Modern Totalitarians

Today’s editorial from the Washington Post on China’s technological surveillance state has one serious deficiency:

STEP BY STEP, China has been rolling out surveillance technology that is remarkably intrusive, comprehensive and ubiquitous. Eager to exploit gains in technology, Beijing seems little concerned about human rights or privacy violations.

On Dec. 10, the BBC reported that China seeks to build the world’s largest camera surveillance network, with 170 million closed-circuit cameras installed and an estimated 400 million new ones coming in the next three years. In the city of Guiyang in southwest China, correspondent John Sudworth agreed to add a photograph of his face to the database of the local public security bureau and have it flagged as a “suspect” in an experiment to see how long he could walk freely on the streets before the police could find him. He got out of his car close to the city center and walked toward a bus station. The exercise took just seven minutes.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch reported on Dec. 13 that Chinese authorities have been collecting DNA samples, blood types, fingerprints and iris scans, in some cases possibly without informing people, from a large swath of the population in the restive Xinjiang province in far northwestern China. Ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang have long complained about repression and discrimination at the hands of the Chinese government; resentment has sometimes turned violent. According to Human Rights Watch, in a procedure rolled out this year, the authorities there are collecting the DNA and blood-type information under the cover of a “free annual physical exams program called Physicals for All.”

It is completely lacking in practical recommendations. What the evidence suggests is that the Chinese authorities would like to be totalitarians but don’t want to appear to want to be totalitarians.

In my view the Chinese people are entitled to have any sort of society they care to have and we’re entitled both to disapprove of it and to not have anything to do with them, taking the additional step of penalizing companies that assist the Chinese authorities in their plans.

We should also be asking whether our own government is seeking the same kind of intelligence on us? How about American companies? Do we really want that? Whose data is it, anyway?