The Chinese government is upgrading its surveillance efforts against key minorities, a recent report from Citizen Lab has discovered.

In September 2019, Apple Inc confirmed that the phones of mostly-Muslim minority, Uighurs – considered a terrorist and radical threat by the Chinese government – were hacked to monitor their community.

The Chinese hackers also spied on Tibetans in exile through their iPhone. The Citizen Lab report suggested that both attacks were carried out by the same hackers working with the Chinese government.

The report also suggested that the Chinese government may currently be upgrading its surveillance efforts against key minority groups, which it considers to be enemies of the state.

In China, it is not just minority groups who are under surveillance. By next year, every member of the population will be subject to the “social credit system”.

“I can’t buy property. My child can’t go to a private school,” Liu Hu, a journalist writing about censorship and corruption in China said. “You feel you’re being controlled by the list all the time.”

Hu was listed on a List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People’s Court and was prevented from taking flights, because of his low social credit system.

“There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to. What’s scary is there’s nothing you can do about it. You can report to no one. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere.”

In April 2018, the Communist-ruled party boasted of blocking Chinese nationals from taking 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed rail trips. Deductions are made for bad behaviour, such as traffic violations or playing too much video games, while points are added for good behaviour, such as being a parent.

China aims to have about 626 million surveillance cameras in the country, to be used as part of the social credit system. Observed behaviour caught on camera, which are not in line with what the Community party deems “good”, decreases citizens’ social credit scores.

Xi Jinping aims for total control of his people’s political, mental and philosophical views. Political commentators have, however, argued that beneath Xi’s desire for totalitarianism is an insecure fear of dissent and political rejection from his supporters. To maintain his timeless rule as president, the social credit system punishes minor social and political dissent as small as jaywalking, and hands out rewards for total conformity to Communist ideals of good citizenship.

For Xi, the founder of modern China, Mao Zedong’s ideologies, will best lead China towards political and economic greatness in the eyes of the world.

“If at the time of reform Comrade Mao had been completely repudiated, would our party still be standing? Would our country’s system of socialism still be standing?” he asked the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee several days after becoming their general secretary.

“These things cannot be cut away from the entire history of our party and our country. To grasp this is to grasp everything. This is not just an intellectual issue—it is a political issue.”

Behind Xi’s ideologies for a great China lies fear of the outside world. Differing ideologies cannot be tolerated in Xi’s China. Although his family was persecuted, murdered and tortured – and he banished – during the Maoist era, Xi’s belief in the Maoist ideals of self-sacrifice for the greater good is demanded of his people. The Western culture of democracy, individualism and self-determination cannot be tolerated, neither can religious beliefs, feminist beliefs, human rights beliefs and many more.

Ironically, Xi’s family do not conform to ideals of self-sacrifice, amassing wealth for themselves in both China and offshore accounts.

“Rein in your spouses, children, relatives, friends, and staff, and vow not to use power for personal gain,’’ he told officials during a 2004 conference call.

In a volume of his internal speeches, published in January 2016, titled: ‘Excerpts of Xi Jinping’s Remarks on the Strict Maintenance of Party Discipline’, Xi is highly critical of corruption in the Chinese political system.

“The higher the positions of power these people are in, they less seriously they take party political discipline, even to the point of recklessness and sheer audacity,” he writes.

“Some are inflated with a political will to power, entirely in the service of personal profits or the vested interests of their clique, running their plots and dealings outside existing party organizations that damage and split the party.”

It seems that, apart from Xi’s own family, conformity is an utmost requirement for everyone in China. Like most totalitarian leaders, China’s president is too hypocritical to follow his authoritarian ideologies.

L'articolo How Surveillance is Used to Punish Nonconforming Citizens in China proviene da InsideOver.

The extrapolation of a recent report compiled by IHS Markit has revealed that American citizens are almost as likely to be spied on as are the Chinese, each by their respective regimes. While China boasts one security camera for every 4.1 people, America ranks at 4.6 people per camera deployed, notes the report’s author, IHS Markit analyst Oliver Philippou. Activists bemoan the fact that China is constantly and unashamedly pushing video surveillance into civil society, but the US state and private monitors are almost as ubiquitous.

Long demonised as a totalitarian state, the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong was, indeed, an unashamedly totalitarian construct. The historical vestiges linger, notwithstanding China’s modernisation of the last two decades, and the Communist Party remains the sole political option, with dire consequences for detractors.

That said, whether it is better or worse to watch third party infiltration as is happening in the US, rather than surveillance by the state itself, is debatable. The report noted that the highest number of surveillance cameras in the US were deployed by private enterprise, such as those in hotels, malls and office complexes. For many, it remains a moot point as to whether a camera is installed by state or private entities, as both the Chinese and US regimes can legally commandeer just about anything in the name of national security, thus making private surveillance footage state property.

