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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the who-even-remembers-1984,-anyway? dept.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/china-surveillance/552203/

Imagine a society in which you are rated by the government on your trustworthiness. Your "citizen score" follows you wherever you go. A high score allows you access to faster internet service or a fast-tracked visa to Europe. If you make political posts online without a permit, or question or contradict the government's official narrative on current events, however, your score decreases. To calculate the score, private companies working with your government constantly trawl through vast amounts of your social media and online shopping data.

When you step outside your door, your actions in the physical world are also swept into the dragnet: The government gathers an enormous collection of information through the video cameras placed on your street and all over your city. If you commit a crime—or simply jaywalk—facial recognition algorithms will match video footage of your face to your photo in a national ID database. It won't be long before the police show up at your door.

This society may seem dystopian, but it isn't farfetched: It may be China in a few years. The country is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China's communist party-state is developing a "citizen score" to incentivize "good" behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens' movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism. While the expanding Orwellian eye may improve "public safety," it poses a chilling new threat to civil liberties in a country that already has one of the most oppressive and controlling governments in the world.

China's evolving algorithmic surveillance system will rely on the security organs of the communist party-state to filter, collect, and analyze staggering volumes of data flowing across the internet. Justifying controls in the name of national security and social stability, China originally planned to develop what it called a "Golden Shield" surveillance system allowing easy access to local, national, and regional records on each citizen. This ambitious project has so far been mostly confined to a content-filtering Great Firewall, which prohibits foreign internet sites including Google, Facebook, and The New York Times. According to Freedom House, China's level of internet freedom is already the worst on the planet. Now, the Communist Party of China is finally building the extensive, multilevel data-gathering system it has dreamed of for decades.

God bless China for showing the U.S. the way to protect its people.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:43AM (3 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:43AM (#633667) Journal

    The Citizen Score has been in the works there since 2014 and will be fully mandatory in 2020. There was another presentation on it at CCC recently, 34C3, about it covering its adoption and the effects of its adoption.

    There are some audio problems with the presentation, especially at the beginning, and they have difficulty setting up the slides, but the end result is still quite an informative to what was covered a few years ago. If that topic is interesting then there are two additional presentations on somewhat similar measures going on in the West. The difference is that in the West it comes from convergence of separate corporate intrusions rather than a single government initiative. Of course it almost goes without saying that Faecebook leads the push towards universal surveillance [medium.com] but there are other factors involved too:

    There was also one about censorship in Spain regarding Catalan.

    --
    Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @08:18AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @08:18AM (#633691)

    Anything that tracks individuals outside of criminal investigations is distasteful and should be abolished if we want to continue humanity along a path of freedom.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @01:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @01:04PM (#633789)

      if we want to continue humanity along a path of freedom.

      That's quite the leap you're making there...

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Wednesday February 07 2018, @03:00AM

      by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday February 07 2018, @03:00AM (#634265)

      > Anything that tracks individuals outside of criminal investigations is distasteful

      I don't know about taste, but many people like the sound, color, texture and smell of money.
      4 out of 5 ain't so bad.