China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone

The country is perfecting a vast network of digital espionage as a means of social control—with implications for democracies worldwide.

The Atlantic | 2 February 2018

[excerpts]

[One of the most chilling novels I’ve read is Orwell’s 1984. I can’t imagine reliving the Khmer Rouge years or be in a similar totalitarian state again. The worst nightmare imaginable. - Theary C. Seng]

One internet privacy expert warns: “What China is doing here is selectively breeding its population to select against the trait of critical, independent thinking.”...

This planned data-focused social credit system is only one facet of China’s rapidly expanding system of algorithmic surveillance. Another is a sprawling network of technologies, especially surveillance cameras, to monitor people’s physical movements. In 2015, China’s national police force—the Ministry of Public Safety—called for the creation of an “omnipresent, completely connected, always on and fully controllable” national video surveillance network. MPS and other agencies stated that law enforcement should use facial recognition technology in combination with the video cameras to catch lawbreakers. One IHS Markit estimate puts the number of cameras in China at 176 million today, with a plan to have 450 million installed by 2020. One hundred percent of Beijing is now blanketed by surveillance cameras, according to the Beijing Public Safety Bureau.