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

[AdamG]

A couple of months stale but too good to gloss over.

China's governing Communist Party has proposed removing a clause in the constitution which limits presidencies to two five-year terms - which means President Xi Jinping could remain as leader after the end of his second term in 2023.

The controversial move has ignited discussion on Chinese social media and pushed online government censors into overdrive.

Several key terms have suddenly been subjected to heavy censorship on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like microblog since Sunday.

According to censorship-monitoring websites China Digital Times and Free Weibo, censored phrases include:

I don't agree
migration
emigration
re-election
election term
constitution amendment
constitution rules
proclaiming oneself an emperor
Winnie the Pooh

So what's going on?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-43198404

[AdamG]

Dozens of cities across China are applying an unusual forensic technique to monitor illegal drug use: chemically analysing sewage for traces of drugs, or their telltale metabolites, excreted in urine. One southern city, Zhongshan, a drug hotspot, is also monitoring waste water to evaluate the effectiveness of its drug-reduction programmes, says Li Xiqing, an environmental chemist at Peking University in Beijing who is working with police in these cities.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...egal-drug-use/

Obvious straight lines are obvious. Post yours' below.

[AdamG]

Who needs democracy when you have data?
Here’s how China rules using data, AI, and internet surveillance.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6...you-have-data/

In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in “electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to represent an entire population, responded to questions generated by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed to happen. Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China.

For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia. How do you effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don’t allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral feedback? How do you gather enough information to actually make decisions? And how does a government that doesn’t invite its citizens to participate still engender trust and bend public behavior without putting police on every doorstep?

[AdamG]

IN THE DECADE after the 9/11 attacks, the New York City Police Department moved to put millions of New Yorkers under constant watch. Warning of terrorism threats, the department created a plan to carpet Manhattan’s downtown streets with thousands of cameras and had, by 2008, centralized its video surveillance operations to a single command center. Two years later, the NYPD announced that the command center, known as the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, had integrated cutting-edge video analytics software into select cameras across the city.

Now, thanks to confidential corporate documents and interviews with many of the technologists involved in developing the software, The Intercept and the Investigative Fund have learned that IBM began developing this object identification technology using secret access to NYPD camera footage. With access to images of thousands of unknowing New Yorkers offered up by NYPD officials, as early as 2012, IBM was creating new search features that allow other police departments to search camera footage for images of people by hair color, facial hair, and skin tone.

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/06/...n-tone-search/

[AdamG]

"Do No Evil" Google aiding and abetting Beijing's censorship.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/21/goog...aboolainternal

[AdamG]

How Google’s China project undermines its claims to political neutrality
The Verge

A leaked internal presentation about censorship frames the issue correctly — but the company’s work in China contradicts it

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/11/...e-speech-china

[AdamG]

Tim Cook: Personal data collection is being 'weaponized against us with military efficiency'

Apple and its CEO have long touted personal privacy, distancing themselves from recent, growing scandals among tech companies — but the comments from Cook are some of the strongest to date.
CEO Tim Cook said the business of selling ads against personal data has become a "data industrial complex" and stopped just short of naming tech giants like Facebook and Google in his criticisms.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/appl...vacy-laws.html