Scenes from ITU Telecom Asia 2000

Wu: China's Minister of Information Industry, Wu Jichuan
China’s Minister of Information Industry, Wu Jichuan, talked about his nation’s telecommunications policy in a keynote speech this morning at the International Telecommunications Union’s Telecom Asia 2000 conference and exhibition. He said many of the right things, but China’s regime isn’t doing enough of them.

ScreenPhone: Payphone of the future
So this is the public phone of the future? I’m not sure it appeals to me.

ChinaTelecom: Attracting attention at China Telecom
At some shows, scantily clad women bring an audience. China Mobile’s booth tried various ideas.


British Government’s Big Brother Urges

The Observer: Secret plan to spy on all British phone calls . Every telephone call made and received by a member of the public, all emails sent and received and every web page looked at would be recorded.

And kept in a giant database for seven years. Or more likely, if such a plan went through, forever.

The British government’s growing passion for spying on its people is one of the most remarkable, and disheartening, trends of modern times. The nation that came up with the Magna Carta is now leading the way toward the most corrosive of regimes, a system under which no citizen would have even the slightest right to be left alone.

Tony Blair’s Labor government is far more reactionary in its civil-liberties positions than even Margaret Thatcher’s administration at its most repressive. Is this the Third Way, to abrogate human rights just because the police think their jobs would be easier if civil liberties were utterly done away with?

Why do the British people put up with this? For the same reason, apparently, that they embrace the placement of spy cameras in almost every public place.

The British would rather have safety than freedom. In the end, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, an American patriot who understood reality, they will have neither.

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