A billion cameras for the kids

The youth of 2019 will likely be growing up in a world filled with all-seeing eyes. IHS Markit has estimated there will be around one billion surveillance cameras in operation by 2025. The growth in surveillance is being driven by price competition and technological advances – allowing for greater deployment at a lower cost – but also respective government funding and a pressing need for public safety, as is the official line.

Critics disagree, and note that the wanton abuse of privacy through surveillance “for the public good” is a precedent set long ago. They fear that in spite of the impetus being public safety – something yet to be definitively and unambiguously linked to increased surveillance – the likelihood that the state will use it to spy on its citizens, crush dissent and broadly and quietly impose whatever stranglehold best suits its purposes, is almost a foregone conclusion.

With China leading the pack and North America a close second, third place for monitoring its citizens goes to Taiwan, with one camera for every 5.5 residents, the UK in fourth position at 6.5 citizens per camera deployed, and Singapore in fifth place, sporting one surveillance camera for every 7.1 people.

With the current figures being 349 million cameras deployed in China and 70 million in North America, Big Brother has never looked so ominous. Or seen so much. Philippou notes that reporting from the surveillance arena has largely focused on Beijing’s roll-out of monitoring via cameras and AI in public spaces, whereas the US deployment has been almost as ambitious. He concludes by saying that “future debate over mass surveillance is likely to concern America as much as China.”

Even though a larger percentage of surveillance is currently being funded by private enterprise in North America, government agencies have not been absent from the arena. For many years, the Baltimore Police Department enacted aerial surveillance of its citizens, and Detroit has cameras pointed at public housing residents. Many police departments are also advocating tech giant Amazon’s Ring, essentially creating a network of citizens monitoring one another.

Civil rights advocates are warning of the dangers of such enhanced surveillance, disputing any real link between increased surveillance and a reduction in crime, while noting that the technology is all too often abused by political agendas, where innocent people are spuriously targeted or privacy completely eradicated through such surveillance.

L'articolo US Domestic Video Surveillance Almost On Par With China proviene da InsideOver.

Hong Kong’s current resistance to an increasingly authoritarian China is indicative of the Western World’s folly that began with President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. The United States’ then-assumption that a diplomatic opening to China, and consequently the opening of American markets to Chinese goods, would result in the liberalization of China’s political life turned out to be a monumentally false assumption. Over the past four decades, as China’s economic power has grown, so too has its capacity to project military power farther afield, resulting in saber rattling at Pacific neighbors including Vietnam and Japan. Ironically, in an effort to contain the then-Soviet Union, the United States fed its true great power rival of the 21st century, China, with the economic growth it needed to consolidate its hold on the Asia Pacific. Consequently, the United States handed China four decades of peace during which it could grow its economy and military power.

The Nixon Administration suffered a fundamental failure of strategic imagination: with its booming population, China long term would turn out to be the far more dangerous great power opponent in comparison to Russia. The consequences of this strategic blunder are today obvious: the presumed Chinese social and political liberalization never materialized; instead, today we ironically have a China that seizes American artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition technology to develop ever more oppressive monitoring tools to use against its citizens. This high-tech Big Brother apparatus is improving with each passing day, snuffing out any true hope of Chinese dissidents ever effectively organizing a democratic resistance.

This phenomenon is well-demonstrated in Hong Kong’s current resistance to the growing Chinafication of their political and judicial systems. Today, the Chinese mainland is seeking to suffocate Hong Konger democratic sentiment. Though China has suffered a setback via the travails of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, as she suffers resistance from Hong Kongers concerning possible extradition to mainland China for crimes, this is but a temporary victory for Hong Konger democracy. The overriding trend is already in place: increasing government surveillance of the Hong Kong populace, an increasing culture of cracking down on peaceful protest, and an increased willingness to overtly challenge Western support for pro-democracy sympathizers. And with the rising military and economic might of China, formerly passionate foreign supporters of democracy are increasingly cowed into silence for fear of Chinese reprisals.

Now is the time for the United States to reverse decades of flawed policy based on the fundamentally false assumption that building up China’s economy within the Western world order would lead to a more democratic China, and begin to fully support both Hong Kong and Taiwan in the face of heightening Chinese intimidation tactics against their democratic institutions and pro-democracy populace. The Trump Administration’s continued trade tariffs and other countermeasures are wisely restricting Chinese access to American intellectual property. The United States would be wise to work more closely with its major domestic AI developers such as Google to constructively navigate how American private enterprise may inadvertently transfer critical AI technology know-how to China. Without a focused public/private partnership within the United States, China will continue to grocery shop for the technology that will assist it best in bolstering its authoritarian control over its citizens.

L'articolo American Folly: China, Hong Kong, Democracy proviene da InsideOver.