Orwell, digital prisons and the double-edged sword of surveillance

[AdamG]

Chinese authorities have begun deploying a new surveillance tool: "gait recognition" software that uses people's body shapes and how they walk to identify them, even when their faces are hidden from cameras.

Already used by police on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, "gait recognition" is part of a push across China to develop artificial-intelligence and data-driven surveillance that is raising concern about how far the technology will go.

Huang Yongzhen, the CEO of Watrix, said that its system can identify people from up to 50 meters (165 feet) away, even with their back turned or face covered. This can fill a gap in facial recognition, which needs close-up, high-resolution images of a person's face to work.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wi...-walk-58988215

[AdamG]

Facial recognition software is already prevalent in a lot of mainstream technology products. You may even use a few of them, like Facebook photo tagging, Snapchat or Instagram face filters, or the iPhone’s Face ID, which uses facial recognition to unlock the phone.

Future uses of the technology may not be so harmless.

Microsoft President Brad Smith laid out a frightening scenario in which facial recognition technology, if left unchecked, could totally change the way we live and what privacy people are able to retain, if any.

“It potentially means every time you walk into a store, a retailer knows when you were in there last, what good you picked out, what you purchased,” he said at Web Summit, a tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, on Wednesday. “I think even that frankly pales in comparison to what it could do to relationships between individuals and the state.”

Smith went on to describe what sounds like a total doomsday scenario for facial recognition technology, a scenario on par with the idea that automation will replace all jobs, or Elon Musk’s projected AI apocalypse.

https://www.recode.net/2018/11/7/180...air-web-summit

[AdamG]

BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing’s municipal government will assign citizens and firms “personal trustworthiness points” by 2021, state media reported on Tuesday, pioneering China’s controversial plan for a “social credit” system to monitor citizens and businesses.

The social credit system, which is being built on the principle of “once untrustworthy, always restricted”, will encourage government bodies to share more information about individual and business misdeeds in order to coordinate punishments and rewards.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKCN1NP0FT

[AdamG]

Millions of Chinese nationals have been blocked from booking flights or trains as Beijing seeks to implement its controversial “social credit” system, which allows the government to closely monitor and judge each of its 1.3 billion citizens based on their behaviour and activity.

The system, to be rolled out by 2020, aims to make it “difficult to move” for those deemed “untrustworthy”, according to a detailed plan published by the government this week.

It will be used to reward or punish people and organisations for “trustworthiness” across a range of measures.

A key part of the plan not only involves blacklisting people with low social credibility scores, but also “publicly disclosing the records of enterprises and individuals’ untrustworthiness on a regular basis”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a8646316.html

[AdamG]

Uninvited, more than one million Han Chinese people have reportedly moved into the homes of Uighur Muslim families to report on whether they display Islamic or unpatriotic beliefs.

Sent to homes in Xinjiang province by the Chinese government, American anthropologist Darren Byler said they were tasked with watching for signs that their hosts’ attachment to Islam might be “extreme”.

The informants, who describe themselves as "relatives" of the families they are staying with, are said to have received specific instructions on how to get them to let their guard down.

As devout Muslims would refuse cigarettes and alcohol. this is seen as one way of finding out whether they were extreme.

“Had a Uighur host just greeted a neighbour in Arabic with the words ‘Assalamu Alaykum’? That would need to go in the notebook,” said Dr Byler, in research published by Asia Society's Centre on US-China Relations. “Was that a copy of the Quran in the home? Was anyone praying on Friday or fasting during Ramadan? Was a little sister’s dress too long or a little brother’s beard irregular?”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a8648561.html

[Bill Moore]

It starts with the Muslims because they can semi-credibly use the threat of Islamic Extremists as justification for the population control measures. Note the minimal backlash from world leaders outside reports in UK journals. However, this is should be a wake up call for what is coming next, in fact it has already started with their online monitoring and ongoing assessments to their citizens resulting in a social rating based on how well they conform to "correct thinking." The dictator Xi is scared to death of internal unrest, and is taking extreme measures to suppress it. After the Uighurs it will be Hong Kong, University campuses will become indoctrination centers (not unlike the U.S.), etc.. The technologies and tactics that enable this oppression will be exported to other countries that seek similar control. Most likely to countries where Xi has bought off the leaders and needs them to stay in power so he can exploit the country for economic gain.

We ignored this threat too long, it is a form of political extremism not unlike Nazism, or Maoism enabled by state controlled capitalism. The oppression of the Muslims was the first wave, we're watching the second wave of oppression build (social credit system), and we need to anticipate what the third wave will be.

[AdamG]

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - A user of Amazon’s (AMZN.O) Alexa voice assistant in Germany got access to more than a thousand recordings from another user because of “a human error” by the company. The customer had asked to listen back to recordings of his own activities made by Alexa but he was also able to access 1,700 audio files from a stranger when Amazon sent him a link, German trade publication c’t reported.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a...-idUSKCN1OJ15J