The article says there are four times as many cameras in China than in the US. This means approximately the same number of cameras per citizen. Where is the NYT article about the US' dystopian dreams?
At least in the USA, citizens can openly criticize and publish their government's corruption and failings and concerns about the surveillance state and abuses of power. Americans can do this without fear of unjust incarceration or worse. And the USA maintains, with all its flaws, a democratic process which requires its politicians to answer to the public and risk not being (re)elected.
China doesn't have (and never really had?) these features. I think this is important. I write this as a non-American and one who often criticizes American policy.
>At least in the USA, citizens can openly criticize and publish their government's corruption and failings and concerns about the surveillance state and abuses of power. Americans can do this without fear of unjust incarceration or worse.
Snowden has certainly paid a price for his leaks. However, the Washington Post, New York Times, and others were not punished for re-publishing or discussing the content of these leaks. Historically, American papers have successfully defended their right to do so in court (the Pentagon Papers, Watergate). Leakers also do often maintain anonymity, obtain legal protection, or receive pardons when their leaks appear to serve the public interest (Daniel Ellsberg, Deep Throat, Manning). The situation in China for newspapers, journalists, and sources is far worse.
Manning, by the way, leaked an enormous unredacted cache of documents pertaining to active, ongoing military operations. This leak very likely resulted in the deaths of anti-Taliban and anti-Islamist informants and cooperators. Not all leaks are good at all times for all people, and some confidentiality rules exist for good reason.
It's never been otherwise. It's returned to a hard dictatorship from a soft dictatorship, and appears to be shifting from authoritarian to totalitarian. I'm not sure if Mao's rule is properly termed 'totalitarian'.
Is per capita the right way to rank this? A camera covers an area. The same picture can have 1 person it or 10000 people in it.
If you're the only person on a route, and I have one camera at a point on that route.. is that really the same as 100 people on a route, with 100 cameras along that same route? I would say not. In the 2nd instance, I've taken 100 pictures of you (and 99 other people), and know in more detail what you're doing.
US and China have a similar land area.. so we can assume in China you're caught on camera more frequently. I say assume, because we don't know how much area these cameras on covering--which is the more important stat. There's a big difference between a wide area camera, and a security camera outside an entrance pointed at the ground.
Correct. In the US, subway stations and buses, elevators, convenience stores etc. have video cameras. Electronic tolling gantries have been used to track vehicles. Red light cameras are everywhere. I haven't seen a backlash.
It's always interesting to see a reference to a different society as a pedagogical tool to learn about something you might not like. The key step though is to see your own life from an outside perspective, i.e. introspection, which is a very lacking skill indeed.
" elevators, convenience stores etc. Red light cameras are everywhere. I haven't seen a backlash."
Because those cameras are not used to track you, nor are you identified in those videos, nor is that data generally shared with anyone, and in most cases not the government.
In some areas, i.e. highways in LA, they do track license plates, and there is backlash and at least concern.
A 'timed security camera' is barely related to the idea of 'ubiquitous cameras that identify you and track your movements in a government DB and input into a social credit score' a system I might add citizens have no recourse to alter.
> Because those cameras are not used to track you, nor are you identified in those videos, nor is that data generally shared with anyone, and in most cases not the government.
>>> " elevators, convenience stores etc. Red light cameras are everywhere. I haven't seen a backlash."
>> Because those cameras are not used to track you, nor are you identified in those videos, nor is that data generally shared with anyone, and in most cases not the government.
> Not yet.
That an ominous-sounding, yet totally empty and meaningless response. Most of those cameras are privately owned and operated, and would be incredibly difficult integrate into a centralized state surveillance system. We're mostly talking systems you can buy yourself at Costco:
The vast majority of cameras in the US aren't feeding centralized recording/storage/analysis/monitoring centers. The $90 1080p cameras in your local 7-11 are probably feeding a box with a few 3TB HDDs in it on a shelf in the back room. Quite the opposite in China.
I have attended meetings discussing IoT and at one, the observation was made many of the cameras are deployed by private individuals, not the state. Private individuals want to surveil their own surroundings.
I can't explain why, I don't live in China. But I do notice many buildings in the cities I visit have thick strong window bars even up above the 5th floor. Maybe there is a strong concern about local petty crime?
