In China, a high-tech plan to track people
China plans the world's largest effort to meld the latest computer technology with police work.
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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.
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The line about this system helping "the Communist Party retain power" is true but a diversion.
That is, the relevant technologies - RFID (Radio-frequency identification)*, facial recognition software linked CCTV, and data mining - find their natural, synergistic expression within a surveillance platform. This platform will be robustly deployed all over the world, legal formalities in the democracies will create only minor obstacles.
In the United States and other countries in the rhetorically free world these systems will be marketed as anti-crime tools, as in the PRC, but will also enter - are entering - our lives via seduction.
Your RFID passport, marketed as an anti-terror countermeasure, enables movement tracking. Your RFID equipped debit/credit card, your EZ-PASS module, your GPS interlocking cell phone, etc...all are sold as conveniences and in fact, do make many actions simpler, faster, safer. But they are also building blocks, raw material of an observation infrastructure.
Of course, these uses are clearly identified when we're talking about China, which is flagged as l'état répressif.
Note this paragraph, from deeper in the article:
<snip>
Large-scale surveillance in China is more threatening than surveillance in Britain, they said when told of Shenzhen's plans. "I don't think they are remotely comparable, and even in Britain it's quite controversial," said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel of Human Rights Watch in New York. China has fewer limits on police power, fewer restrictions on how government agencies use the information they gather and fewer legal protections for those suspected of crime, she noted.
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We're safe, the story goes, because of all the 'protections' we enjoy. These protections, as should be clear by now, are merely a speed bump.
We are living in a dystopian science fiction novel but are reluctant to grab the thought by the throat and throttle the truth out of it.
.d.
* RFID
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rfid>