People's Daily Reports Shandong Capital To Deploy Monitoring System for Internet Cafes

January 25, 2005

According to a report on the People's Daily Web site, Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, has deployed a system that will allow monitors to view the information running on any computer in the city’s 700+ Internet cafes at any time. The report states that the system, which it dubs "clairvoyant," is part of a "cultural monitoring platform" established last November to monitor the online activity of Internet cafe customers. The report says that the software employed in this system is capable of monitoring the identity of the person registered to use the computer, and of filtering "illegal Web sites." The Jinan municipal cultural bureau intends to use the resources of this platform's hardware to develop what the report calls a "dedicated culture market management information system," in order to "implement management of data collection for the entire city's culture market."