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China's All-Seeing Eye
Greg Walton brings us a lengthy story from Rolling Stone which describes China's comprehensive surveillance project, dubbed Golden Shield. The 'Great Firewall of China,' which we've discussed in the past, is but one aspect of Golden Shield. It also includes national ID cards, CCTV networks, and face-recognition software. This investigation showcases just how massive an undertaking it truly is. When finished, it will dwarf London's surveillance system. Quoting:
"Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range -- a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.) ... This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces."
David Brin should be thrilled. Maybe we can nominate him as our ambassador to ask them if perhaps they might not mind filling in the missing details required to make this a true Utopia under his model. I'm sure he has lots of ideas for how that's supposed to work.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Better to be stuck under a Golden Shield...
then a Golden Shower
*Hides*
1984, here we come.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Without a doubt, a face-recognition software in China is an incredible hi tech piece of software.
meh... the Chinese are amateurs. Come to the UK to see a REAL surveillance system. If you're really lucky, Premier Gordon Brownshirt will allow you to leave too.
They don't work in the UK, or so we are told. Why should they work in the PRC?
I'm Jewish, and I certainly don't feel like I'm a "master" laughing at this. It hurts me just as much as it hurts you.
Actually, most of the Jews I know have a rather liberal viewpoint and feel rather strongly about the importance of individual liberties.
Where do you get this crap? Where do you come from? I'd take it as a joke except that even it's just not funny...
Is that is may come to the US. One of the rationals for extending US copyright was that we needed to maintain parity with the European Union. I could see some argument regarding anti-terrorism parity resulting in more surveillance here as well.
from the article;
//
This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.
Like many other security executives I interviewed in China, Yao denies that a primary use of the technology he is selling is to hunt down political activists. "Ninety-five percent," he insists, "is just for regular safety."
In other words, we can find every political activist, dissident and extremist in China,
using only five percent of our security/monitoring capacity.
If this is just regular security, I think I prefer mine unleaded.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
... not what they claim such a system will be used for but rather what it will actually be used for.
Consider all the issues coming to light in pre-Olympic China, regarding human rights....
I guess Google Street China will not have to go to the trouble of blurring faces :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
China called, They said that they want to make the world in to a utopia that looks like this
Money is the root of all evil?
Bad, bad, baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad journalism. Blogs have fucked up the standard of journalism. Idiots rule.
Love it.
Why is it that the authors of these various surveillance societies don't show good faith by building into their laws the requirement that the details of their own lives, being public servants and all, should be constantly monitored and broadcast.
(Personally I would have loved to have the online Clintoncam available a few years back.)
This falls right into the same category which results in that strange coincidence whereby the people who decide who gets paid how much just coincidentally always happen to be worth the very most themselves.
Anyway. Bring on the revolution. It's starting soon I just know it...any day now...
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
all you white people look the same
The Brits are going to have to get serious if they want to compete on canine hygiene enforcement.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The sooner that totalitarianism is unmasked in all its horrible glory, the better. One of two things will result.
...or they will continue as before, the totalitarians march in, and they will learn the true meaning of dictatorship.
Either the anarchist kids who do their best to undermine society will wake up to the threat...
Lenin used the term "useful idiots" to describe the nattering spoiled brat self-proclaimed "intellectual elite" of Russia that cried for anarchism. Anarchists were quite successful in destroying Russian civil society, first attacking the wealthy capitalists, then the bourgeoisie, then the petty-bourgeoisie, and finally turning on the well-meaning social democrats.
With all opposition swept aside, Lenin took over. His first act was to line all the useful idiots against the wall.
Ahhh... damn clever these Chinese.
"Virtual Shield" and "Golden Shield" are hard to tell apart.
Red light cameras can be used for the same thing and are being put in almost everywhere. They are the vanguard of these programs.
Transparency in society can only work with transparency in government (certainly not something China has in abundance). That is the concept behind the forming Metagovernment, which is based on the open content model. If nobody has power over other people, then Brin's arguments might not apply (though admittedly there would still be economic discrepancies between individuals).
If he is, he's dead wrong. Law enforcement and the military at the top levels are operating more like totalitarian enforcers rather than protecting and serving. The operating mentality is that privacy rights of citizens only serve to impede these neo-totalitarian goals of law enforcement.
In other words, law enforcement whether it's the FBI, Chinese government, or the City of Chicago, will ALWAYS take as many rights as they can in the name of providing security. They actually think that if they can only gain a certain level of knowledge, then they will be able to control practically everything, and thereby provide "security".
