Comment by vorg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vorg | Hacker News Reader

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Countries such as the US and Australia already implement much of what the article describes: credit rating, criminal record, financial assets, standarized test scores, educational and employment records, residential history, searchable online presence, with the greatest weighting given to financial assets of course because how much money someone has trumps all.

The main differences with the announced Chinese plan are:

* it will aggregate many various ratings and makes them available publicly on all citizens, something that's done only privately for some residents in the US

* it extends the system to social criteria, something only done privately through sports clubs, religious groups, etc in the US, and dilutes the importance of a person's financial assets in calculating a person's "worth"

* it's using technology from the ground up, intead of slowly automating a paper-based system that's already been developed over the years

So the main differences are those of degree.

The social criteria is questionable. If the Federal Government cares, do you not think they can dredge your social media interactions? Do you not think that they do this for presidential candidates and those applying for top brass positions? Do you think they don't have numerical indicators to prioritize and sort the hundreds of millions of profiles they have on American citizens? They very near most certainly do.

Where do you imagine that this system is applied? What China is working on is more akin to credit ratings in that it is openly part of decision making processes for non-shadowy actors. The NSA might have such a system internally but there's not evidence to suggest it would affect your life in any way (if you are a US citizen inside the US).

Definitely the flags and scoring systems the US has in place are not part of a public conversation in the United States, are not used by US employers (for example) during job applications, etc. I agree that this makes the system very different in kind despite similarities in form.

I imagine that the US currently uses this to prioritize domestic investigations for the FBI and law enforcement.

I imagine that the US currently uses this during the process of vetting membership to the intelligence community, other sensitive positions, political leadership (I forget which NSA whistleblower mentioned the targeted surveillance of then president-prospect Obama), and for security clearances.

I imagine that the US currently uses this to find and disrupt politically minded groups and to deal with narrative challenges inside the United States.

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