Hi people,
I’m still trying to make complete sense of this, so please apologize me for any mistakes. I don’t read Chinese and automatic translations tools sometimes produce nonsense stuff. This is utterly complicated by Orwellian police procedures.
A Chinese guy known as @lovechan64 was arrested by Shanghai police last May 30, on charges of “the crime of destruction of computer information systems”. lovechan (known in twister by ids @lovechan, @z9 and @9z) is a well known twister promoter, having publicly talked about twister using his Twitter account multiple times.
According to some sites:
It is understood that 陈乐福 network called “love chan”, is committed to promoting social networking software twister, on May 30 was arrested by Shanghai police. twister is an open source P2P microblogging network, which is characterized by the message sent can not be blocked, not deleted after content publishing, publisher’s identity can not be tracked.
Chinese activist @wenyunchao reported on Jun 8:
Love Chan @ lovechan64 Chen Yuefu committed to promoting #Twister, authorities Detention he seems to be afraid of this thing. Another reason may be that he helped some of the dissidents face to face counseling over the wall.
I’ve asked chinese twister users about this. Some confirmed and others reported another reasons.
@mfreitas @yangxiao no, it’s NOT because of twister, it’s because @lovechan (aka @z9 @9z ) helps @xiaolan spreading leak of 50-cent party. @xiaolan is anonymous but @lovechan is not, @lovechan even uses his own photo as avatar
I’ve tried to understand a bit more about this, and it seems “50-cent party” is a group of people who receive money from Chinese govt to post good things on public forums and stuff like that. This seems to be officially demised but recently someone (not @lovechan) obtained, and then leaked, a private email containing a list of these people. @lovechan is reported to have helped publicizing such leak.
Either way, this is serious stuff that we should bring awareness about. The guy is definitely detained as reported here. He is married to Lee Funchang who just gave birth to a baby last Jun 5th. The guy is still detained and has not yet seen the baby.
It looks like the guy was found by old police job (he apparently didn’t tried hard to hide his identity) not due to any twister failure. Anyway it is important to realize that, while it is ok to use twister over a plain networks for reading the news and casual chats, if you have really serious and dangerous shit to say by all means: create a new user and only connect twister on top of Tor. twister alone won’t protect you against Orwellian governments!! (note: i’m referring to public posts here, twister’s DM and Group Chat content should be safe even without Tor)
#FreeLoveChan!
Stay safe and let me know for any corrections.
Update: No, I don’t think @lovechan was identified because he was not using Tor. He posted the leaked files using his wife’s account (see below for @chinanet’s comments). Of course, it doesn’t matter using Tor or not if one signs with his real name.
Update Jul 04 2015: by @chinanet(新人教程, 点我资料): @vegos @thedod @lohang @twister good news is @lovechan was granted bail pending trial with restricted liberty of moving. he used @9z to post just now.
more details:
original leak post here by @xiaolan65535 (aka @xiaolan in twister):
https://twitter.com/xiaolan65535/status/599910912997339137
@leefunchang (aka @lovechan64) collect leaked docs from @xiaolan to Google Docs:
https://twitter.com/leefunchang/status/600791077474304000
although leefunchang is his wife’s name, he confirms that @leefunchang is actually operate by himself:
https://twitter.com/xiaolan65535/status/600813472297984000
@xiaolan65535 is anonymous by using Tor, which makes it impossible for police to arrest him. instead, police arrested @lovechan64 to take credit and seek rewards.
human translation here:
陈乐福致力推广 #twister，当局刑拘他看样子是怕这个东西。另一个原因，可能是他帮一些异议人士面对面辅导翻墙。
Chen Yuefu committed himself to promoting #twister. It seems Chinese Government is afraid of Twister and arrested him. Another reason may be that he helped some of the dissidents to circumvent Internet censorship (ie: climb over the Great Firewall of China) face to face.
@hackerz provided further explanations on twister:
HackerZ Fri Jun 12 2015 00:20:20
@black_puppydog @mfreitas Let me explain the entire thing a little bit. @z9 was an active twister user and spent a lot of time (1/10)
advertising twister in Chinese social media. But he doesn’t seem to be interested in hide himself from evil government and thus he (2/10)
encountered problems. I think the reason which caused him to be arrested is he spread @xiaolan ‘s work to the public by uploading (3/10)
them to google docs. @xiaolan hacked into a mailbox of department of propaganda of Communist Party and got the whole list of (4/10)
“replying volunteer” list of Shanghai (actually we call them “50-cents” indicating they receive 50 cents for every reply they post (5/10)
saying good of the Communist Party). Actually, @xiaolan is the person that the police really want to arrest, but since @xiaolan cares (6/10)
about his own safety and use Tor, it’s not easy to find @xiaolan in the real world. However the head of the Communist Party was angry (7/10)
about this issue so the police had to arrest someone to satisfy them. It’s obvious that finding @z9 is much easier so @z9 got (8/10)
arrested. Now you see it’s neither your nor twister’s fault to cause @z9 got arrested. On the contrary, we appreciate that you create (9/10)
a platform for us to express our opinion and hope in darkness. Please keep working on Twister and help to #FreeLoveChan (10/10)
HackerZ Fri Jun 12 2015 00:42:56
PLEASE HELP #FreeLoveChan by sharing this story and give pressure to Chinese Government
HackerZ Fri Jun 12 2015 00:45:56
@xsmurf @z9 It’s now Criminal Detention, which means it’s most likely he’ll be put into jail. I don’t know how serious it would be (1/2)
but a similar case once happened in China and Gao Yu was sentenced seven years in jail. Please note the gov treat the list as secret (2/2)
HackerZ Fri Jun 12 2015 00:48:39
@xsmurf @z9 this link shows the earlier case: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-32346382