What It’s Like to Live in a Surveillance State
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I eventually found a map of China showing state borders. Xinjiang and Tibet are a massive portion of China, and also give China border access to many countries. Normal state imperatives to keep territory aside, these are comparatively important territories for China's global influence.
I think it's simply that the chinese gov't relies on maintaining a brand of virtually absolute control. Even publicly entertaining the idea of letting territories go would be a strong signal for weakness.
edit: maybe that's what you already implied by "Normal state imperatives"
Technically, the Chinese Civil War never ended. There was no signing of a peace treaty, and all the way through the 90s you had military standoff’s between Taiwan and the Mainland, i.e. the two militaries shot at each other. The relationship between the mainland and Taiwan is legally analogous to the one between North and South Korea.
The main reason mainland China can’t recognize Taiwan is because of the huge geopolitical and legal consequences. A pillar of US-China relations is the One China Policy. Recognizing Taiwan would throw that into flux.
If China recognized Taiwan as Taiwan, or as the Republic of China, there are tons of uncomfortable questions. Would Taiwan be admitted into the UN? Could Taiwan compete in sporting events under a Republic of China flag, or would you continue calling it Chinese Taipei.
There’s also Taiwanese domestic politics. Depending on the year, some Taiwanese parties still advocate for reconciliation, and perhaps eventual reunification with the mainland.
Add to the fact that China is currently led by a leader not afraid to pull the nationalism lever, and you have a host of reasons why recognition of Taiwan is a nonstarter.
Only China believes in or even really cares about the One China Policy. The US, along with much of the rest of the world, recognizes Taiwan as a de-facto independent state. That might throw China into flux, but everyone else would just be happy that they can drop the pretense.
I also challenge you on whether there’s de-facto recognition of Taiwan. Diplomatic contacts are limited, and there’s no formal US embassy in Taiwan. Taiwan doesn’t get a vote in any UN body.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsinkable_aircraft_carrier
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Chain_Strategy
But, by such imperatives I meant states normally won't give up so much as an inch of territory if they can help it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsinkable_aircraft_carrier
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Chain_Strategy
For a paralle, look at how vexed the US was by Cuba's changing sides in the cold war. And in that scenario the US enjoyed regional naval dominance, the inverse of today's situation in the pacific.
Beyond US rivalry, it is better to have such an island under state control for regional naval advantages as well.
And to answer your edit by such imperatives I meant states normally won't give up so much as an inch of territory if they can help it.
Interestingly I think Taiwan (which also sees itself it be at heart still part of China) actually lays claim to Tibet too.
I didn't mean that was the only reason that China is interested in Taiwan. I was trying to contextualize it for American readers.
The TL;DR is that Xinjiang and Tibet both serve important national security purposes.
Interesting parallels to the US attacks and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. We go from being liberators (in our minds) to occupiers of ungrateful nations. And we have to stick around so long as people resist, because politically people hate to "lose".
Combine that with the lucrative pay for the workers and whatever... It's a bit like trying to convince coal miners to stop working because of global warming, but instead make coal mining a very cushy job with 3x the pay.
However, if we're afraid to do anything for fear of bad consequences, we could as well do nothing. I don't think that there is any way to know for sure. All we know is that right now, we do see here, a possibility for bad consequences to happen. Real-life situations are not as black and white as a call from Kim Jong Un asking us to nuke the world. We aren't smarter than the guys telling us to use the talents we have to serve their purpose. The only thing I could think of so far is to not depend on their pay or their recognition or personal fame.
1, It makes a lot of money for me, and I'm a happy person
2, I spend the money I earned to buy products and services, contributing to the global economy.
The only way to resist is to watch the watchers.
Keep a camera/phone on you at all times. Distribute secret cameras near Govt buildings.
wat?
Ideally, the press would do this job as in the link below.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10141790...
It's a good idea not just for civic pride, but for personal safety and liability--the same reason drivers use dash cams.
"Videre: the secretive group on a mission to film human-rights abuses"
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/videre
"Hidden Cameras Film Injustice in Dangerous Places"
https://www.ted.com/talks/oren_yakobovich_hidden_cameras_tha...
Google and Facebook can’t withstand a sustained disruption of their workforce, which is why they spend so much time paying lip service to social issues. They have to create a constant illusion of concern for rights and justice to prevent their employees from actually demanding them.
The article is talking about the extensive surveillance of an authoritarian government that heads a planned economy. What does it have to do with capitalism?
From what I can tell China keeps most of its oppression inside its borders, at least compared to the US.
Look up forced labor in immigrant prisons, or the 1,000,000 current cholera cases in Yemen / estimated 7,000,000 victims of famine coming soon — the US is actively working to expand that humanitarian disaster as you read this.