I certainly don't disagree there is state surveillance, but I think you should be wary of assuming all devices sold in China as IoT web connected cameras are state cameras.
I suppose that strong bar on 5th floor may be a means to keep people inside, not prevent invasion from outside.
That is, it might be a safety measure preventing falling from a window. E.g. windows in my apartment used to have state-mandated bars because my daughter was small, and had to be prevented from falling from a window.
I am amused that such statement is even possible, as if, someone just lost their common sense and start to reason China in a way that is exactly opposite of what they believed to be common sense.
To be fair, I spent first 24 years of my life in China. Your idea were never appeared in any form of discussion when I was there. I did not even fancied about such explanation.
All in all, I assume you want to have a reasonable discussion.
To your point, no, those bars are not for preventing staff falling.
I'm not assuming that - there are undoubtedly a huge number of privately owned cameras in China, as there are just about anywhere else in the world that people can afford to put 802.3af/PoE cameras stuck somewhere on a wall, fed from one cat5e cable, that cost $65 to $120 a piece. But as for cameras in major public locations with pedestrian traffic, I would bet that a much higher percentage of cameras in China are actually owned/controlled by a government entity than in the US.
Not being able to say in the US right now, I read that in the UK, private cameras are installed for profit and sell a feed to the police.
There are three levels of police in most jurisdictions worldwide: federal state and local. the US is no different, and putting devices on street poles typically demands compliance with planning law, and I suspect in any economy with cameras on light poles or sign posts by roads, its state actors.
The UK is either the most, or the second-most surveilled economy in the world. Not western world, worldwide. Cameras per head of population are increadibly high.
Your faith in 'old glory' is touching. I suspect, its misplaced.
I lack the criminal mind. I've been wondering about this, in HK, Beijing, Jakarta, KL, Sau Paulo, Buenos Aires, unable to work out what he threat risk was that high.
Now I know: the intersection of thief, and rock-climber.
Each camera in China is far more invasive due to how they're used. The government views cameras as the means for total population control. The goal is to process, cross-reference, and store surveillance across the entire country, to know and control every minute of people's lives. Compare to the US, where most cameras do not have facial recognition, are not interconnected, and do not store data long term.
Storing feeds of each camera is got to be expensive. I thought about recording my life. It would be too expensive for me to do surveillance on myself 24/7 and then do analysis on the feeds. And i make more than the median Chinese or american.
The government doesn't need to store the video, just the processed data, such as each person's history of locations, emotional states, interactions, and actions. Analysis is automated and thus scalable to the entire country. The underlying technology improves exponentially, so everyone underestimates the social impact that this will have in a decade.
So you agree storing 24/7 video on a billion people is not practical today. I don’t think processing is practical either. Processed output can be bigger than source depending on what you want to do and doesn’t remove the need to store original data to get value out of it always.
Technology has improved exponentially in the past. No guarantee it will continue. Ram prices are double from a year ago. Gpu prices are also not much better than 2 years ago.
I gave specific examples of processed outputs that are much smaller than source and are trivial to store today. No need to store the source video. For an example of what you can do with location history, see https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
I firmly believe (though in these matters it is hard to prove) that China and the US are in a technological AI war, with the first to largely automate their economy getting the biggest piece of the pie. One needs pervasive surveillance to accomplish economy automation.
I believe stories like these carry a certain propaganda element and are directed behind the scenes. What ultimately sticks is "Don't share your tech with the Chinese or they will use it to build 1984's Orwell. Go work for harmless Silicon Valley instead, so you can make people click on advertisements and get them addicted to your platform.".
If we had access to all the facts (we don't), we could honestly compare the US's surveillance apparatus to the Chinese. I believe that it was the US that started it with the early Echelon systems, forcing the Chinese to step up their game (every time a Chinese spy got caught with these systems, their picture of US capabilities got a bit more clear).
All modern ML is build on old military projects, adversarial images is researched due to the military wanting no mistakes, and all popular tools see investments by DARPA/IARPA. There is just no way to escape the military when working with advanced technology, except for putting on the blinders and pretend that your work/code/tutorials are not being consumed by (foreign) intelligence agencies.
