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China to Have Over 100 Eyes in the Sky
gollum123 writes "Reuters reports China plans to launch more than 100 satellites before 2020 to watch every corner of the country, state-run China Central Television quoted a government official as saying Tuesday. A "large surveying network" would be set up to monitor water reserves, forests, farmland, city construction and "various activities of society," a government official said without elaborating. "The aim is that, at any time and any place, we can obtain necessary data on any event through watching the Earth from space," said Shao Liqin, an official with the Ministry of Science and Technology."
A "large surveying network" would be set up to monitor water reserves, forests, farmland, city construction and "various activities of society," a government official said without elaborating.
good grief!
"various activities of society,"
translation anybody?
How ominous. Was this translated with editorializing in mind, or was this official so tactless as to expose the true purpose of such a constellation?
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Yeah they are going to use them just to monitor China, uhuh.
I for one welcome our Chinese satellite overlords!
Just don't ever do anything wrong (by the standards of the people in power) and you'll be fine. What, me worry?
Vote Quimby!
What it does not say is what orbit these things will be in. Spy satelites normally are in polar orbit so they cover the whole earth as it rotates.
Putting these things in geostationary orbit so that they stay in the same place as the earth rotates is probably too high for this sort of thing.
Hence I guess that these things can spy on the rest of the world, not just China. Or am I missing something?
No more weather.
China legalises nude sun bathing. An official, quoted on condition of anonymity, said that studies have shown that Chinese women, especially those between the ages of 18 to 29 seem to suffer from low levels of vitamin D and are thus encouraged to sunbath... in the nude... on clear cloudless days...
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
I doubt the White House will mention this. Even if they did condemn it, they will be secretly trying to figure out their own way of one-upping it (assuming they haven't already).
The Bush administration has done things like that in the past. Remember when Bush made his campaign promise to repeal Clinton's secret evidence laws, and instead increased them dramatically?
The US have spy satellites up. Europe wants spy satellites up. Don't complain if the Chinese want theirs up there too.
Set up huge techno-fire works on the satellites and do horizon wide shows of colours. Or not..
I wonder if you would be able to see them from the ground on a good night or would they be beyond the reach of the human eye?
_+_
Things like this have been flying for decades.
I'd like to know what sort of sensors and resolutions will be flying and what they plan to charge for raw data.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
The rest of the world in 10, 9, 8, 7......
Its only a matter of time. I can without a doubt say this will be commonplace in the next decade or two. No tinfoil hat joke here, sorry.
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
This makes a lot of sense for China. It is a vast country after all that is hard to monitor. Not only a lot of infrastructur is missing, but also the local authorities have a really bad tendency to cover up any problems including large scale environmental disasters. That is one of the problems with authorian rule. So being able to monitor the provinces from Beijing gives them a lot of control.
Do You really think China has now the technology to monitor people from the sky? I doubt even the US has this. But who am I kidding? This is Slashdot of all places so I better get my tinfoil hat to blend in with the crowd.
And I always thought it was the Japanese who liked taking pictures...
"Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine No Posessions?'" -- Elvis Costello
http://service.china.org.cn/link/wcm/Show_Text?inf o_id=112464
Highlights:
Sun Laiyan, director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), said that a large satellite-based earth observation system will also be built by 2010. The system could be used for observation of land, atmosphere and ocean within China, its adjacent areas and even the entire globe.
Sun said that China will develop a new generation of polar orbit and stationary orbit meteorological satellites, high-performance resource follow-up satellites, oceanic color and dynamic observation satellites.
All rites reversed 2010
...these should be fitted with giant flash guns so we know when they are taking our photograph.
There are lots of "activities of society" that don't require a tin-foil hat, you know.
E.g., traffic congestions. If you can see those from the sattellite, you have a head start in telling people to take other routes.
E.g., fires. If in the middle of a forrested area you see a big bright infrared spot, you can react before the fire wiped out several square kilometres. And you'd be surprised how many forest fires are due to "activities of society". (A.k.a., idiot tourists.)
Even if it is China and the mandatory knee jerk reaction is "chinese govt==evil", it's actually easier for them too to watch for such _big_ things, than to try to track an individual dissident by sattellite. If they want to track an individual person, they can just send an agent. It's cheaper and doesn't lose track each time the target goes into a house or bus.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Europe wants spy satellites up.
. That makes them uniqe. Of course monitoring "various activities of society" can cover anything from something as innocent as traffic control to spying on the private citizen. Even so, judging from the limited information in this story, these plans look more like a rather innocent survey/management network than a 1984-esque Orwellian spy apparatus.
AFAIK some European countries already have spy satilites up, first among them Russia. What makes the Chinese ones special is that they will not be for spying on the Europeans, Americans, Australians or Africans. Nor are they intended to keep an eye on the Middle east. They will be a instrument with 100% coverage of Chinese national territory for the Chinese govt. to use for monitoring the Chinese
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Insert obligatory 1984 reference here.
dude, i just bought the new cassette by cyndi lauper. it's totally rad! want me to dub it for you?
