China's Big Brother tech gives surveillance new reach
10 replies, posted
[QUOTE]LONDON (REUTERS) - As tens of thousands of Chinese drinkers walked into a beer festival in the eastern port city of Qingdao in August, a software program scanned their pictures.Those identified as being on a police list of wanted persons were pinpointed in less than a second.
By the end of the three-week event, authorities had made 25 arrests, including one of someone on the run for a decade. According to police, the program had correctly matched faces in 98 per cent of cases.
The exercise is one of the latest examples of how Beijing is tapping the newest technology to redefine the limits and scale of mass surveillance.
As China's President Xi Jinping and those around him cement their power with purges and a ruthless anti-corruption drive, they are relying on these breakthroughs to stymie dissent.
This push for loyalty will form a quiet backdrop to proceedings at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party in Beijing. When delegates gather for the Oct 18 opening of the meeting, they will showcase a superpower that is becoming increasingly assertive.
In the last year, Beijing opened its first major overseas military base in the east African country of Djibouti, deployed warships as far afield as the Baltic and Atlantic and taken a more assertive stance in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.
All of these priorities, however, pale in comparison to the leadership's commitment to retaining control at home. China's government has long used all the resources at its disposal to keep track of its people and stifle dissent. Spies and wiretaps of the early communist era have been followed by high-tech surveillance of China's internet and social media.
China has become one of the earliest large-scale adopters of widespread facial recognition technology, tapping into an ever-growing collection of millions of security cameras across the country.
Such techniques allow those wanted by the state to be quickly - and often automatically - identified, sometimes en masse.
As part of a separate programme, Chinese media reported that researchers have developed programs that can identify individuals from several hundred yards away simply by their walking style.
For Chinese citizens, mass surveillance is now a largely unquestioned part of everyday life. CCTV feeds from private security cameras are often broadcast live and continuously online, watched by the curious or prurient, and the activities of passersby are discussed on internet forums with little regard for privacy.
Beijing's rulers, however, have access to much, much more information - as well as the data crunching tools to interrogate and analyse it at ever-increasing speed.
When it comes to tracking what its citizens do online, Beijing has long taken things further than any other major power. In 2011, American academic Rebecca MacKinnon coined the phrase "networked authoritarianism" to describe the way China aggressively monitored and censored its own social media platforms while blocking access to many outside services such as Facebook.[/QUOTE]
[url]http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/chinas-big-brother-tech-gives-surveillance-new-reach[/url]
Its weird that my chinese friends are cool with it, they can travel with relative freedom, but they still are fiercely loyal to the ruling party, because they upped the economy as a whole, they don't mind giving some freedoms away.
[QUOTE=Ignhelper;52805509]
Its weird that my chinese friends are cool with it, they can travel with relative freedom, but they still are fiercely loyal to the ruling party, because they upped the economy as a whole, they don't mind giving some freedoms away.[/QUOTE]
who knows man maybe they'd get arrested if they're not cool with it
Pretty sure with how big data and machine learning is going, the entire world will be like this as it becomes more accessible
:uncomfortable:
I, for one, do not welcome our robot-assisted overlords
People of different culture value autonomy and freedom differently. Trading bits of intangible privacy for the promise of safety seems like a beneficial trade-off for some.
[QUOTE=Noob4life;52805974]People of different culture value autonomy and freedom differently. Trading bits of intangible privacy for the promise of safety seems like a beneficial trade-off for some.[/QUOTE]
As if we aren't all doing that? Aztec is right, this will spread to the rest of the world the more successful it is.
[QUOTE=Ignhelper;52805509][url]http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/chinas-big-brother-tech-
Its weird that my chinese friends are cool with it, they can travel with relative freedom, but they still are fiercely loyal to the ruling party, because they upped the economy as a whole, they don't mind giving some freedoms away.[/QUOTE]
Well, they probably grew up all their life without things like freedom of speech and assembly so that's probably why they don't care. Also the reason they're so fiercely loyal to the ruling party is probably because all the news that they look at is state-owned which would be biased, of course, towards the state.
[QUOTE=MelonShooter;52806049]Well, they probably grew up all their life without things like freedom of speech and assembly so that's probably why they don't care.[/QUOTE]
I get the feeling that you would think people in countries used to freedom of speech would somehow react differently to this situation.
Do you really think that this type of surveillance would create a different response among the vast majority of Americans than “meh, it will stop the terrorists though.” ?
You underestimate just how much Americans value relative comfort and convenience over their own freedom of speech or privacy.
[QUOTE=Ignhelper;52805509][url]http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/chinas-big-brother-tech-gives-surveillance-new-reach[/url]
Its weird that my chinese friends are cool with it, they can travel with relative freedom, but they still are fiercely loyal to the ruling party, because they upped the economy as a whole, they don't mind giving some freedoms away.[/QUOTE]
the romans were pretty chill with living under a military dictatorship as long as the trash got picked up, the aquaducts were running and the peasants were kept in line, as long as the military coups were quick they didn't seem to care. The more modern saying is "Hey at least Mussolini got the trains to run on time." People will put up with a lot of shit as long as things are working for them, even if its not even warranted, that even applies to the US right now with mr. "MAGA" in the office taking credit for 9 years of economic gains and all the national security shit we've built up which seems to do fuckall to stop anything but the most inept terrorists.
9 years? where's the evidence that the first 8 even amounted to anything?
Haha I work at a software development company, so one of our projects is exactly a system collecting video feeds from dozens of cameras and running our face rec algorithm(alongside with many others, like licence plates recognition and whatnot) on it, and, as far as I know, one of our biggest clients is exactly some chinese company. Don't really know the details though.
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