Tag: 1984

Original: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/st … _eye/print
Archived: http://www.westerfunk.net/archives/secu … ing%20Eye/

I don’t normally read RollingStone Magazine, but I stumbled across a link to an article while on Bruce Schneier’s security blog. In short, China is performing a social/spying experiment upon a city called Shenzhen. Every spy toy imaginable is being employed in the service of watching and controlling every movement its citizens make. This is 1984 stuff here. And one of the interesting comments in the article is that U.S. corporations are some of the largest financiers of this endeavor. Also, just like everything in China, it will be exported to a “neighborhood near you,” as it says in the article. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true and maybe a bit alarmist. But it is odd to me the U.S. seems to have such a vested interest in this. Also, at the very least, the technology could be quickly exported to current oppressive governments for the controlling of their people. Here are some quotes from the article:

“As China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)”

“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.”

“One Shenzhen-based company, China Security & Surveillance Technology, has developed software to enable the cameras to alert police when an unusual number of people begin to gather at any given location.”

“Shenzhen is the place where the shield has received its most extensive fortifications — the place where all the spy toys are being hooked together and tested to see what they can do. ‘The central government eventually wants to have city-by-city surveillance, so they could just sit and monitor one city and its surveillance system as a whole,’ Zhang says. ‘It’s all part of that bigger project. Once the tests are done and it’s proven, they will be spreading from the big province to the cities, even to the rural farmland.’

In fact, the rollout of the high-tech shield is already well under way.”