The Quiet Death Of Privacy, Another Casualty Of The Worldwide 'War On Terror'
Most of what is detailed in this story about super surveillance in a Chinese city you can take as given will become reality for all in the US, the UK, the EU and Australia within five years or so. At least, there will be those who will point to data from the "success" of China's new multi-functional ID chip card, in a few years time, and claim it is a necessity for all.
That American tech companies are helping China to create such super surveillance capabilities means that what happens in Shenzhen will be seen as a sort of live field test for this spy-tech, and will be used in the pitch for the adoption of such super surveillance by Western governments.
It should be noted now, however, that in all the talk below about China's unrolling of massive networks of surveillance cameras, the United Kingdom still leads the world with one surveillance camera for nearly every 14 people.
From the New York Times :
At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.
Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.
Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.
These sort of personal information-rich ID cards were once referred to as "life cards", meaning that details of a person's entire life would be encoded into a chip on the card. Eventually the ID chip will move from the card to the human wrist, first as a bracelet, or ring, and then actually implanted under the flesh. To not have one of your own, will be to not officially exist.
Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime.
The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.
Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.
“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.
Once again, the spectre of 'terror threats' is used as the all-purpose excuse to eventually place an entire population under life-time monitoring, and behavioural analysis and assessment :
...rising fears of terrorism have lessened public hostility to surveillance cameras in the West. This has been particularly true in Britain, where the police already install the cameras widely on lamp poles and in subway stations and are developing face recognition software as well.
New York police announced last month that they would install more than 100 security cameras to monitor license plates in Lower Manhattan by the end of the year. Police officials also said they hoped to obtain financing to establish links to 3,000 public and private cameras in the area by the end of next year; no decision has been made on whether face recognition technology has become reliable enough to use without the risk of false arrests.
Shenzhen already has 180,000 indoor and outdoor closed-circuit television cameras owned by businesses and government agencies, and the police will have the right to link them on request into the same system as the 20,000 police cameras, according to China Public Security.
How the regional Chinese government keeps track of its police paves the way for how the central government will eventually keep track of all citizens, and visitors :
Every police officer in Shenzhen now carries global positioning satellite equipment on his or her belt. This allows senior police officers to direct their movements on large, high-resolution maps of the city that China Public Security has produced using software that runs on the Microsoft Windows operating system.
Western security experts have suspected for several years that Chinese security agencies could track individuals based on the location of their cellphones, and the Shenzhen police tracking system confirms this.
When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. Mr. Huang used a real-time connection to local police dispatchers’ computers to show a detailed computer map of a Shenzhen district and the precise location of each of the 92 patrolling officers, represented by caricatures of officers in blue uniforms and the routes they had traveled in the last hour.
All Chinese citizens are required to carry national identity cards with very simple computer chips embedded, providing little more than the citizen’s name and date of birth. Since imperial times, a principal technique of social control has been for local government agencies to keep detailed records on every resident.
What worked in China will become the reality of all those living in the supposedly 'free' West.
That there is so little opposition to an ultra-surveillance state, as personified by the participation of hundreds of millions of people on social network sites, like MySpace and Facebook, who are easily encouraged to share the most intimate details of their lives, their thoughts, emotions and spending habits, surely would have surprised the likes of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
Both authors, along with thousands more since the 1960s, expected the general public would mount widespread resistance and dissent against ultra-surveillance. They couldn't have been more wrong.
As long as it ultra-surveillance is sold to us as being more convenient, and fun, and working to keep us safe from 'terror', we seem to all but welcome the integration of our privacy and governments into a cohesive whole.
That so many seem to take comfort from the presence of surveillance cameras in particular, citing the reassuring feeling that "someone is watching over me", seems almost more science fiction than the Big Brother dystopias of Huxley, Orwell and Philip K Dick.
When our every movement through a city, or across a country, can be tracked and logged via GPS and surveillance cameras, and through digital checkpoints (where your ID chip is auto-scanned through your wallet, or clothing), and the majority seemed to have already made peace with the reality that every phone call, e-mail and text message they send and receive is being monitored, how long then before we gladly welcome surveillance cameras into our homes? Into the private sanctum of our bedrooms and even our bathrooms?
The ultimate end game for ultra-surveillance would be constant monitoring from within our minds, a log of every thought and emotion, a record of every dream.
But we would be most likely be as happy, or non-resistant, to that invasion of privacy as well. Once we got used to it. Once we were thoroughly sold on the benefits, and all the reasons why it would be fun to get brain chip.
As long as we get the craving reassurance that we are not doing anything wrong, or thinking anything wrong, with the proof being that we are never detained, or officially questioned, we seem to harbour no mass resistance to the end of privacy.
We barely even hear the pro-surveillance state mantra, "If you've done nothing wrong, then you've got nothing to hide" anymore.
It is no longer needed. That mantra has become a cliche.
As cliched as the idea that privacy, and freedom, is the reward for not breaking the law.
There is no reward anymore.
Just a slight lessening of suspicion.
