1984 Hits Hyper-Speed
"It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used. This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”
Even Schmidt
Former Commander, East German Stasi
Communist Secret Police
(Radio Free Asia) - The Chinese police are building a "big data" policing platform that can analyze massive amounts of citizens' personal information, using it to track rights activists, political opponents of the government, and ethnic minority groups, according to a U.S-based rights group.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on the ruling Chinese Communist Party to halt its "abusive" system, called the Police Cloud.
"It is frightening that Chinese authorities are collecting and centralizing ever more information about hundreds of millions of ordinary people, identifying persons who deviate from what they determine to be ‘normal thought,’ and then surveilling them," HRW China director Sophie Richardson said in a statement.
"With authorities increasingly able to track everyone’s every move, what’s at stake across China isn’t just people’s privacy—it’s also many of the rights they hold," Richardson said.
China's ministry of public security is currently exploring new technologies, including big data analytics and cloud computing-based systems, to analyze large volumes and varieties of data, including text, video, and pictures, HRW said in a report published this week.
There are also moves afoot to link up existing databases at national and local level, as well as those held by private organizations.
According to HRW, the Police Cloud includes details of people's medical history, supermarket purchases, delivery records, linking it to their national ID card numbers.
"This allows the Police Cloud system to track where the individuals have been, who they are with, and what they have been doing, as well as make predictions about their future activities," HRW said.
"The fact that these systems are designed in part to track groups the authorities deem politically or socially threatening raises serious concerns about social and racial profiling," it said.
"Local police can decide that virtually anyone is a threat and requires greater surveillance, especially if they are seen to be undermining stability," the report said. "There are no legal avenues for people to be notified of this designation, or contest it."
Targeted groups include those who persist in complaining about the government through the petitioning system, and ethnic minority Uyghurs from the northwestern region of Xinjiang, it found.
Citing official documents, the report said Police Cloud systems are now fully operational in some provinces, including Tianjin Municipality and Jiangsu.
Medical records, petitions lodged with government departments, criminal convictions, corporate and individual use of social media and package delivery contents are among some of the data types now being linked by the new systems, it said.
Residential addresses, family relations, birth control methods and religious affiliations, as well as hotel, flight, and train records, biometrics, CCTV footage, and information from other government departments and even private companies are also being added to the mix.
The system "makes visible" hidden trends and relationships between people in the ocean of data, enabling keyword searches linking vast amounts of data.
It allows the police to analyze those "who travel, who live, who work together; who go on the internet; who share the same household registration; who share the same family members; and who are involved in the same case, HRW said.
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1984 is Already Here The NSA Utah Data Center is unconstitutionally recording you without a warrant. But I am just a "Crazy Blogger" what do I know? k"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire." - - - Robert A. Heinlein |
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