Also there are 100,000’s of legal immigrants we’re planning to send back to failed economies and war zones. All of that is happening today. If you go back a decade for more context, you can add torturing civilians to death, establishing narco states, etc, etc.
I was going to add “funding terrorism” to my list of past events, but I just remembered we’re actually in the middle of active military strikes that are meant to help Al Qaeda ground forces.
All of these violations of basic human rights were very profitable to campaign donors.
To make it worse, from what I can tell, some members of our congress think it is appropriate to let the president replace the head of the FBI with a yes-man specifically to block an investigation into the president’s ties with organized crime and foreign powers. That will give him some degree of legal impunity, and also control of a massive domestic surveillance apparatus (much of which consists of commercial entities).
How did this happen? Trump hired a foreign-owned company (Cambridge Analytica) to use the tools of surveillance capitalism to squeak through the electoral college with a record-low percentage of the popular vote.
Sorry for the long-winded answer, but that roughly summarizes the state of survelliance capitalism in 2018, and what it has to do with the article.
The whole culture depends on pampering and aggrandizing tech workers as individual heroes for whom collective action would only hold them back. You have to overthrow the entire mainstream worldview about employment in tech before you can get a foothold on that front.
What about Labor Disorganization. Simply stop working in "the industry". Simply stop accepting ego-stroking emails from recruiters. Simply stop playing their shitty game. Quit, quit, quit.
Stop buying new shit. Pay down your debts. Get away from consumption & move towards genuine ownership of the means of our own production.
Use some fucking bitcoins and stop paying taxes to a corrupt and oppressive regime.
1. don't work for companies that surveil or support surveillance and don't hire, associate, converse, or lend aid to anyone who has worked for those companies
2. don't work for companies that produce weapons that will be used against civilians and don't hire, associate, converse, or lend aid to anyone who has worked for those companies
3. don't pay taxes to a government that treats you like a prisoner, and don't hire, associate, converse, or lend aid to anyone who has worked for that government in an intelligence organization, surveillance organization, or police organization
4. organize with your neighbors and coworkers to work within the political system to prevent abuses (we have already failed this option in the USA)
5. sabotage internet infrastructure of companies and governments wherever possible
6. revolution
none of these options are palatable, and none should be jumped into rashly. but do not assume that they are not necessary.
step 4 requires some minimal effort, and more people are getting there. finishing step 3 requires the confidence of having enough friends-- which is rapidly approaching for many people, tbqh.
the other steps are for people more serious about making rapid change, and frankly i don't think most people are there yet-- but they would be if they thought they had friends who were. for now, it's step 4.
You probably meant "how do we stop building it?" Which is a bit of an easy question, just stop building surveillance systems.
The hard part is how do we, as hackers, accept that most of our fellows will gladly do this for pay. Because it was fun to pretend they cared and be part of the subculture, but they never actually did.
That's a multipronged task.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/makeu...
Looking at the entire world, I feel it's shameful that more time and effort is spent on building better surveillance and control systems than decentralized and privacy protecting (to the extent possible) systems. It's as if all our freedoms are slipping by, leaving either an illusion of having freedoms with no practical use or freedoms curbed by governments with no concern about the well being of people or the government's reputation.
We've known about China and North Korea for a long time. Then we came to know about Five Eyes and Fourteen Eyes. It worries me that we may have One Hundred and Fifty Eyes in the next few decades (just a rough count of all countries minus a small percentage).
Each feeds into the other. Political regimes use lies about (often invented) outsider groups to justify their growing power. And then true believers and overzealous apparatchiks begin harassing members of that group, often using those very tools, which leads to a growing perception that yes these people who are receiving international calls are clearly terrorists or terrorist supporters, who need to be surveilled. Etc.
the line between a surveillance state and an oppressive political state doesn't exist, as surveillance is oppressive-- but it's not the only form of oppression. the article seems to forget that oppression has many effectors. it is too convenient of a slip.
the political oppression of the uighurs is, as the article notes, uniquely chinese-- but these things could have easily happened without any real surveillance whatsoever.
harassing minorities for arbitrary reasons doesn't need the evidence that surveillance can provide-- malice is not based on evidence to begin with.
as far as the chinese idea of han ethnic supremacy: it isn't new. in fact, it's old. the leaders' chinese vision of their country is that of a han chinese monoculture with a very particular apoliticism (they wrap passivity in many different terms). i was about to say that they aren't genocidal yet, but i dunno if that's really true; they have done quite a number on tibet, but my knowledge of the situation is very shallow.
Also, although there may be some China bashing in the background, I don't see anything about the US being better. And it doesn't take much imagination to see how such total surveillance is becoming normalized here.