These ideas must be fought on two fronts: 1. fighting for privacy in all forms. 2. seeking to change way people view what law enforcement can do.
As for what a person in the US, like me, can do for China...well, that's easy, we must be outspoken in our rejection of American companies that are making money by helping the Chinese abuse its citizens.
Thank you Dave Raggett
So our policy of exporting western values through capitalism is in fact giving a communist regime the technology to further control their people. "But isolationism doesn't work!" Oh yeah? I bet Kim Jong Ill is still using those birds from the Flinstones (that chisel out pictures of people on a stone tablet) for surveillance.
Remember the great wall of China? What a lovely tourist attraction. Completely irrelevant in the 21st century. I wonder how many people died building that? And the Berlin wall, such a wonderful exercise in futility. Much like the one they built around Palestine.
Anyone got any figures on the costs of these projects? It's money that may as well have been burned, only burning money doesn't actually destroy real wealth the way futile labor does.
In a few years or decades all these CCTV systems, border posts and checkpoints will be rusting ruins. Moms will take their kids to museums to see how the age of paranoid delusion played out in the early 21st century. Either that or we will all be dead.
All those sad, lonely security people in front of TV screens, wasting their lives watching other people live theirs. All those workers installing security devices that add no value to society, produce no food or fuel. All those leaders marching around with their addled brains unable to grasp the hopelessness and foolishness of it all. What a sad waste of industry and resources. What an insult to humanity at a time when we need to pull together and work on real problems.
We would be better off building some new pyramids.
Washington and London are probably green with envy.
I don't doubt that the Chinese government would like to build such a system. I have no doubt that they would love, honestly, to actually have the power and influence that they are rumored to have in the west over their people, and to truly be the police state they are accused of being. The government there, like most governments everywhere, has an appetite for power.
But the days of Mao are long gone. There was a time not so long ago when parents everywhere encouraged their children to pursue a career in the state, as a policeman or soldier or political cadre. In the socialist days, that was how you advanced, how you got a good life. The promise of wealth, power, but most of all prestige could be found in those careers. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of police and military folks in those days.
Now, though, the situation has changed. True wealth and prestige come from the market, from private enterprise, and this simple fact is not lost on anyone in China. Parents are realistic about this. They don't encourage their children to enter the police or military anymore -- and if you are Chinese or even Chinese American you know well what "encourage" means when it's being done by a Chinese parent. The policeman and soldier's life is no longer stable or guaranteed, and besides being dangerous it generates far less income for the family than an office job (or, truth be told, even one selling fruit.)
Because of this, there are not enough young Chinese entering the police force.
To put this in perspective, Beijing has 10 million residents, around 4 million migrant workers, and a likely 2 or 3 million undocumented (illegal) residents. In a city this size, a small police force simply doesn't cut it.
It's not for lack of trying, but mainland China simply does not have the infrastructure necessary to be the police state it wants to be and that the west fears it is. As Beijingers say, "guan bu zhao", there are too many people and not enough cops.
So it's not the least bit surprising that this golden shield idea is the goverment's latest fantasy, a way to keep tabs on the populace all while circumventing the increasing human resources shortage that is crippling their once formidable security force.
But that's all it is -- a fantasy.
Sure, they'll put up cameras and buy high-tech imaging software, and maybe they'll be able to maintain that infrastructure in Wang Fu Jing, Xin Tian Di, and downtown Shen Zhen. But in the rest of China -- where the bulk of the population lives -- the notion is simply untenable.
China has more than a billion people, and most of them live in small rural villages that lack sewage infrastructure and running water. The idea that the government would prioritize CCTV surveillance systems in these areas is laughable. They simply don't have the money, the experts necessary to put it up, or any of the other basic requirements for a system that size.
You simply cannot govern a billion people by force alone. Nationalist propaganda can help get people to give you the benefit of the doubt, but once people are suffering the government gets the blame whether it deserves it or not. If you don't believe me, have a chat with a Beijing taxi driver about their wages, which are set by the government. They'll give you an earful. And that's in the capital. It's worse in the provinces.
The Chinese government knows this, and they aren't fools. The polarization of wealth is a much more pressing problem on their agenda than putting up cameras, because they remember that it was precisely a wealthy upper class stomping on the rural poor that put them into power in the first place.
This certainly sounds just a tad bit...what is that word...ambitious? No...creative? No...Got it! Overbearing and heavy handed!
don't mind, why are the Westerners making a fuss out of it?
