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How U.S. Tech Giants are Helping to Build China's Surveillance State:
AN AMERICAN ORGANIZATION founded by tech giants Google and IBM is working with a company that is helping China's authoritarian government conduct mass surveillance against its citizens, The Intercept can reveal.
The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to "drive innovation" — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.
Shenzhen-based Semptian is using the devices to enhance the capabilities of internet surveillance and censorship technology it provides to human rights-abusing security agencies in China, according to sources and documents. A company employee said that its technology is being used to covertly monitor the internet activity of 200 million people.
[...] After receiving tips from confidential sources about Semptian's role in mass surveillance, a reporter contacted the company using an assumed name and posing as a potential customer. In response, a Semptian employee sent documents showing that the company — under the guise of iNext — has developed a mass surveillance system named Aegis, which it says can "store and analyze unlimited data."
Aegis can provide "a full view to the virtual world," the company claims in the documents, allowing government spies to see "the connections of everyone," including "location information for everyone in the country."
The system can also "block certain information [on the] internet from being visited," censoring content that the government does not want citizens to see, the documents show.
[The Semptian video demonstration showing how the Aegis system tracks people's movements is embedded in the article]
[Related Cloud Platform by IBM - China]: SuperVessel
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday July 13 2019, @10:52PM (4 children)
Because little else matters, I have to ask the same old, but all important question:
*Who's gonna stop them?*
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 13 2019, @11:28PM (3 children)
"We, the people" (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday July 13 2019, @11:47PM
That's been tried countless times before. At best success is fleeting.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 13 2019, @11:47PM (1 child)
It has to get bad enough to get the populace to act en masse.
Like the French had to.
The rich 1% use pens.
The other 99% have to build guillotines.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday July 14 2019, @04:01AM
FTFY. Not as effective as the guillotine, granted.
Also, last time guillotines were effective was against a well-defined government structure with well-known actors, with the on-call wealth quantified by amounts of heavy metals and in a world when the fastest escape speed for a person was the speed of horses.
I'm afraid they'll fail today against a multinational corporate structure, with diffuse responsibility and actors that change at minute times, with wealth transferred between continents in microseconds and corporate jets are "at hand".
What it will take to equal the field today? I don't know; the biggest chance to start something was, in my opinion, the "occupy..." "movement"**. Perhaps looking in why did that one fail may bring in some idea (e.g. why today the American middle-class is warring against itself instead of trying to get some control over the structures of power - be them economical or political structures).
Maybe "the anubi solution" may also work on long term - but I doubt that a significant part of the population will ever forget about "the American dream" and refuse to have anything to do with McMansions, Marvel super-hero movies or any "empty cultural calories".
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*** it wasn't an actual movement - too many agendas and possible directions to take.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford