The Beijing government has launched an enhanced Internet cafe monitoring rule which states that people who visit Internet cafes for the first time need to have their picture taken and have their identification cards scanned.

At present, there are over 1,500 Internet cafes in the capital of China and all these cafes will finish installation of relevant camera and equipment and start to use them before the end of 2008. The new rule says when people want to surf the Web in an Internet cafe, they need to stand before a camera to take photos first. At the same time, the scanner below the camera will scan their identification cards. This information will be passed to the monitoring platform of Beijing's Law Enforcement Team for Culture as an archive. When these people go to an Internet cafe again, they can gain access by offering only their identification card numbers.

Li Fei, a spokesperson of the Law Enforcement Team for Culture, told local media that the registration system has been put into use since 2005. So far, the system has been installed in Beijing's 14 districts and counties, with exceptions of Mentougou, Haidian, Yanqing and Fangshan. However, by mid-December 2008, the system will be extended to all Internet cafes in Beijing.

Li says that by saving the image pf the netizen, they can prevent the repeated use of one identification card by several persons. With the monitoring platform, they can achieve a real-time monitoring on any computer space of any Internet cafe, so as to ensure the registered information really belongs to the person who is actually using the Internet.