Some of the requirements passed as part of the Real-ID ACT around 2005 'anti-terrorism' law are :
states required to run license applications through a federal database
states will have to retain digital images for 10 years
Real ID demands that all driver's licenses or ID cards have pictures that can be read by facial-recognition technology.
Granted Bush hasn't yet publicly requested put up all the cameras, but what's to stop the next step of just requiring government access to all private security feeds, or maybe just promising funding for cities that make their cameras directly accessible. For our benefit of course.
Governments, including ours, "sell" these societal strategies to their citizens as crime-fighting tools. The citizens like low-cost tools because they have fantasies about their taxes going down, etc. But also, J.Q.Public probably often assumes crimes are things like stolen purses or muggers. But such uses are very "small fry" and no serious government is going to build a whole societal surveillance system for so limited a purpose.
Long ago, I had my car broken into in a major US city. When the police arrived, I asked them if they were going to fingerprint it, etc. It seemed plausible they would get some good prints. They just laughed. Only for capital crimes, they explained. It just isn't worth the time and trouble otherwise.
And probably it's only used for capital crimes because they get public exposure. That probably accounts for why there are racial disparities in which capital crimes get followed up. Even there, it is (sadly) probably not really about the severity of the crime, it is more likely about its political impact.
The real crimes, the ones that motivate a government, are those of disagreeing with who's in power in that government or what that power is being used for.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Brin doesn't advocate a surveillance state. In Brin's vision, information is available about everyone to everyone, including government officials. The problem with a surveillance state is asymmetric information. In fact, I'm not sure Brin even advocates that; it's rather that he recognizes surveillance as inevitable and tries to make the best of it by reducing the asymmetry.
As for Schneier's criticism, first, I think his arguments is full of holes, and second, he fails to come up with a better alternative. Surveillance is happening. What are you going to do about it?
This is truly terrifying.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
China sets up a surveillance system the western 'democracies' only dream of. Telling, satiric and ironic at the same time. Relatively soon we will all live in China. It's obvious when you look at it from far away, but twistedly transparent when you live inside. I wonder how many decades it takes to join all the databases and form an international entity, which has the total control of all the information.
The rulers will further separate themselves from the masses, who will further be subjected to their realities, which are formed by those who control the information flow. What is needed is clarity, but hardly anyone cares because the basic needs are met and the subjecting actions are not lethal. After all, it's all done for your own good and well-being.
My point here obviously isn't to justify it but to point out that an "all seeing eye" at the very least serves the purpose of stamping out opposition to the government. Just good record keeping and census as in the case of 18th century China was enough to track down a dissenting voice.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Well, who can blame them really? They've got to be preparing to do something with all that high tech manufacturing capacity they've got once the economic bottom falls out of the US purchasing market.
I can hardly wait to find out how the analogous situation in the robot manufacturing area plays out. Fortunately, with all those 200,000 cameras, I should have no trouble sitting back and watching it on TV. Robots can't move across water can they? No, probably only in science fiction.
Ok, that's silly. No one would ever do anything bad with robots. Let's just stick to the issue of cameras and overcapacity...
Is this project at least "green"? Have they at least planned for environmentally friendly ways of disposing of this many cameras when version 2.0 comes along? Well, maybe the US can by them second-hand as part of some sort of secret arms deal when it hasn't the money to buy them nor the factories to make them. Reduce, reuse, recycle... It's a grand tradition in the international weapons market, which in some ways seems to have pioneered the whole "green" movement now that I think about it. But, oh, that's right. Cameras aren't weapons. Never mind.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
DeusEx here, gentlemen.
Treading the Canal Road, triad compounds, the market... that sound sensor, militia bots, etc. It's all here.
Funny enough. The CCTV will make more Chinese think Shenzhen is a better city, and choose to live there. The reason China will definitely have more CCTV than UK is simple: there are more people and more populated city. Personally I perfer a police-watched street to crime-dominated steet. Anonymous Coward? yes!
The "keeping up with the Joneses (EU)" rationale was an obvious lie from the start. The extensions to copyright were made for purely corporate reasons, and it was (is) an assault on society as a whole. Michael Eisner, formerly of Disney, is probably quite proud of himself.
We had a perfectly workable system... arguably more successful that what the EU was using. So why mess with it? For profit, of course!
It needs to be changed back to the way it was.
