That's roughly 10% of the population (23M). At its peak, the Stasi in the DDR had files on about 30% of the East German population.
And doesn't NSA and co track 100% of the population?
Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang
31–40 of 115 posts
Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang
#32This is just part of the reason mass tracking is bad, you never know who is going to end up with the data.
What do you mean? Simply because they have it means it's bad, regardless of what they do with it? Seems you've already formulated an opinion.
Well, one thing can be bad in itself.
Breach of privacy is bad in itself. Thats not the parent's "formulated opinion", it's something well discussed, with extended arguments, that many people agree on.
So it doesn't matter "what they're going to do with it".
The same way your spouse going over and tracking your internet searches and mails is bad, no matter if they don't do anything with it.
(This of course holds for the whole world states that do that shit, not just China).
Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang
#33My friend from China explained to me that the surveillance of people is as much top down as much as its bottom up. - At every village level they have "informants" for the communist party who inform their higher ups regularly about village level activity. They are financially supported with healthcare and education subsidies and so it makes sense for everyone to join in and inform, especially the poor. - At the city l…
China also tolerates civil unrest and civil disobedience as long as it's not directly challenging the authority of central government. Official name for it is "mass incidents" or "mass frustration".
There are almost 200,000 of these incidents every year. Several of them grow into large demonstrations with barricades, sit-ins, and rioting. They are usually reactions against come companies, local government, land seizures, or some corrupt individuals.
As long as people don't demand changing of the system, government often gives in at least a little. People can be changed, more investigations, some government actions can be cancelled.
It's clever way to bend without breaking. Allow people to show their frustration against things that are wrong but control tightly what kind of targets are allowed.
Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang
#34I’m sure China thinks this is a really great idea, but seriously, what a waste of resources. This goes against the very existential reason for organizing into complex societies in the first place, and second if the powers at be were students of philosophy and especially history they would know that this kind of behavior never ends well for the ruling class.
I don’t think we have seen anything like this in history. In past it was different, because your possibilities for collecting and processing information were much more limited. Also the security apparatus had to employ huge number of people, making it harder to control and less reliable.
Agree that we've never seen anything like current surveillance capabilities, but there have been big jumps before. For example, IBM famously supplied equipment that made it possible for WW2 Germany (did I dodge Godwin's law?) to collate evidence of ethnicity at a scale not known before, with disastrous results [1].
I think that to some, surveillance often looks like a way to get the efficiency of distributed decision making while keeping central control (which has definitely been the philosophy behind China's economic experiments of the past 30y). But historically, it has arced towards enforcing centralized organization for reasons that have nothing to do with the efficiency of the tech involved - and that pattern has proven both bad for a population and self-defeating for regimes.
Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang
#35I’m sure China thinks this is a really great idea, but seriously, what a waste of resources. This goes against the very existential reason for organizing into complex societies in the first place, and second if the powers at be were students of philosophy and especially history they would know that this kind of behavior never ends well for the ruling class.
I think dictators have learned a lot and technology has the possibility to be a real game changer. A few years ago I watched The Red Chapel which is a documentary on which the director and two comedians visit North Korea under the pretence of performing a comedy show there. At one point it got clear that people there even have to keep their basic emotions secret. How do you overthrow the government if it had become that controlling and good at monitoring? I'm afraid it might not be possible.
Even more terrifying is the thought that if my above fear that this now might be a one-way road is true, is eventually every country going to become a oppressive dictatorship? On top of that we've seen the last year or so that we now have propaganda warfare on social media. Having free speech and little internal propaganda is clearly a weakness...
Edit: formatting
Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang
#36Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang
#37[deleted]
Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang
#38Wait doesn't the United States track essentially every person - both in its country and every other for the purposes of mass surveillance and mass propaganda? And indiscriminately targets assassination programming off of metadata?
It's a big deal that China is tracking <2% of its population now?
Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang
#39This is so sad: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...
Indeed, what a brave New world.
People do not forget abuse on such a level, and collective trauma does not go away overnight. I am sure there will be more sadness in the future, when people will discuss effects of the repressive policies on the Uigurs.
Re: Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang
#40I don't get if this is supposed to be a scandal?
This sounds like a mild version of what we've built in the United States.