I get it!!!!! Yes!!!!! This is a good day to be alive.
It is a joke on English!!!!!!! The parent said "time to make reference of 1984!!!" but was referring to book by GEORGE ORWELL; the humor of English lies within tragic misinterpretation!!!!!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!! I am laughing at your misinterpretation of his words to mean 1980's era of time!!!!! This is funny!!!!!!!
You are great comedian!!!!
They make no bones about it.
Wasn't it in Deus Ex somewhere they talked about the difference between governments being that some are openly controlling and others leave freedom to the people, thereby allowing the corporations, etc. to take power?
Of course, I am not suggesting that you take dictation on philosophy of rule from a video game, simply that China is a very different social climate than we are used to and that there are undoubtedly many advantages and disadvantages to any system...
In fact, present circumstances bearing heavily here, I for one am more and more interested in alternatives.
Of blankness, I know nothing.
If they want to spy on the world - they should put spy satellites in polar orbit.
If they just want to spy on their own people - they should use balloons or automated high-endurance aircraft (say 1 month aloft time - solar powered - like that NASA thing).
One satellite for the whole country would be useless for spying - too much space to monitor if you want to be really intrusive. They'd need dozens, or 100 even.
Instead, you just float a balloon for a month at a time over each populated area. You can get better resolution than the US satellites get for less cost simply because you are FAR closer to the ground, and yet you could watch the entire city from a high-enough altitude. No contending with solar radiation, and it is easy to do repairs.
Something like this was talked about to replace cell towers in low-usage areas.
The only limitation of this plan is it is only good for domestic spying. However, it would make sense to use the expensive satellites to spy on other countries, and cheaper technology to spy on yourself...
Here is a little more information.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Ah, there's irony for you, huh? You're happy to talk about China's shortcomings but not those of your own nation, the one that's supposedly "the land of the free".
Look, I don't live in a utopian society where everything is perfect - nobody does - but I think you have to at least acknowledge that, if your an American, measuring your freedoms against those of China (or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Wherever You Want To Invade Today (TM)), rather than against, say, your own Constitution is a sad state of affairs.
When you start accepting the small injustices and intolerances, even the ones that don't affect you, then you've let the door open a little bit. From there on, opening it wider and wider becomes easier than you think.
Freedom isn't the freedom to say just the popular things, it's the freedom to say the most unpopular stuff, even the stuff that makes 99 percent of people want to puke. Start oppressing one person's rights and you've oppressed everyone's.
Bottom line: if you're the land of the free then be the land of the free, not the land of the mostly free.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Interesting. China is often seen as being the secretive control-obsessed state, yet America has had this capability for years, and the Chinese are only getting it now AND they are being open about their intentions.
...We have camera's on the ground (lots and lots of them)
I live in the UK.
China sure is wasting alot of money for a developing country.
The only problem with the "watching for people gathering in Tiananmen Square" theory is that such squares are already in the middle of cities, and patrolled by police. China _is_ a police state. Don't assume that communist police was like, say, German police, which you only see about once per month. Communist governments have police and informants all over the place.
So they don't really need a satellite to tell them that. A cop will relay that information quicker.
More importantly, a cop has a brain and can filter data easier than a computer can. A cop can tell if it's a demonstration shouting anti-communist slogans, or merely a crowded day with everyone going around their business.
An orbital camera only sees a crowd in both cases. Even if you program it to only react at over a certain crowd size, a cop could still have informed you faster, while the crowd was still forming.
That said, I'm sure they'd _love_ to be able to track everyone by satellite. In fact, if the press release is indeed worded like that, it can well be that someone actually _wanted_ to give the population the idea "we could mean watching _you_."
I'm just saying it's not practical.
1. Tracking people from above, seeing only the top of their head, isn't of as much use as the tinfoil hat crowd seems to assume. Half the office building I work in would look just the same from above: a mess of hair anywhere between blond and brown, on top of some black clothes. Good luck telling it's me, and not some guy from the second floor.
And let's remember that currently software has trouble even recognizing a face in a clear photo. Recognizing someone by their haircut from above is just SF.
2. It loses track as soon as you enter a building, car, bus, train, or subway. If I enter a subway station, I could come out _anywhere_. Just supervising all possible exits to see me come out, is gonna take half of those 100 satellites. Just for one person.
3. It becomes useless on any cloudy or foggy day.
Needless to say, a human agent has none of these 3 problems.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Even if it is China and the mandatory knee jerk reaction is "chinese govt==evil"
I'm sorry, but I missed something. Is there some other more apt reaction to a government with a long, bloody track record of torturing, killing and suppressing its people in the name of ideology?
I don't understand the people that come out of the woodwork as apologists for the Chinese government here. The Chinese government IS EVIL and that knee-jerk reaction isn't a "knee-jerk" reaction, it's as simple and logical a reaction to the totalitarian brutality they've demonstrates as the "knee-jerk" reaction to Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, ad nauseum.
Learn to use Google
I don't see a single "All Your Base Are..." joke. What is happening to this younger generation of slashdotters?
Table-ized A.I.
All those links... you could have just sent them here.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08