This is an employment program! Think about it: 2M CCTV cameras @ X screens per watcher = 2M/X jobs x 3 shifts. Multiply that by the bureaucratic overhead factor of 2.5 (watchers of watchers and their watchers) and you have some serious job creation. That doesn't even consider the manufacturing and maintenance job creation to support the infrastructure.
Now consider how many lawyers will be needed to operate the pro forma oversight litigation process. OK, maybe only 2-3 in China.
Invenio via vel creo
Corporations that have been aiding in this endeavor should have their corporate charters revoked NOW, with no reimbursement to stockholders, and sure as hell no compensation to corporate officers.
DO LESS EVIL, Google. And so many others.
Yeah, right.
Oh, I absolutely understand that. I saw him at a Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference a few years back and chatted with him a little about this in the after-talk mingle, so I don't think I'm too confused about what his position is. At least I had a chance, while standing there incredulous, to ask him if he really believed that. (Those are great conferences, by the way, and there's one coming up in New Haven next week. I don't have any clue if Brin will go, and don't much care, but there's always something good on the agenda in my experience, and I wanted to slip in a plug.)
But my point is that it has to be at least a presupposition of his (or anyone's) if you're going to entertain this as other than a philosophical exercise to say that you have to "get there from here". So they've done part of Brin's vision--my point is: How do we get them to do the rest? Because I think the problem with Brin's vision is that you can't ever under any forseeable circumstances get everyone to do the rest. The world is always going to be full of power imbalances, and there will always be someone wanting to keep it that way. So it's just a fantasy to say it could be done. That's why I pointed to this article in my prior post.
If Brin believes it's possible to motivate people to all at the same time do something in the public interest that way, first of all, his energy is better spent on getting people to all believe in Global Climate Change, because that's a much more pressing problem and affects us all and yet we can't get people to agree on that either. But either way, it's time for him to put his money where his mouth is, so to speak, and say what the next step is toward Utopia because I'm as tired of his proposed non-solution as I am of some of hearing of some of the non-solutions being pursued for Climate Change.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
So, you're saying that you're not "dumbish," you're just DUMB!
Fear the penguin.
Wiggle Room... ...all the more reason to accelerate the rollout of the "ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY" while we still remember what human rights are, while there is still some wiggle room left... http://roboeco.com/wiggle-room Let's leverage the "SUPERCLASS", who are still humans, while there is some wiggle room left : http://teaminfinity.com/COMMUNICAE-12556.shtml
The Future is already here, just unevenly distributed... THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY NOW! http://RoboEco.com/slash
"...Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras..."
Erm, as a Londoner, can I point out that a lot of those are dedicated to the automatic congestion charging system, which requires monitoring of all roads entering or exiting the congestion charge zone (most of the West End).
They don't want to prevent crime, they just want to have control over ther population and increase their power.
And how will the cameras accomplish this?
To me that goal is very similar to what the police want to to with crime in London - have control and increase the power of police over criminals. But it hasn't worked that way at all, crimes are still committed and the cameras do not always help. Why then should they work any better at cracking down on a citizen committed to action against the state, especially since an actual crime like a mugging is much easier to ID on camera than distribution of subversive literature, for example?
You rail against it but don't say why we shouldn't just laugh and let the government waste that money, knowing what will happen.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Lucky for us we have some governors and representatives who are against the Real ID, and have sworn against implementing it in their states.
Congress voted against the Real ID Act multiple times before. The Real ID act was snuck into another bill at the last minute because it would not pass on it's own.
He likes to watch.
China and the Golden Shield.
James Bond in The Quantum of Solace.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Why does everything sound like a new Harry Potter book nowadays?
Replying to yourself again twitter?
I thought all Asian people looked alike!
(kidding)
The trouble with all-seeing eyes, is that they see too much trivial activity which makes it hard to find the important bits. This is a lesson that London has learned all too well. In serious crime incidents such as murder, and grievous bodily harm, the police do make the effort to trawl through hours of video from hundreds of cameras, in order to backtrack (or forward track) a perpetrator. But it is not easy, it is not certain, and it is not cheap.
People who speak against such systems really do not understand them at all. Criminals can and do manage to fool the CCTV system. Fortunately, crimes involving passion, like stabbing someone, are rarely committed by criminals who plan and execute intelligently. But in the case of China, if they try to target dissidents with this system, it will just weed out the dumb ones. The smart dissidents will manage to fool the system, and perhaps even pervert the system to frame loyal subjects of the Chinese state.