There is a surprising amount of people that think of China as the bad communist state and the US as the superior nation. Even here on HN where I usually would expect the average commenter to have even some basic education.
It is the same population, I suspect, that is totally oblivious of the state of surveillance in their country and how this actually is bad and won't stop crime of any sort.
There is a lot bad going on in the US, but China is ten or a hundred times worse. For instance, the web is massively censored, and political dissidents get sent to jail by the hundreds or thousands.
Furthermore, in the US we still have enough freedom of speech that we can criticize surveillance at places like HN, and even organize efforts to resist it, even political campaigns, but in China that is completely impossible.
It seems to me that if people were to come to believe that things are as hopeless in the US as in China, then they would give up all efforts at resistance. I think that would be a terrible mistake.
But they claim that there's no substantive surveillance until some human queries that data. Arguably, even AI processing would not be considered to be surveillance.
And sure, they claim that they're not looking at traffic between US citizens. However, there's the SOD program:[0]
> The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.
> Today, much of the SOD's work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked "Law Enforcement Sensitive," a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.
> "Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function," a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD's involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use "normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD." DEA even has a history of SOD online.[1]
That is, parallel construction. And given the secrecy about SOD-based evidence, we have no idea how widely it's used. Potentially, the full power of the NSA could be turned against anything that federal investigators consider as legitimate targets.
I could go on at length. And I won't. But consider the situation at the Mexican border. Consider surveillance around presidential conventions, WTO meetings, etc. Consider reports about Stingray units cited near USCIS offices. And those surveillance aircraft circling over areas of interest.
Sure, things aren't "as hopeless in the US as in China", but they're getting there in some ways. And all it would take is some serious crisis and drama, real or manufactured.
0) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod/exclusive-u-s-dir...
1) https://www.deamuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/042215-...
I mean honestly:
- Use Android? Chances are you're being watched by Google.
- Facebook tracks literally hundreds of millions.
- Post on HN? Guess what, you can't delete your posts after a while. Advances in stylometry in addition to more and more data being on the internet will mean your identity on here will be compromised eventually.
---
However, using Android allows Google to have literally minute-by-minute traffic updates which allows our cars to move more efficiently.
Facebook's tracking of millions may aid in allowing smaller organizations to connect in a more programmatic way.
HN well, obviously is allowing you to read this now.
Things like privacy were forfeit the minute we gained the technology. If people have problems with these technologies being used in bad ways, we should punish the people using the technologies in such a bad way. The spooky "surveillance state" is a red herring imo.
Sorry, not down with your logic one bit.
Take the long view. I guarantee that the people collecting the data do.
I don't think we'll be able to stop the surveillance state, but we should push for the right legal and judicial culture.
There is no Rule of Law.
But you may be right about trying to stop the surveillance monster... perhaps if you don't mind it we can put the cameras in your bedroom first.
And then you call me complacent for not wanting fight against surveillance.
So, do you believe that political fights are worth it or not? Make up your mind and stop bringing bedroom stuff into the discussion.
I do not. They are a sideshow. Our systems have already been coopted by powerful, monied interests with armed guards.
Recent 702 vote made it perfectly fucking clear who's in charge (if it wasn't already clear from "this is how we know we're a family") and whose opinion matters.
It wouldn't be very nice of me to assume you're ignorant (and I don't, tbh), but I do find it frustrating that people feel there is room for returning to an imagined better place, where authority wasn't corrupt. In history, it seems to me, the news wasn't as thorough and the well-connected just as oppressive.
The googlefaces hire all sorts of behavioural scientists, paychologists, statisticians to get people more addicted to their ecosystem, spend millions on lobbying to bend the laws and generally do whatever they want.
People caring about this topic waste their time explaining for the millionth time why surveillance is bad to every innocent soul who bent their mind into a pretzel coming up with excuses for surveillance and spyware.
1) Ban surveillance. Not going to happen, if what you just stated is to be believed.
2) Complain about it.
3) Try to enact means to punish abusers.
Maybe that's because you don't actually SEE the surveillance.
Surely you close the door when you try on clothes at a mall, or when you use a toilet?
You're making claims that because we interact on the web we should not expect any safety. That's fine... but what about those of us who specifically don't use Google, Facebook, etc... we are STILL surveilled, constantly. The US Gov't is STILL trying to break encryption (for everybody) in order to surveil more completely.
Privacy is forfeit by participation in these types of forums (centrally administered), but not all forums are like these.
As distributed networks continue to develop, the arguments you've used to advocate a carelessness about your post-privacy lifestyle will no longer be valid. But the state apparatus and oppressive outcomes that type of intellectual laziness enables/encourages will persist.