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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.


Original Submission

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Although he has physically recovered, he has lost his razor-sharp insight and biting wit[1]. Like other patients, he finds talents in unrelated areas. His computer fluency, which was sufficient to publish in academic journals, is now 20 years out of date. During this period, laptops have become as thin as paper and also horrendously obsolete. Although the paper-thin laptops can be configured as a variety of legacy desktop environments and legacy web browsers, rendering data from the (almost) ubiquitous wireless network is less successful than accessing the current World Wide Web without images or JavaScript. However, this is only one slice of purgatory.

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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:26AM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:26AM (#633663) Journal

    I was mentally preparing and structuring my rant as I was reading TFS, then.... this

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

    Come on, editors! What is a honest ranter to do if you cut short the discourse with such a terse and to-the-point phrase!?!

    (grin)

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:44AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:44AM (#633668)

      The scientist told the woman that he wanted to conduct an experiment, and that in order to do so, he needed her to give birth to 7 babies. Instantly, 7 babies appeared and the scientist responded as though the woman had given birth to them naturally. At last, there were enough resources to begin the experiment!

      The scientist began by grabbing one of the babies and smashing its head against the wall repeatedly until his vision was filled with red. Then, he grabbed another baby and tossed it through a glass window and into a nearby pond, leaving it to drown. Next, the magnanimous scientist stuck a baby in a file cabinet drawer such that only its head was sticking out; he then slammed the file cabinet shut repeatedly until no motion remained. The scientist looked at the remaining babies with a cold gaze, and slowly approached them. They screamed and they screamed and they screamed, but the scientist continued to meticulously carry out his grand experiment.

      The scientist led a group of his contemporaries through the house - which was now filled with blood and baby parts - so that they could see the results of the experiencement. Amazing. Phenomenal. Marvelous. As the group of researchers walked throughout the house, they clapped and repeatedly uttered, "The experiment is complete!" The group reached a closed closet, and then opened it to reveal someone. They found you.

      An adult became a file cabinet baby that day.

      • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @08:16AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @08:16AM (#633690)

        The scientist told the woman that he wanted to conduct an experiment,

        and thus the scientist ran his experiment. It was successful and the scientist saved the world. In a twist it was discovered that the scientist was indeed THE woman, she just had a habit of talking to herself and wishing she had a life as a masculine powerhouse with half a brain.

  • (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.
    • (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.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by MostCynical on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:54AM (1 child)

    by MostCynical (2589) on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:54AM (#633670) Journal
    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
    • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 06 2018, @07:06AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 06 2018, @07:06AM (#633673) Journal

      Prescient fiction..

      Prescient is a bit exaggerated, perhaps "foretelling" is more appropriate.
      Usually Cory Doctorow doesn't jump very far into the future and this makes his novel setups credible without much hand-waving.
      He sorta has a knack of near-future-extrapolation with just-thickening-enough the lines of the sketch emerging from the current use of technology before weaving these lines into the plot.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @07:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @07:58AM (#633685)

    The moment Japan surrendered, the USA got China as part of the deal. We barely paid any attention to China, so they became a dystopia with nukes. In more recent decades, we handed over our technology and regulated our own factories out of existence.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @08:47AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @08:47AM (#633700)

    Citizen scores are a government's wet dream. I'm sure this will spread to other developed countries in some form or another. Black Mirror s03e01 explored this idea.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 06 2018, @10:35AM (2 children)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday February 06 2018, @10:35AM (#633725) Journal

      Private "citizen scores" already exist. They are just named differently, e.g. credit score.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @03:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @03:33PM (#633871)

        That's the public but state approved version.

        The public governmental versions are "security clearance", "do not fly list" and "concealed carry permit".

      • (Score: 1) by mobydisk on Tuesday February 06 2018, @07:09PM

        by mobydisk (5472) on Tuesday February 06 2018, @07:09PM (#634036)

        I had the same thought, but a credit score doesn't look at your political views. Interestingly enough, in 2015 they did look at your Facebook friends, but they dropped it in 2016 (or so they claimed) because it didn't work. And FaceBook started banning the practice - perhaps related to the FTC warnings on the topic.

  • (Score: 2) by Virindi on Tuesday February 06 2018, @11:22AM (3 children)

    by Virindi (3484) on Tuesday February 06 2018, @11:22AM (#633743)

    Western governments probably already have this. If not now, soon. It is certainly not going to happen any slower...the difference is, here it will be top secret.

    And we will be told, by some magic unknown algorithm*, that someone is dangerous (based on the secret score). Since people blindly trust "algorithms", they are fine with that. They just don't want to know how the sausage is made.

    *"Services" that do this based on who knows what have already been discussed on this site.

    • (Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday February 06 2018, @01:40PM (2 children)

      by turgid (4318) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 06 2018, @01:40PM (#633798) Journal

      You only have to look at the wrong thing on the Internet to be considered dangerous.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @03:02PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @03:02PM (#633846)

        Don't worry, our dear government would never abuse us based on what we do [wikipedia.org] and much less on who we are [wikipedia.org]...

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday February 06 2018, @10:20PM

          by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Tuesday February 06 2018, @10:20PM (#634134)

          That article on COINTELPRO is a real eye opener.

          The various organs of the US state seem to have been pretty good at preventing change so far, but I had no idea they were so murderous within the actual US.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @12:40PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @12:40PM (#633772)

    ... you need to hear about what happened to my friend, Lacey Pound.

    Well, she's not my friend any more now, obviously, but...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @05:54PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @05:54PM (#633983)

      Lacie Pound's desperate need for approval shows up in most of humanity. That Black Mirror episode has technology placing a digital score on what many do on a daily basis.

      Think it's interesting this site allows others to score ones posts.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:44PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:44PM (#634014)

        Indeed it does; but if you're new, it only allows you to score them upwards.

        Waiting for Russian hackers to plant a 'dislike' button...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @03:08PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @03:08PM (#633850)

    So great leader and his minions will have scores ? they will algorithmically cheat and make top score and no wrongdoing will affect it.

    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:02PM

      by Freeman (732) on Tuesday February 06 2018, @06:02PM (#633986) Journal

      Great leader is the 100% score, no one else can reach 100%, all others will be scored based on their distance from the ideals given by the great leader.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @09:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 06 2018, @09:43PM (#634112)

      too-big-to-fail

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday February 07 2018, @03:04AM

      by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday February 07 2018, @03:04AM (#634267)

      If you're Ultraviolet, you get to program The Computer.

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