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Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

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Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#31

Post by refurb »

crdb wrote: post #26
jimmies wrote: post #5

I think one of the few really, really good things we have left in the US is that I _feel_ that I am trusted to do the right thing. I was in Singapore, a rich, orderly state for an internship a couple of years ago. There were cameras everywhere: Cameras on the sidewalks, cameras on the staircases, cameras in residential apartments, cameras in the subway, cameras at the workplace. There were very few places I feel not…

Funny how these things work... I've lived in Singapore for close to 7 years, have permanent residence, and it is when I travel to the US that I feel slightly uncomfortable. It starts with the immigration agent who sometimes feels the need to ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal, there's the part where they get to look through all your social media accounts and hold you indefinitely, and then there'…

There are states where you can drink in public places. CT comes to mind. Not all public places, but most.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#32

Post by kccqzy »

I have a friend who’s born in Xinjiang and she told me this kind of control goes far beyond just surveillance, physical control, ID checks and whatnot. In a very Orwellian way, it also extends to control of the mind. Schools, government agencies, and local companies have to have their students and employees routinely recite propaganda about “ethnic unity” and relevant official policies and conduct routine tests to make sure these things are memorized.

Big Brother isn’t just watching you, it’s also trying to sneak its way into your mind.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#33

Post by sgt101 »

stickfigure wrote: post #10
agorabinary wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether your wallet or your privacy, you are being robbed regardless.

When someone sticks a gun in your face and demands your wallet, you will reconsider this equivocation.

Consider Anne Frank. Her family were identified as Jews by a census by the somewhat benevolent Dutch state in the 1930's. The disclosure of these records cost Anne her life, and cost the lives of tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of others.

Consider homosexuality, disclosures of sexual preference in 1950's England or in modern Saudi Arabia were, and are, fatal. Cf. Alan Turing!

Privacy breeches can, and do, kill. We should take this very seriously.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#34

Post by crdb »

refurb wrote: post #31
crdb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how these things work... I've lived in Singapore for close to 7 years, have permanent residence, and it is when I travel to the US that I feel slightly uncomfortable. It starts with the immigration agent who sometimes feels the need to ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal, there's the part where they get to look through all your social media accounts and hold you indefinitely, and then there'…

There are states where you can drink in public places. CT comes to mind. Not all public places, but most.

Yeah, the hard thing about commenting on the US is that it's really 50 separate countries which do a lot of regulation locally. Cannabis being the obvious example today - in some of the country, you can smoke it in front of the police station, in other parts, you can get jail terms of years...

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#35

Post by kbos87 »

crdb wrote: post #26
jimmies wrote: post #5

I think one of the few really, really good things we have left in the US is that I _feel_ that I am trusted to do the right thing. I was in Singapore, a rich, orderly state for an internship a couple of years ago. There were cameras everywhere: Cameras on the sidewalks, cameras on the staircases, cameras in residential apartments, cameras in the subway, cameras at the workplace. There were very few places I feel not…

Funny how these things work... I've lived in Singapore for close to 7 years, have permanent residence, and it is when I travel to the US that I feel slightly uncomfortable. It starts with the immigration agent who sometimes feels the need to ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal, there's the part where they get to look through all your social media accounts and hold you indefinitely, and then there'…

I guess it’s all relative. I too feel like the US is a surveillance state on some level, but nothing compares to the UK - arriving at Heathrow feels downright dystopian. I guess it’s just what you are used to.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#36

Post by crdb »

gvurrdon wrote: post #30
crdb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how these things work... I've lived in Singapore for close to 7 years, have permanent residence, and it is when I travel to the US that I feel slightly uncomfortable. It starts with the immigration agent who sometimes feels the need to ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal, there's the part where they get to look through all your social media accounts and hold you indefinitely, and then there'…

Agreed about the customs officials - travel to the US is no longer pleasant. Concerning government officials, for a few years I lived in the same town as the prime minister of the UK. I used to see them walking about town or in shops, sometimes alone, sometimes with family, but never with any security escort. The CCTV cameras there are mostly private ones in shops, as far as I can tell.

Funny you should say that. I grew up in the UK (Central London, Cambridge) and found most interactions with the government difficult in their bureaucracy and sometimes sheer unpleasantness (airports being at the top of the list, until the merciful arrival of auto-gates).

But it is true that smaller towns are almost a different country. British big government has always been oppressive in nature, and rather unconcerned with the collateral damage to the average citizen - see the current NHS restructuring, or how the trains were privatised into the laughing stock of Europe, or remember how you felt when you received your first TV tax letter making you feel like a suspect about to have a SWAT team enter your bedroom... there is this assumption that the citizen is naughty, a feeling of nanny state in a 1984 way. I don't know if that's a recent phenomenon, but it is part of the reason I left for good. Love the Brits though.

The Hitchhiker's Guide is quite an accurate representation, I think, of how I felt about government there at the time. A recent letter from my empty, but extant Lloyd's account intimating me to surrender a ton of private information to HMRC just reinforced the feeling - meanwhile, the Singapore government auto-calculates my (low) taxes and thanks me for "contributing to nation building" with a heart warming picture of a child at school.

