[ExI] 1984 and Orwell's Warnings

[M1N3R]

From: "Amara Graps" <amara at amara.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2008 9:38 PM

> 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.

I love technology and the way it might change our lives but this is too much 
for me. Just what makes the opposition nervous about rapid development. 
Plus, this is also a way to enforce something from the outside.

One of my favorite parts from the book is when Winston asks O' Brien: 'Do I 
exist the way Big Brother exists?' and the answer is: 'You don't exist.' 
Will those 1.3 billion oppressed Chinese people exist?

The European Union is not as strong as it should be, granted. It might 
disperse someday. But Europeans will surely agree in one thing: liberalism. 
Sometimes we're much too liberal but that's another thing. Here I'd gladly 
have an RFID chip under my skin because I trust nobody, really, nobody would 
want to track me down. Because they don't CARE, they have other, more 
important stuff to attend to (like embezzlement of state funds :D XD). The 
most terrible about all this is that it might actually work in China because 
people tend to have the appropriate thinking. Yeah, someone might say 
'Europeans are individualists' and that's just as right :) I'd say a good 
collective is a collective in which nobody suffers from the existence of 
others, a cohabitation that is positive for all parties. Like a symbiosis. 
(not necessarily live and let live but a +/+ relationship).

M1N3R