The Great Thing about China that the Western propaganda conveniently likes to forget - in order to maximize corporate profit and extend consumer buying power with decreasing wealth distribution - is that China is still run by Communists. So it goes.
We're not that far removed from this and we supposedly have the political tools to stop it. Problem is, we don't really care. At best half of us get up off our fat asses to vote. So in a culture that like China WHICH DOESN'T SEE THIS AS A BAD THING, I'm doubtful that anything will of complaints. That's not the Chinese way.
The parent's "brin would be happy comment" seemed to be partially tongue in cheek. Brin's ideas are no "solution" to anything. At best, he's misguided, at worst he's on the CIA payroll sewing seeds of dischord among privacy advocates.
Brin's idea is interesting in theory, but that's it. It has a major flaw:
The government will never be 100% open to its citizens. Sure, as some sort of purely philosophical thought experiment, the idea is interesting to ponder, but it has no relevance when discussing actual policy. Let me break it down further:
1. Brin is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If everyone just gave up privacy rights en masse in some Faustian bargain with the government agreeing to do the same it would be a tragic loss for the idea of liberty. To me, this is akin to the US surrendering to the USSR at the height of the Cold War.
2. Even the whole of the US would not be able to watch the government close enough all the time to check its power and ensure it was not keeping secrets or having 'private' information in some way. This incorrect assumption is at the heart of those who support CCS cameras and other privacy invading tactics: no matter how much information you have, you cannot provide total security. It works both ways...citizenry to government and government to citizenry.
Thank you Dave Raggett
please mod parent up...makes excellent point and has a great example w/ the Amartya Sen research
If a person has a right to liberty, they also have a right to give up that liberty. We do it in small (but ever increasing) amounts here in the US...it's the idea of the social contract. However, as parent elegantly made clear, there is a point where accepting control for security becomes harmful.
Now, I cannot hold a gun to a Russian's head and force them to want liberty (lesson from Vietnam that some candidates never learned), but I can say that those Russians *should* fight for liberty in their society.
Thank you Dave Raggett
One billion matches?! Oh yeah... we all look alike!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The Panopticon is a prison design (and associated design philosophy) that resembles this to a frightening degree.
Cue the racist "all chinese look the same" jokes...
Three words: open source governance.
First of all, associating right-wing Israeli politics with all Jewish people the world over is simply moronic.
Second of all, is Rupert Murdoch a Jew? No, I didn't think so. Neither is Steve Jobs, who owns half of Disney. Neither are the vast majority of our lawmakers.
I know none of this will get through to you because you exhibit the sort of blind hatred that would make Hitler proud, but imagine you changed your argument to "the Whites" or "the Christians". I think you'd have a much easier time supporting your argument. Since they're not minorities, though, they're not up for the scapegoating game, are they?
Please, go back to your Neo-Nazi hate-website hole and stop sullying Slashdot with your fecal matter.
It's easy to increase your power when you can make your enemies disappear. It's easy to identify one single enemy, then track him and see who he is talking to, where he goes to meetings and suddenly one lead leads you to a den of dissention.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Once you have enough, you send in the jack-booted thugs to black-bag all the big boys and some of the smaller players (to scare the rest of the opposition rank and file) and BAM, no more dissention. They can't even meet in secret, because their every move is being watched.
They already do that today, sans cameras. Again, how do the cameras REALLY help with that? Today the police have vast databases of known criminals but the London system is not really helping to catch many of them.
In your race to bash the Chinese, as well deserved as that may be - you are not stopping to think logically, you are thinking only with the Fear Module active. Try shutting it down, and see if in fact this is something to be afraid of. If you can explain how without frothing, more people might be willing to listen to you. As it is, you sound like an idiot - with an agenda.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The fact is that living in a totalitarian state can be very nice actually. A real totalitarian/fascist state has a very low crime rate, so you can walk about anywhere in perfect safety, your house doesn't get broken into when you go on holiday, your car radio doesn't get stolen when you park in a dark spot, women don't get raped...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
1. Put in place censors at information bottlenecks, so as to allow favorable idea to spread and strengthen through collaboration, while dividing dissenters, and forcing them to compete individually.
2. Implement a system to track the populations activities and communications, automatically approximating individual allegiances and beliefs.
4. Obfuscate justice process, then gradually and subtly modify it in such a way as to discourage dissent, and encourage blind allegiance. Making use of information gleaned from step two justify all changes using system implemented in step one
5. use your new self-subjugating population as a tool to do your bidding
and ultimately, it will be sold to the US Government, that's when Big Brother would get even bigger!
