China has formed an Internet Police force to track down individuals who have posted "harmful information on the Internet that causes a negative social influence." In China, this sort of thing is against the law. The government decides what a "negative social influence" is. On March 27th, the government revealed the arrest of a 17 year old girl for posting such messages in a chat room from a PC in an Internet cafe. The police would not say what information the girl posted, but in the past, simply passing on information about something the government wanted kept quiet (Falungong demonstration, some disaster like the current SARS outbreak), could get you busted. The Chinese communists running the government see the Internet as a major threat to their control of the country and are making aggressive efforts to control the flow of information on the Internet. They are using a combination of filtering and monitoring software from the US and Europe, as well as some written in China.