My point, which I admittedly did not make very clear, is that it is not about the CCTV but the government behind them. What is the relationship between the government and the people? Is it one of trust? Are words like "necessary evil" used? How do people feel when they see a cop, or a border agent?

The US was built on the idea that politicians are inherently untrustworthy, and the government should be weak and decentralised, with states having the freedom to do what they like (with some exceptions, c.f. the Civil War, eventually leading to the current strong Federal government situation) and competing with each other for residents and businesses. This sort of acts as a balancing mechanism avoiding the most egregious abuses of individual rights in the very long term, whilst leaving room for experimentation on what those rights actually mean in practice.

Singapore is the polar opposite - Lee Kuan Yew structured an immensely powerful and centralised government to solve a number of problems ranging from being invaded by neighbours and Mao's attempts at subversion, to opium gangs and a country so poor hawkers slept on the street behind their cart. However unlike most other new nations at the time, he specifically built a ton of safeguards and structurally made the government as impervious to corruption and meritocratically oriented to customer service as possible. The PAP walked in the streets dressed all in white to symbolise that philosophy when they were first elected. Whether it will last is an interesting question, but today, the government is trusted, so people don't mind seeing CCTV or a police patrol...

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#37

Post by l33tbro »

The idea of Bubba the local beat cop packet-sniffing my smartphone and arbitrarily detaining me "because encryption" is a mortifying thought. Hopefully it remains nothing more than a far-fetched concern here in the West, but I wouldn't count on it.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#38

Post by kbart »

Animats wrote: post #15
jackyinger wrote: post #4

The same thing is happening in the US. The difference is that the authorities here use much more subtle methods so it doesn’t appear pervasive. It is known that use and abuse of stingrays is rife in our cities and gag orders allow even wider silent collection of data we give up willingly to tech companies because we can’t see what’s done with it.

In the US, law enforcement is split among too many organizations to implement a Big Brother system competently. Every little police department has their own system, and private sector systems aren't integrated with government systems. Look at the mess in DC - their camera system was taken over by a botnet. Not even to use the camera data, just to mooch network resources. There's an business opportunity here. There's…

"In the US, law enforcement is split among too many organizations to implement a Big Brother system competently."

NSA begs your pardon..

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#39

Post by jimmies »

crdb wrote: post #26
jimmies wrote: post #5

I think one of the few really, really good things we have left in the US is that I _feel_ that I am trusted to do the right thing. I was in Singapore, a rich, orderly state for an internship a couple of years ago. There were cameras everywhere: Cameras on the sidewalks, cameras on the staircases, cameras in residential apartments, cameras in the subway, cameras at the workplace. There were very few places I feel not…

Funny how these things work... I've lived in Singapore for close to 7 years, have permanent residence, and it is when I travel to the US that I feel slightly uncomfortable. It starts with the immigration agent who sometimes feels the need to ask me questions for 20 minutes as if I were a criminal, there's the part where they get to look through all your social media accounts and hold you indefinitely, and then there'…

All you said is true.

Forget to mention, aside from that, I love Singapore in general and I have no illusion that the US is getting more hostile by the day. I have been in the US as a foreigner for 10 years. Last time I came back, I was hassled and treated like a piece of shit by a customs official, too (and I love how they ask for social accounts now, I hope they don't ask for HN?). Recently I was extremely upset having so much difficulties getting my driver's license renewed. I think the new Trump thing made it so much worse too, but I'd rather not dig into the Trump thing. In Singapore? Government officials did treat me like a human, I absolutely loved that.

However, once you're in in the US, you have NYC, Chicago, SF and you also have Smallville or Lancesterville in the middle of nowhere. In those supposedly backward, homophobic X-villes, you can see part of why some people love the US so much. It's still the life we love in the 80s-90s movies like Back in the future or Groundhog day. They have no cameras, people greet you on the street, and you can go for miles and miles by car, bike, or on foot and you wouldn't see any other person.

Yeah, I get it, it's not legal drinking a beer in the public. I used to live in a rented house downtown with other graduate students in a relatively big town that houses the state's biggest college. During the summertime weekends, we often just drank and smoked and played the guitar (and flute, and banged on broken guitar) all night long on the front porch and watched the cops patrolled by. The other day in X-ville, we smoked our asses out one night. The next morning, I jumped on my friend's 70s truck and saw a 6-pack of beers, some new, some empty. I asked whether we should move it back, and I quote his answer, "Have some man, it's X-ville, no one actually gives a fuck." We blasted an FM channel full of country songs, cranked the window down, and I rode shotgun in a glorious sunrise.

Re: Twelve Days in Xinjiang: How China’s Surveillance State Overwhelms Daily Life

#40

Post by krick »

StreamBright wrote: post #21
agorabinary wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether your wallet or your privacy, you are being robbed regardless.

Not really. Robbing your privacy cannot result in your death. Look how many times robbery goes wrong resulting in the victims death.

I would question living a life like that being worth it. It horrifies me to think I would't even know otherwise should I be born in a country like that.
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