BEIJING, Nov. 8 (AP) Seeing gold in Chinese efforts to police the free-ranging Internet, foreign companies are rushing to sell Beijing the latest in law enforcement technology from tiny cameras to code-breaking software. At a trade show in Beijing today, some of the biggest names in Web technology - companies that proudly attach themselves overseas to the Internet's reputation for anarchy - peddled their wares to crowds of police and security officials... Fully a quarter of the approximately 50 Chinese and foreign vendors gathered at the Security China 2000 trade show focused their efforts on the "Golden Shield Project," Beijing's ambitious plan to build a nationwide computer network linking national and local police agencies... Beijing envisions the "Golden Shield" [Project] as part database and part remote surveillance system. One feature is quick access to registration records on every citizen in China, while links to networks of small cameras in public places will cut police reaction times to demonstrations and other signs of trouble. U.S. companies like Cisco and Sun Microsystems and Canada's Nortel Networks offered the "fire walls," initially developed to protect corporate computer systems from hackers and viruses, saying they could also shield police networks. Some executives admitted that the systems are powerful enough to sift through millions of electronic messages for key words that Beijing might find politically offensive... China already uses such devices to block Web surfers from viewing foreign news sites and those set up by exiled democracy campaigners and the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement... Government-owned Shenzhen Siyue Information System Co. has a software tailor-made for the police's concerns. Company president Yuan Quan maneuvered a computer mouse over an icon marked "foreigners" to click on another labeled "Falun Gong." Up popped a list of names and photographs. Fingerprints can be added, Yuan said. "You can store all sorts of information... in here," Yuan said. "Anything you need to keep an eye on them."

November 7, 2000 (BBC) China has launched a new attempt to gag dissent on the internet by targeting chatrooms and news sites. Websites hosting chatrooms will be held responsible for ensuring that users do not post messages that could be interpreted by the government as "illegal." That means anything that is against the constitution, threatens state security or "harms China's honour and interests". The regulations appear to be aimed at curbing increasing boldness in Chinese chatrooms where criticism of government policy has grown... Now all [foreign-based] websites will be forbidden to report or write news themselves, and must sign contracts with state media organisations before using their content... China has already shut down websites tied to the outlawed China Democracy Party or Falungong spiritual group, and has blocked access to foreign news sites including the BBC, Yahoo! and CNN. The rules follow similar regulations issued in January on the posting of "state secrets" on the internet and regulations guiding internet content providers issued in October. The definition of "state secret" in China is so broad that it could be used to refer to almost any piece of information posted on the web from China. The BBC's Beijing correspondent reports that some analysts say the rules may be hard to enforce, while others believe they may further damage the vitality of a sector which is still struggling to make money and has suffered a loss in investor confidence in recent months. And that is despite the number of internet users in China doubling in the first eight months of this year to 16.9 million.

HONG KONG, Nov 8, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) Another member of the Falun Gong spiritual group has died in prison in China, bringing the number of members reported to have died in police custody to 68, a Hong Kong-based rights group said Wednesday. Zou Songtao, 28, a biology professor at Qingdao Maritime University in eastern Shandong province, died Saturday in the Number Three Shandong Reform Through Education Camp in Zibo city, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said. Officials at the detention center told the family that Zou had committed suicide, but they refused to allow Zou's wife to see the body, the center said. His cremated remains were returned to the family on Sunday. Camp officials refused to comment when questioned by AFP over the incident. Zou, who graduated from Nanjing University in 1995, was arrested on July 18 and sentenced to three years detention for protesting the ban on the spiritual group in Beijing and attempting to petition the central government's crackdown at a Complaints Bureau in the capital. The rights group said Zou's family doubted he would have committed suicide especially since [his wife] had given birth to a daughter 10 months ago... [Editor's note: Falun Gong is against killing, and that includes suicide.]