Ecuador’s system, called ECU-911, was largely made by two Chinese companies, the state-controlled C.E.I.E.C. and Huawei
A topic of intense ongoing interest is following the progress of China's massive social engineering experient in behavior and mind control. If the China experiment in building and implementing its deep surveillance state succeeds, it could represent the ultimate fate of most humans for a very long time, maybe forever. The most recent step discussed here in building an enduring behavior- and thought control-based tyranny, was China's recent introduction of a phone app, Study the Great Nation, that forces millions of people to study Chinese President Xi Jingping's version of socialism and his own greatness. The prior discussion included this:
Authoritarians all over the world would love to have this level of surveillance and control. In time, this model of society could be the fate of about 99.99% of humanity.It was just a matter of time before other countries picked up on China's experiment in absolute, unassailable tyranny. The New York Times reports:
QUITO, Ecuador — The squat gray building in Ecuador’s capital commands a sweeping view of the city’s sparkling sprawl, from the high-rises at the base of the Andean valley to the pastel neighborhoods that spill up its mountainsides.
The police who work inside are looking elsewhere. They spend their days poring over computer screens, watching footage that comes in from 4,300 cameras across the country.
The high-powered cameras send what they see to 16 monitoring centers in Ecuador that employ more than 3,000 people. Armed with joysticks, the police control the cameras and scan the streets for drug deals, muggings and murders. If they spy something, they zoom in.
This voyeur’s paradise is made with technology from what is fast becoming the global capital of surveillance: China. Ecuador’s system, which was installed beginning in 2011, is a basic version of a program of computerized controls that Beijing has spent billions to build out over a decade of technological progress. According to Ecuador’s government, these cameras feed footage to the police for manual review.
But a New York Times investigation found that the footage also goes to the country’s feared domestic intelligence agency, which under the previous president, Rafael Correa, had a lengthy track record of following, intimidating and attacking political opponents. Even as a new administration under President Lenín Moreno investigates the agency’s abuses, the group still gets the videos.
Under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has vastly expanded domestic surveillance, fueling a new generation of companies that make sophisticated technology at ever lower prices. A global infrastructure initiative is spreading that technology even further.
Ecuador shows how technology built for China’s political system is now being applied — and sometimes abused — by other governments. Today, 18 countries — including Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates and Germany — are using Chinese-made intelligent monitoring systems, and 36 have received training in topics like “public opinion guidance,” which is typically a euphemism for censorship, according to an October report from Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group.
With China’s surveillance know-how and equipment now flowing to the world, critics warn that it could help underpin a future of tech-driven authoritarianism, potentially leading to a loss of privacy on an industrial scale. Often described as public security systems, the technologies have darker potential uses as tools of political repression.
“They’re selling this as the future of governance; the future will be all about controlling the masses through technology,” Adrian Shahbaz, research director at Freedom House, said of China’s new tech exports.
Right now, personal freedom is under severe attack throughout much of the world, including in America. Authoritarians are on the rise. Democracies are under pressure to be more authoritarian. If China's experiment in governance based on surveillance and behavior and mind control succeeds, the human species looks destined to be enslaved. We may be living in the dark twilight of personal freedom with the dawn of a new, harsh age awaiting.
B&B orig: 4/25/19
No comments:
Post a Comment