OMG!
I have been clocking on the average of 2 China bashing articles per week on /. for a while now.
fuck karma, I like saying the truth better
"What? I'm a sickly person and don't want to catch anything!"
Of course then the government
"The government"? What does "the government" have to do with it?
Brin talks about surveillance by private cameras and sharing of the data on servers and market places. Are you going to hit me with a baseball bat if I dare use a camera in public? Are you going to smash my web cams? Are you going to smash Flickr's servers when I upload my geotagged photos to them?
When you leave your house, you don't have a right to privacy. With few exceptions, anybody can take your picture, publish it, and data mine it. Anybody can can track your phone and share that data as well. That's not an accident, it's a deliberate choice we made long ago as a society that has been reaffirmed by the courts again and again. And it's the right choice, because the alternative would be far worse.
CSI China: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEbwJeEDpNo
Unlike the Illuminati the Chinese eye isn't placed on a pyramid but on The great wall of China.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Things go ok till the US remembers, the faces didn't want the US to invade China in the first place. All hell breaks loose when the unemployed ppl who ran the system bite back, ultimately enhancing the ever climbing oil prices in the world, causing more an even more devastating impact of the US recession on its economy.
The US govt. realizing its mistake stays in China till it empowers the ppl again, resulting in:
It's a shame when western nations are becoming more like china the media tries to distance the realities between the two instead of showing how our freedoms are becoming more like them.
What if you made a hat covered with infrared LEDs all blinking furiously?
They could just be setting up the ultimate census network.... who needs to do sample sets when you can just count the unique faces...
Personally I don't mind the accumulation of data. I don't even mind that there is some organization watching my every move.
This type of surveillance isn't about individuals however. It's about population analysis... cultural trends, etc. It's certainly not about policing... there is ample evidence that widespread surveillance doesn't work against criminals who are aware of it.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
The parent may be funny to some (enough to get +5??) but I didn't find it funny at all and also believe it is wrong. so I think it is worth trying to refute it with some googled evidence at least.
... (that's a Black man") rather than individual recognition ("that's a man with a mustache and a down-turned mouth")"
The gist of what I found and what makes sense to me is this quote from the research paper summary that is linked later:
"Participants who were poor at recognizing black faces appear to code blackness as a visual feature while they may not code whiteness at all," says Dr. Levin. "The problem is not that we can't code the details of cross-race faces; it's that we don't. Instead, we substitute group information, or information about the race, for information about the features that help us tell individual people apart.
This old post on reddit says it pretty well. Mostly only the first part of the post is directly related to refuting the logic behind this kind of joke.
That post also links to this press release summary (same as first link of this comment) of an article on the topic in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that backs up that post.
Yes, but then who has to/gets to develop the Canine Anal Sphincter Recognition Software?
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Let me guess... if we don't "cease the bullshit", China will do a Tibet on us when it grows powerful..?
I wish it would feel natural to add a ":-)" here...
That said, foreign policy is as brutal, selfish and dishonest in most countries, including democracies (foreigners don't have the right to vote "at home"). The rest of the world really hopes that China will get its act together on e.g. human rights.
(P S -- to have as your only argument that others' politics might be criticized is a bit weak.)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
You really can't discuss the millions of people killed from actions by the Chinese communist party, can you?
1984 is about a police state that controls its population so hard and horribly that it will continue to do so forever. A quote, if I remember correctly, is "history as a foot stomping on a face -- forever". The main reason that isn't so likely anymore is because democracies works better than dictatorships. The rest of the world just hopes that China isn't breaking that trend...
Was that clear enough that you can't stick your head into the sand anymore?
AFAIK, most everyone that did atrocities like mass murders deny them -- except the Germans. For instance Turkey, Japan, Pakistan -- and the Chinese communist party. The big problem with this is of course that it lowers the threshold that it will be done again.
But it is just pathetic to argue that the Japanese WW II government had a worse quality to their atrocities than the communist party -- which did theirs much later! That is just not serious. The whole world has more to fear from the Chinese communist party's refusal to accept their atrocities than from japan, which is democratic.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
No, no. If we accept a completely "open" society without privacy, then those who seek to take away privacy in the name of security will be most unhappy to find that policy applying to them as well. The centerpiece of his argument is that surveillance will happen; the only choice we really have is whether we want to have it be performed by elites on the rest of us, or by everyone on everyone.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
same title and all. was on the front page a couple of weeks ago: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/18/1630208
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)