China’s High-Tech Police State
Naomi Klein in Rolling Stone reports how China is gearing up to use the latest people-tracking technology, thoughtfully supplied by American corporations who are currently sponsoring the Beijing Olympics.
Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
What next?
- Next post: Secrecy
- Previous post: The Backlist
- All Posts: All available blog posts
It is interesting that you note the number of security cameras in China. But really, we do not know the exact number of security cameras in the UK or the US. If you include all forms of surveillance including telecommunications eavesdropping then the case could easily be made that the Western countries are the biggest police states with USA as number one. If you need evidence to substantiate the claim that the US is the biggest police state look no further than the incarceration rate. With only 5% of the world’s population the “Land of the Free” incarcerates 20% of the world’s prisoners.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,333589,00.html
China is merely following in the footsteps of the US and UK. If not for the controlled TV media most people in the West would already know this.