From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly
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Re: From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly
#2This is not what I hoped the 21st century would be like! Dystopian scifi novels were supposed to warn us not act as a template.
Know what else? Fuck China.
“In China, it’s not wise to refuse.”
Coming to a Western country near you. We're going right back into feudalism.
Re: From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly
#3This tech will be sold to every country in the world, completed with language files. Plug and play. That's the even sadder part.
Re: From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly
#4I have first hand experience in Xinjiang a decade ago. Based on this report, it's gotten even worse.
What I remember most was:
1) nearly hourly MMS messages to my flip phone from unknown numbers with an unknown attachment. Since my phone was bought outside China, the MMS attachment didn't automatically open the likely spyware.
2) Being followed and monitored by plainclothes policemen
3) Having my hotel room searched while I was away. Having police come to my hotel room to interrogate me but lacking access because I had the only key to the room (very very cheap hotel).
4) Armed convoys of Chinese army soldiers constantly going up and down major streets.
The originally intention ten years ago was massive surveillance and intelligence gathering. AI and facial recognition are just making this easier and far less costly for their government.
It's clear now that China is moving towards dictatorship, not democracy.
Re: From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly
#5I'm really tired of people fawning over China. This is a country with a horrible human rights record, over a million people presently in camps based on racial profiling, and an active program to build the most comprehensive surveillance state in the world.
It's doubly hypocritical when the people doing the fawning are American liberals that would go completely bonkers if anything like that were happening here. (The same logic applies to Saudi Arabia, our other even more brutal "ally.") Money talks I guess. China's GDP growth has been phenomenal and that's all that matters.
Getting tough on trade with China is one of the very few things I agree with Trump about. The Chinese don't play fair in the trade realm either. They vertically integrate their industries with the government, subsidize them to dump, manipulate their currency, ignore the environment and pollute to a degree unprecedented in human history, and deploy "soft" plausibly-deniable mechanisms for trade protectionism so they can pretend to open their markets without actually doing so. The most significant part of the latter is the "great firewall," which is as much about keeping foreign Internet companies out of China as it is about censorship or surveillance. Another mechanism is a maze of regulations around currency, banking, incorporation, and payment systems that makes actually taking payments from Chinese customers painful. It's very easy to send money into China but hard to take any money out.
Re: From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly
#6They're just copying what the CIA/NSA has been doing for decades.
Re: From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly
#7They're just copying what the CIA/NSA has been doing for decades.
No.
Re: From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly
#8They're just copying what the CIA/NSA has been doing for decades.
To some extent yes, but it's a false equivalence to compare the USA and China. They're pushing surveillance further than our own intelligence agencies, and more importantly they have no bill of rights.
I dare someone to try a Sasha Cohen act in China mocking the present leadership. You'd end up in a prison camp within a week. In America you can openly call the President and the ruling party hideous names, troll them, mock them in public, and criticize them all day and the very worst that will happen is getting kicked off private media platforms and forums.
Re: From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly
#9They're just copying what the CIA/NSA has been doing for decades.
To some extent yes, but it's a false equivalence to compare the USA and China. They're pushing surveillance further than our own intelligence agencies, and more importantly they have no bill of rights. I dare someone to try a Sasha Cohen act in China mocking the present leadership. You'd end up in a prison camp within a week. In America you can openly call the President and the ruling party hideous names, troll them,…
The main difference is legal/constitutional. Yet they use almost the same tools.
Re: From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly
#10They're just copying what the CIA/NSA has been doing for decades.
"... police are generally able to get users to hand over their passwords, experts say."
The NSA and CIA may have the tools but that little statement speaks the gap between what our agencies can do and what theirs can do legally.