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China's Web Surveillance System Employs More Than 2 Million
Reader dryriver recommends a BBC report on the immense scale of the web-monitoring system in place in China. An excerpt: "More than two million people in China are employed by the government to monitor web activity, state media say, providing a rare glimpse into how the state tries to control the internet. The Beijing News says the monitors, described as internet 'opinion analysts,' are on state and commercial payrolls. China's hundreds of millions of web users increasingly use microblogs to criticise the state or vent anger. Recent research suggested Chinese censors actively target social media. The report by the Beijing News said that these monitors were not required to delete postings. They are "strictly to gather and analyse public opinions on microblog sites and compile reports for decision-makers", it said. It also added details about how some of these monitors work. Tang Xiaotao has been working as a monitor for less than six months, the report says, without revealing where he works. 'He sits in front of a PC every day, and opening up an application, he types in key words which are specified by clients. He then monitors negative opinions related to the clients, and gathers (them) and compiles reports and sends them to the clients,' it says. The reports says the software used in the office is even more advanced and supported by thousands of servers. It also monitors websites outside China."
The Ministry Of Truth employs many members of The Party.
Supposedly it was approximately 854,000 people in 2010:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/38304293/ns/us_news-security/t/report-firms-agencies-involved-war-terror/
New things are always on the horizon
The easiest way to create jobs is to hire everyone to spy on their neighbors.
Only? 2M informants is no more than 0.2% of the population.
Compare that to the East German Stasi, who had ~0.5% full time on their payrolls (about 100k of 16M ppl), plus ~3% of unpaid whisperers...
It's somewhat disturbing that China is more forthcoming about its domestic spying than the US. At least they admit that they do it.
I don't know; just sayin'
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
One can hope.
The legitimate use of this is, "Here's a list of the top 20 things that people are really angry about."
The illegitimate use is, "Here's a list of the first 20,000 people to arrest in Wuhan."
this great part is that the majority of software that is used for censorship is developed right here in the US. the truth is that it's raw capitalism that is helping oppress the chinese people which completely subverts the freedom of others that we so greatly cherish.
moral, ethical or even legal behavior with any foresight is not in the nature of true capitalism and yet we continue to allow these practices to continue. in true capitalism, snakes would continually eat their own tails with no thought of the repercussions if it made a buck. at the end, we get things like the massive economic collapse because banks "didn't see it coming".
i dont like the government messing with my affairs but there are sometimes when we need to prevent both our and others' destruction and oppression with some regulation. if there is a customer that wants a product to do evil, there will be some corporation willing to support them if it's profitable.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"these monitors were not required to delete postings. They are "strictly to gather and analyse public opinions on microblog sites and compile reports for decision-makers"
They are meta-moderators, if somebody's karma goes to bad, the brute squad is sent automatically without their doing.
It depends on how public works are paid for and what is going on in the rest of the economy at the time. Consider the situation of too little cash is in the real economy, and too much cash is in the "casino" economy of the FIRE sector (much of it rich people gambling with teach other in zero-sum games). I would say that is the case today -- there is lots of money floating around but it could be all stuffed into mattresses for the effect it is having on our economy. In that case, a government printing money to pay for public works puts money immediately in the hands of many people who will spend it in the real goods economy. Any extra inflation will have the positive effect on the economy of sucking money as a tax out of the casino economy. Higher inflation also forces those with huge bank balances earning no interest to inject that money into the economy as investments or consumption rather than lose it to inflation.
By the way, I put together a lot of possibilities on dealing with joblessness here, and yes, increasing pointless bureaucracy was one of them:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
"Here is a list of possible ways to deal with joblessness.[53] Some "cures" emerge mostly on their own; some require political action to start or to prevent. This list is intended to be complete in order to help in understanding the interaction between social changes and job creation; not all possibilities are desirable by most societies. The ones in the first half of the list (like wage subsidies, a shorter work week, or a basic income) in general would usually be considered more positive and adaptive responses than the ones in the second half of the list (like war, escapism, and luddism), although actual preferences or ordering of desirability and acceptability may vary depending on political beliefs and feelings about things like government intervention and taxation. Many of the items in the second half of the list have profit-making aspects for some individuals within the current economic system, although usually directly at the cost of others in society (like crime). Not all items on this list are compatible with each other. Not all might be considered moral or would be legal under international law or existing trade agreements. Some of these "cures" create new jobs (like public works), others make it easier to survive without a job (like frugality), others eliminate the unemployed individuals from the official statistics in various ways (like prisons), others in some way destroy abundance which has a side effect of creating jobs to build it back up (war), and some allow someone unemployed to take a job that someone else was doing but who no longer can do the job anymore for various reasons (like mandatory retirement). Some of the "cures" that help individuals survive without a job may actually increase the unemployment rate as they reduce demand for items in the market place produced by paid employment, contributing to overall increased joblessness even as the individual may be helped locally. Because these items may interact in unexpected ways, and people have many different feelings about them as different groups may benefit or be harmed in different ways, and many vested interests are involved, it is challenging for any economist, political scientist, politician or private citizen to make sense of all these issues or to pick a best way forward, even though people are trying in various ways to do that.[4] New approaches in social science involving computer simulation and agent-based modelling may also help in understanding the way these issues interact to gain insight into them.[54]"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.