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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."
1984, here we come.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
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"
0.5M vs 2.0M - what difference does it make? The thought process behind it and loss of privacy is the same. The US is also implementing biometric databases and national ID cards, so nothing to crow about here (and don't forget that the US has a higher percentage of it's population in jail than China). The West may have China beat in terms of freedom of speech and lack of censorship, but when it comes to big-brother style monitoring and loss of privacy it's neck and neck.
Because in the UK people are used to freedom. They are used to being able to vote in multi-party elections, to choose goods and services, to make a profit. In China people aren't used to these things, chances are there will be very little protests because most simply don't know whats going on is bad. It is comparable to if all you ever knew was dial-up you wouldn't think that dial up was really that slow, however if you had a really really fast connection and all of a sudden you were on dial-up you would think that dial-up was really really slow. Same thing with freedoms, if you have freedom and then it is gone you are more likely to notice and do something about it then if you had little freedoms and just get less freedom.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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
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.
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.
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
Because in the UK people are used to freedom.
You misunderstand dnwq's comment. He said it doesn't work in the UK. That is, they have half-a-million CCTVs in London and it's made virtually no impact on the crime rate or solving public violent crime.
And ya gotta wonder. The Chinese are planning to install 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen alone. How are they going to monitor them all? My impression is that it's a massive amount of overkill.
The idea that anyone given a taste of freedom will want to preserve it is false. Look at Russia -- they're moving back towards a police state at an alarming rate, but the populace largely supports it. Given the choice between wealth (or at least comfort) and tight control vs. hardship and freedom, a great many individuals do in practice choose the former. Who are you or I to say that they are wrong?
They always give these projects double-speak names such as "Golden Shield", "Happy Fun Safety Blanket" or "Patriot Act" instead of something like "Citizen Surveillance System".
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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
Way to show your biases, and the fact that you seemingly have never spoken to a real Chinese person.
People do not support the communist regime, and certainly do not support the tyrannical aspects of it. They do not support shooting Tibetan monks, nor do they support jailing political prisoners. People don't cheer when another freedom-fighting troublemaker is arrested, they simply accept it as a fact of life, and move on. In your twisted reality you might call that supporting the tyranny by refusing to fight back, but that's far from the truth.
Similarly, people do not generally see the Communist regime as tyrannical. After all, this is the regime that has turned China from backwater agrarian wasteland into THE industrial power of the world. It has lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty, and modernized a country that was ridiculously behind, even just two decades ago. The people have seen explosive economic growth, and the indescribable improvement in their quality of life. This is hardly tyrannical. Most everyone I know accepts that some collateral damage must be done (e.g. political prisoners, putting down unrest in brutal ways) in order for the whole to benefit.
Unfortunately most Chinese citizens welcome the filtered news and internet brought to them by their government and certainly support any efforts of that government to quell further uprisings by such violent 'terrorists' (as the government lovingly refers to them) as Buddhist monks...Do you assume the Chinese are stupid, you racist fuck? My God, if we all thought like you we'd still think Blacks can't vote, and are subhuman, or some other nonsense like that. The Chinese know full well that their government lies to them every single day. They know that the state media twists everything, and most don't believe in it more than they do fairy tales. I have no doubt *some* of the state media's lies sneak through as truth, but seriously, the state media is NOT a trusted news source in China.
Your attitude sickens me. This whole "America is so superior, we can see right through obvious propaganda, but surely the simple-minded, backwards, uneducated masses in China cannot!" It reeks of the superiority complex that Western media has constantly demonstrated towards Asia.
You want to have a positive influence on Chinese people? Stop publishing ludicrously biased news. I've had the unique opportunity to look at news of the Tibetan uprising from both sides of the media, and I have to say that both sides are *equally* guilty of publishing pure bullshit. China claims that the Dalai Lama is a terrorist inciting war inside Tibet's borders, a ludicrous claim. American papers on the other hand, published a picture of "Chinese" military police brutally suppressing monks in Tibet, when it turns out that the "police" were actually Nepalese, the picture was taken in Nepal, and the Chinese had nothing to do with it. Media bias much?
Give it up, your news media is every bit as "fair and balanced" as the state news in China, and we all manufacture the same propaganda bullshit. Get off your high horse and stop assuming that your media is the paragon of unbiased truth.
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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
and ultimately, it will be sold to the US Government, that's when Big Brother would get even bigger!
OMG!
The one where one man one vote really is one man one vote? ;)
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.