. They should be prevented. If not, criminals should be punished. Someone must be held to account if the government cannot catch the criminal. Why not the telecom operator whose phone the criminal used?
Something that has been going on South Asia (efficiently or not) is now going to happen in China too, according to the NYT. The Chinese government on Wednesday began to require cellphone users to furnish identification when buying SIM cards, a move officials cast as an effort to rein in burgeoning cellphone spam, pornography and fraud schemes. The requirement, which has been in the works for years, is not unlike rules in many developed nations that ask users to present credit card data or other proof of identification to buy cellphone numbers. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that about 40 percent of China’s 800 million cellphone users were currently unidentified. Those users will be ordered to furnish identification by 2013 or lose their service, according to The Global Times, a state-run newspaper.