[ExI] 1984 and Orwell's Warnings

[Amara Graps]

Appropriate to this topic.

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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye/1
China's All-Seeing Eye
NAOMI KLEIN
Posted May 29, 2008 3:24 PM

With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the
prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

some clips:

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be
watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote
monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls,
monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet
access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious
system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements
will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips
and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to
their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all:
linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of
names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data.
When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases
for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

[...]

The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests recently,
the surveillance system was thrown into its first live test, with every
supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age - cellphones,
satellite television, the Internet - transformed into a method of
repression and control. As soon as the protests gathered steam, China
reinforced its Great Firewall, blocking its citizens from accessing
dozens of foreign news outlets. In some parts of Tibet, Internet access
was shut down altogether. Many people trying to phone friends and family
found that their calls were blocked, and cellphones in Lhasa were
blitzed with text messages from the police: "Severely battle any
creation or any spreading of rumors that would upset or frighten people
or cause social disorder or illegal criminal behavior that could damage
social stability."

During the first week of protests, foreign journalists who tried to get
into Tibet were systematically turned back. But that didn't mean that
there were no cameras inside the besieged areas. Since early last year,
activists in Lhasa have been reporting on the proliferation of
black-domed cameras that look like streetlights - just like the ones I
saw coming off the assembly line in Shenzhen. Tibetan monks complain
that cameras - activated by motion sensors - have invaded their
monasteries and prayer rooms.

During the Lhasa riots, police on the scene augmented the footage from
the CCTVs with their own video cameras, choosing to film - rather than
stop - the violence, which left 19 dead. The police then quickly cut
together the surveillance shots that made the Tibetans look most vicious
- beating Chinese bystanders, torching shops, ripping metal sheeting off
banks - and created a kind of copumentary: Tibetans Gone Wild. These
weren't the celestial beings in flowing robes the Beastie Boys and
Richard Gere had told us about. They were angry young men, wielding
sticks and long knives. They looked ugly, brutal, tribal. On Chinese
state TV, this footage played around the clock.

The police also used the surveillance footage to extract mug shots of
the demonstrators and rioters. Photos of the 21 "most wanted" Tibetans,
many taken from that distinctive "streetlamp" view of the domed cameras,
were immediately circulated to all of China's major news portals, which
obediently posted them to help out with the manhunt. The Internet became
the most powerful police tool. Within days, several of the men on the
posters were in custody, along with hundreds of others.

[...]

Police State 2.0 might not look good from the outside, but on the
inside, it appears to have passed its first major test.

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Amara
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Amara Graps, PhD      www.amara.com
Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado