Up to now, the Net Nanny infrastructure has had it pretty good. Look out for sensitive political content, unclothed women and (once in a while) copyright infringement or illegal e-commerce. Not too onerous.

Looks like someone figured there was some excess capacity to utilize:

Police in Chongqing municipality have tightened online monitoring since Saturday as part of a three-month school security overhaul.

Local fears about the recent attacks on schools were renewed when media reported on Friday that a father in the city’s Fengjie county, who claimed his baby died from drinking melamine-tainted formula, was sent to a labor camp for reeducation after he made Web posts saying he would kill children in revenge.

Not to criticize the police, who know their job better than I do, but a guy’s baby died, he vents online and he gets “sent to a labor camp for reeducation”??? That sounds awfully harsh, although to be honest I don’t really know what “reeducation” entails. I have a feeling, though, that it isn’t anything like taking a night class at the local community college.

Not to criticize the guy who made the threats (gee, I’m doing a lot of criticizing here, though), but if you’re going to write about wasting kids, at least make sure that you do it anonymously. Kind of a no-brainer. After the planned Real-ID system for online comments kicks in, no one will be able to say anything online anonymously, so this guy really should have taken advantage of the current system while he could.

Looks like the cops are also looking closely at what goes on at schools:

Chongqing police and relevant authorities also issued 10 online content bans, prohibiting “pornography, rumors, false reports about dangerous or epidemic situations on campus networks, or other means of intentionally disturbing school education”.

That’s a rather broad ambit. If “disturbing school education” is now a violation, they ought to put Tang Jun in jail. So how does one know when a comment has gone too far?

Officials with the municipal police bureau’s political department told China Daily on Sunday that they could not elaborate on how local police determine what content crosses the line.

They added, off the record, “we’ll know it when we see it.”

Moral of this story: when all you’ve got is a hammer Net Nanny, all of your problems look like nails excuses to monitor online content.