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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

#51

Post by bryananderson »

Jyaif wrote: post #48
sgt101 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Anne Frank was killed by people. No one in the history of mankind has ever been killed by a privacy breach. Preventing ideologies that lead to killing people is what needs to be worked on, not forcing people to live closeted lives.

History shows us that the risk of the state being co-opted by killers is non-negligible. We can try to prevent authoritarian elements from gaining power, but don’t you think the Dutch in the 1930s felt the same?

We need to be very careful what sort of tools we make available to future iterations of the state, rather than thinking in terms of how much we trust the current iteration (“mass surveillance doesn’t bother me because it’s Obama and I trust him”).

We would like for a benevolent state to have the tools to carry out the services we enjoy, including security, but we should try not to give them too many things that could become effective totalitarian implements at the flip of a switch.

The mass surveillance apparatus is exactly such a thing.

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

#52

Post by hux_ »

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…

American beliefs about their freedom are just that - BELIEFS.

The underlying implication ALWAYS is the Chinese and Singaporeans or whoever can't think for themselves about what is good for their societies and therefore need American moral guidance and leadership.

This is the same tactic the British/French/Spanish etc used to justify colonization. They needed a reason cause by the 18th century, most of the local population had begun to wonder why their kids needed to get shipped off to get killed all over the planet.

Read the views of an Indian or and African or a Brazilian visiting Singapore from more unstable homelands and see what their views are on surveillance is.

Or better still pick up last month's natgeo on global happiness and ask yourself why Singapore tops the happiness index in Asia despite the surveillance. There is no one size fits all cultures solution to social problems.

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

#53

Post by darrenf »

Reason077 wrote: post #49
darrenf wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK the vast, vast majority of CCTV in the UK is privately owned and has nothing to do with police or government.

While it's no doubt true that the "vast majority" of CCTV in the UK is privately owned (pretty much every business premises will operate their own private CCTV), there are large numbers of police, local-government, and transport-agency operated CCTV cameras monitoring public spaces in the UK. If you look at somewhere like London, then pretty much every busy intersection, every public square, every station, every bus,…

It was estimated that high, but using a flawed extrapolation from observations on just two streets in Putney:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080704145855/http://www.channel...

I'd be interested to know the source of your (almost) certainty.

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

#54

Post by smcl »

Jyaif wrote: post #48
sgt101 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Anne Frank was killed by people. No one in the history of mankind has ever been killed by a privacy breach. Preventing ideologies that lead to killing people is what needs to be worked on, not forcing people to live closeted lives.

Not disclosing your religion or sexuality to the government isn’t living a closeted life. I could be out and proud to my friends and family, but have little desire to allow some nasty actor in the government to include me in a query like

    select * from citizens where sexuality != ‘straight’

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

#55

Post by mnw21cam »

Deathmax wrote: post #44
mnw21cam wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming "FB" means Facebook, what if one doesn't have a Facebook account?

Or manually use FB's redirect: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/...

Nope - paywall still present.

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

#56

Post by Simon_says »

kelnos wrote: post #23
stickfigure wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Scared people are nearly the worst kinds of people you want making policy decisions. If you can establish statistical significance that no cameras -> cameras (actual causality, not mere correlation) causes a drop in (public) robery-related homicide, and a majority of people believe that drop to be significant enough to warrant the loss of privacy, then sure, you put up cameras. You don't do it because a few people go…

The reason to have citizens own guns is so the population can't be bullied by a totalitarian state, whether foreign or domestic. Guns democratize the use of violence. Sure, militaries can nuke cities, but only if they want to rule over a sheet of glass. Tanks and air superiority can win battles, but they can't stop the occupied population from assembling. To subjugate a populace, to keep them under your boot without outright killing them, you need infantry or police on the ground, and rifles in everybody's hands is a nightmare for such an occupying force.

More people will die of murder and suicide in an armed society, but it's the price we pay to protect against an existential threat to our culture's way of life, which in aggregate is more important than the tens of thousands of lives lost every year to gun violence. It's not good enough to just say that a disarmed society is safer. You have to show how we can have equal protection against a government run amok without guns. So far as I know, there's nothing equal. Human history is quite long. I don't think it's a coincidence that the number of democracies in the world exploded so very close to the same time in our history that guns became widely available and cheap enough for average citizens to own. Be careful about tearing down a foundational pillar of what keeps governments in check. This isn't some abstract fear. It's tangible, and it's already happened repeatedly.

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

#57

Post by sgt101 »

smcl wrote: post #54
Jyaif wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anne Frank was killed by people. No one in the history of mankind has ever been killed by a privacy breach. Preventing ideologies that lead to killing people is what needs to be worked on, not forcing people to live closeted lives.

Not disclosing your religion or sexuality to the government isn’t living a closeted life. I could be out and proud to my friends and family, but have little desire to allow some nasty actor in the government to include me in a query like select * from citizens where sexuality != ‘straight’

In my book you have an absolute right to present yourself to others as you choose, when you choose.

Taking that right is a violation.

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

#58

Post by karpodiem »

mnw21cam wrote: post #55
Deathmax wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or manually use FB's redirect: https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/...

Nope - paywall still present.

Worked for me, I use Facebook though (may not work if you do not have a Facebook account?)

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

#60

Post by vixen99 »

sgt101 wrote: post #33
stickfigure wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
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