The US government is legit afraid to lose to China, because China seems to care way less about the unfairness and biases presenting itself in IT systems, while the educated US citizens demand fair automated treatment and justification. In the eyes of progress, those are mere hindrances and roadblocks that need clearing first, giving China a head start. The only thing you can do to lessen this drawback, is to publish wide and far that China does not care about ethics in AI, turning it into a PR problem for them.
DeepMind winning at Go would be like Alibaba winning the Superbowl with robots. It was a huge wake up call, and I think it rattled some cages of foreign militaries.
I myself share a lot of information with the US, including KYC data. A lot of US companies try to track every move I make online. Even if I wanted to go 1 month without touching anything Akamai, I could not. Commercialized mass surveillance it not much better than state-led mass surveillance.
It would have been interesting to see how the US would be portrayed if it was not the top dog. Like the US media attacks and publicizes the poor rights of women in countries like Afghanistan as part of the war effort, I wonder what aspects of US culture a country like Afghanistan would attack/deem subhuman.
People willingly & with excitement walk into Amazon Go stores. It's so creepy to me. You can turn your phone off and it still tracks you and everything you buy.
It’s not even close. A false equivalence. Assuming a camera represents a unit of surveillance, then that comparison might hold, but it’s what China actually does with that stuff that makes the difference.
There is always this knee-jerk “What about the US?” every time there is an article like this. If you haven’t lived in China and actually lived within their system, it’s easy to take for granted the freedom Americans have.
I taught in China and showed a YouTube (via VPN) of the Tiananmen Sqaure uprising to a classroom of high school senior journalism students. This was an international school and there wasn’t a single Chinese citizen in the room — a few days later I am called to the principal’s office because they had a visit from MSS about potential “subversive content” being presented in a classroom. This was about 6 years ago. Some of the teachers held clandestine bible study on weekends — the fact that it had to be clandestine should say something. Even the most radical Muslim in the US isn’t going to get arrested for having a religious meeting in his home. Of course if the conversation leads to a conspiracy to commit violence, then of course the authorities are going to be interested. Clandestine Christians in China have never been involved in the planning or execution of violent acts in China — yet they risk arrest by even having an unsanctioned get-together in their homes! In the US, tens of millions practice their religion without government molestation, even “scary” religions, yet in China, a person even talking with their next door neighbor about religion can get them on a list.
If a teacher in the US shows a video of the Kent State protests or plays disparaging videos about Ronald Reagan, the FBI doesn’t show up.
I can walk into any bus station in America and buy a bus ticket to anywhere without being denied because I may have had friends that were anti-capitalist. But in China, you can be denied the right to travel even within China if you are identified as a someone who has associated with anti-CCP elements. Look at Ai Wei Wei — an artist with 24/7 surveillance because he dared make a fuss about the Sichuan earthquake. He has been arrested, detained on multiple occasions, denied a passport and all sort of other indignities for simply making art. And yet in the US, we have stand up comedians that have built hugely successful careers criticizing and even humiliating the government, government officials and government policies. We have protest groups that burn effigies of presidents practically in front of the White House without being sent to a re-education camp, having their kids kicked out of school and/or banishment to the countryside. Try that in Beijing. See what happens when an Occupy protest happens on the streets of Shanghai.
Comparing China to the US is comparing a pigeon to a velociraptor when it comes to this stuff.
But it doesn't seem unreasonable to see present-day China as a potential future state of the USA|Western Europe and want to prevent that. (Not to mention wanting to think about how change might be effected in China. Hearing about what regular Mandarin citizens face is rough enough, and the situation for the Uyghurs is of course worse.)
I wouldn't take the parent's statement as one of moral equivalency. I see it as a reminder to notice similar trends within and not rely so much on exceptionalism or the existing milieu to carry you through without effort, forever. Even Chinese society was at one point perfectly free, even if you have to go back two thousand years.
> If a teacher in the US shows a video of the Kent State protests or plays disparaging videos about Ronald Reagan, the FBI doesn’t show up.
