A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities | Hacker News Reader

A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities

nytimes.com

49 pointsaxiomdata3168 comments

Crime in China used to be really bad, years ago. I recall one visit as a teen, some 15 years ago, where someone attempted to snatch my mother’s purse as she was riding on a bike, in broad daylight in a major city. In the last five years, such incidents seem to be significantly rarer; while I don’t have crime stats handy, I can definitely say that I haven’t worried about crime.

The thing is, everyone already expects to be watched in public. The government in this sense is really just living up to the expectation.

To the average citizen, they can ascribe lower crime rates to the surveillance program, which makes them feel safer. Fitting with the cultural inclination towards societal stability and harmony, surveillance does not seem out of place or unusual in public for folks.

Is it a crime to protest in the streets? I wonder if the Hong Kong citizens would feel safer for a surveillance net across their city.

What is authoritarian for the goose is authoritarian for the gander. Makes me wonder where this kind of thing is at in the US now.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/persistent-surve...

It's not okay just because America does it to a limited extent in a miniature percentage of land. It's actually a false equivalence.

I think I am saying it's negative in both nations and ok in neither - the percentage of land monitored is much less a question than any percentage. Given reported uses of Ring, as well as facial recognition in police bodycams we have to question wether and how the techniques and technologies of big brother should be limited in free societies.

> It's not okay just because America does it to a limited extent in a miniature percentage of land. It's actually a false equivalence.

America does not do it to a limited extent. America spies all the western world. Everything which goes on internet is watched by NSA and CIA.

I can't speak for America directly but I hear it's trending too: here in the old western world (EU), we gladly install cameras and microphones in our homes, down to the bedroom, all by ourselves.

To think that 50 years from now, people who grew with such a permanent record on them — an ever-lens to watch and re-watch their every move, to frame the world anew most likely — will not be willing to accept current levels of Chinese State surveillance, is either naively cute or idealistic delusion. IMHO.

Another way of saying this, looking backward: you gotta admit this crazy idea of lighting fires inside ships and inviting lightning itself in our homes were ridiculous ideas (before), dangerous behavior (during), totally obvious (retrospectively). It's called a paradigm change.

I feel the level of exposure we have to tracking/recording sensors (cams, mics, gps, etc) is bound to provoke such a shift. Probably in the name of efficiency (for the good part), in fear of some terror (for the bad), I just hope we'll be top-notch on security and privacy (lest it gets ugly before it gets better).

The US Government doesn't need persistent surveillance. Facebook, Amazon and Google have already built the surveillance network for them, for free:

One of Amazon’s most significant business contracts, which has largely been kept hidden from the public since it was finalized in October 2013, was a $600 million deal for Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build a private computing cloud for the 17 American intelligence agencies known collectively as the “intelligence community” (IC).

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/13/amzn-j13.html

Companies would be given new authority to monitor their users -- on their own systems as well as those of any other entity -- and then, in order to get immunity from virtually all existing surveillance laws, they would be encouraged to share vaguely defined “cyber threat indicators” with the government. This could be anything from email content, to passwords, IP addresses, or personal information associated with an account. The language of the bill is written to encourage companies to share liberally and include as many personal details as possible.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/249521-ci...

Documents released alongside security journalist Glenn Greenwald’s new book, “No Place To Hide,” reveal the NSA and FBI partnership, in which the two agencies developed techniques for exploiting Facebook chats, capturing private photos, collecting IP addresses, and gathering private profile data.

According to the slides below, the agencies’ goal for such collection was to capture “a very rich source of information on targets,” including “personal details, ‘pattern of life,’ connections to associates, [and] media.”

https://venturebeat.com/2014/05/15/how-the-nsa-fbi-made-face...

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