(Forbes) Xinjiang, 2018. In the world of surveillance, few terms are more hackneyed and hyperbolized than ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Big Brother’. But earlier this month, when Nikki Hayley, the US Ambassador to the UN, described China’s subjugation of Xinjiang’s Uighurs as being “straight out of George Orwell”, she pretty much nailed it. Xinjiang is a state surveillance laboratory, with unconstrained deployments of early-stage, commercial technologies being used to suppress an ethnic minority. Upwards of a million people forced into re-education camps. Police checkpoints. Facial, iris and license plate recognition. Geofenced travel restrictions. Biometric registration. GPS tagging. Blanket video surveillance. And, of course, mandatory communications monitoring. This is the reality of a high-tech surveillance state.
A (Slightly) More Polished Face Of China’s Surveillance State
Beijing/Shanghai, 2018. Travel east and you will enter a much larger experiment in high-tech surveillance for population control. China has sold its people a chilling dystopian dream built on a fanciful ability to watch everyone, everywhere, with a sinister undercurrent of ‘we know who you are’. Yes, kind of like telling your toddler that you have eyes in the back of your head and that you’re always watching. It doesn’t matter that it’s not true. That’s not the point of the exercise. Read More
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