(...) when I got to the airport, the FBI, the CIA, the TSA; they came and intercepted me. All these guys in black suits. And they took me in a back room and started questioning me about the Stokley Carmichael speech that I was listening to. They probably, you know, have some sort of bug, or some sort of tap or something... But, umm... they were very concerned with me listening to this Stokley Carmichael speech from 1967. You know? Forty years ago. So, words that he said forty... now, we have gangsta rappers - we have rappers who talk about shooting other people all the time; killing... but the FBI's not looking for them. They're looking at me because I'm listening to this speech from forty years ago. And it shows you the power of those words, is that they resonate even to now. The FBI is still scared of this man. He doesn't have nearly the same influence over our community as he did then, but yet, they still stopped me at the airport for listening to his speech.
That's not to say it's the same - it's just a reminder that there's danger that surveillance can curb free speech - which curbs involvement - which in turns undermine the processes for democratic change.
> Clandestine Christians in China have never been involved in the planning or execution of violent acts in China
Firstly, the Christian element to the Taiping Rebellion[0] is one reason why the Chinese state is wary of Christianity outside the carefully controlled state form that is permitted. Religion can obviously contribute to social unrest.
Secondly, house churches in China tend to promote the vision of a coming Kingdom of God that will do away with all the rulers of the world. Anywhere else in the world, that is viewed as an entirely mainstream aspect of Christian doctrine. However, the Chinese Communist Party sees this as an attack on their own authority, and so they want Christians to remain within the state church that downplays this doctrine.
With regard to this second point, it is not just Christianity. The same treatment applies for any other sociopolitical movement in China that envisions a future for the country without a place for the established Communist Party in it. It doesn’t matter if Christians are not advocating violence. The mere fact that they even question the everlasting authority of China’s authorities is already offensive enough to get them condemned.
Hi there. I was born in China and have been in here for more than two decades and I'm pretty sure that the reason CCP consider Christian as detrimental is absolutely nothing with Taiping Rebellion.
To understand this, you have to learn that what CCP did from 1950 to 1990 is aiming on sandificate the whole society. They successfully destroyed all tradition local communities under the name of "reform for communism", by killing landlords in rural and taking away fortunes of rich men in cities. Just like what happened to Jews in 1930s, German. People are atomic and not self organized. They only focus on their own interest and no concept of being a member of a local group.
However, Christians are encouraged to build local communities, and holding regularly meetings in Church or someone's home. This is level 0 alert for CCP.
Disclaimer: I don’t consider myself prochinese government, if you think the below statements state otherwise, don’t call me a 50cents party. There are freedom in expressing ones thoughts on solid facts. It’s an insult to people’s rights by labeling them and automatically disregard their opinions.
I think our collective consciousness should be to show the world that a free and open nation is the best form of national structure.
It should not be that someone is doing something not free and open, and then all statements are pinned to say those are bad. That does not help the cause of convincing others to do the good.
I think the sin is on both sides:
The western nations seemingly enjoying freedom and openness should understand why there is a tendency to move to police state. Not to label everything as the givernment is run by evils communists, or some other easy reasoning that deliberately frame the problem outside of its inherent complexity.
The people inside, however, should do the same, understand why people outside are worried about the direction they are heading to.
I totally get the point that this article falls victim of the first sin, where they automatically label what China is doing as bad, and use a title that obviously state that mental judgement.
And what you are saying actually is more correct to identify that what happening in USA is not showing free and open nation is the best national political structure.
But in the end, this probably will be treated as another piece of nonsensical rambling, might even get downvoted.
I have lost faith in mankind’s long term viability on earth for quite some time. And that’s why I fully support Elon and Bezoss endeavor. Not that they are kind or trustworthy human being, but I agree with them, and I believe space is the only space to help humans not explode on this planet.
That crosses into personal attack and breaks the site guideline against insinuating astroturfing without evidence. If you can't post civilly and substantively, especially on divisive topics, we're going to ban you. Please don't do this again.
>Where is the NYT article about the US' dystopian dreams?
Huh? The NYT has endless articles about the dystopian dreams of Trump and the Republican party. Or perhaps you an authoritarian who thinks those dreams are actually a utopia.
I guess I don't understand. Are you saying The New York Times would refuse to publish news or editorials criticizing an element of American culture or governance? Perhaps I am confused, but it seems like that's almost all they ever report.
