Four Takeaways From a Times Investigation Into China’s Expanding Surveillance State
China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens is more expansive than previously known, a Times investigation has found. Phone-tracking devices are now everywhere. The police are creating some of the largest DNA databases in the world. And the authorities are building upon facial recognition technology to collect voice prints from the general public.
TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — Angry bank customers who traveled to a city in central China to retrieve their savings from troubled rural banks have been stopped by a health app on their cellphone.
Chinese residents are required to have the health app, which displays a code indicating their health status, including possible exposure to COVID-19. A green code is required to use public transportation and to enter locations such as offices, restaurants and malls. But some depositors at the banks in central Henan province said their codes were turned red to stop them.
The incident has started a national debate on how a tool designed for public health was appropriated by political forces to tamp down controversy.
The future is scary.
The federal government is cutting short debate by MPs on its online streaming bill, a move Tory MPs have condemned as “draconian” and “disturbing.”
They say curbing scrutiny of the bill line by line in committee is an attempt by the government to rush it through the House of Commons and will lead to the creation of a “flawed and incoherent” law.
“Sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear.” These famous words used to usher in viewers of “The Outer Limits,” but they could more aptly describe the designs of the CRTC, the broadcasting regulator that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government seems intent on putting in charge of anything that moves or makes a sound.
This week, Toronto’s Pearson International Airport went viral for all the wrong reasons when former NHL player Ryan Whitney described it as “the worst place on Earth.” Many recent travellers would agree. It appears the airport is running a not-so-limited promotion where all fares include a tour through the nine circles of hell.
But if you think hours-long security and customs delays, passengers held on planes for hours without food or water, staffing shortages and cascading flight cancellations are bad now, just wait until border agents can search through your phone and laptop based on nothing more than “reasonable general concern.”
Why can’t we get rid of ‘non-crime hate incidents’?
Britain’s thoughtpolice are a law unto themselves. Nothing captures this more clearly than the continued existence of the ‘non-crime hate incident’ (NCHI) – a policing tool that refuses to die. At the weekend, the Daily Mail reported that the Home Office is drawing up new plans to increase the use of NCHIs, as part of its new hate-crime strategy. There are fears this could effectively criminalise comedians like Ricky Gervais for joking about trans issues.
NCHIs are a sinister form of thoughtpolicing. They can be recorded by the police whenever someone is accused of showing ‘hostility towards religion, race or transgender identity’. There does not need to be any evidence of hate – just as with hate crimes more broadly, the only requirement is that the victim or anyone else perceives the motive of the non-crime incident to have been hateful. In other words, literally anything can be logged as a hate incident.
The tracking capabilities of the Tim Hortons app – which more than one in 10 Canadians use at least once a month – are the subject of legal probes, launched in 2020, that have raised questions about whether the company gathers too much information about its customers through their smartphones.
Brave New World? You decide.
J. Michael Evans, president of the Alibaba Group– a Chinese multinational technology company—bragged at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: “We’re developing through technology an ability for consumers to measure their own carbon footprint. What does that mean? That’s where are they traveling, how are they traveling, what are they eating, what are they consuming on the platform?”
A major component of the Great Reset-Technocratic Agenda is the implementation of a worldwide digital identity scheme. One of the first steps to realize this goal is to convince the public that digital identity programs are a “human right” worth fighting for.
Why is the push for digital identity absolutely vital to the Technocrats visions?
The world of 2030 — the one in which the World Economic Forum imagines “you will own nothing and be happy” — depends on an all-encompassing digital id program. This digital ID will allow a track and trace society where the authorities can see every purchase and every move you make.
Four unidentified air carriers are apparently on board with ‘biometric travel documents.’
Canada’s Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that it is working with top airlines in the hopes to mandate all travelers use a form of “digital identity documents” complete with facial recognition biometric data for pre-boarding flights.
According to a May 14 statement published in the Canada Gazette on Regulations Amending the Secure Air Travel Regulations and the Designated Provisions Regulations, Canada’s Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness spoke about such “digital” travel documents during an air travel participant exercise.
Investments in new tools for Canada’s security agencies to deal with “extremist ideology” and “misinformation” are being made by the government, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says.
“We need new tools to fight all of these pending threats, and that’s why we’ve turned to all of our security agencies to look at new ways of ensuring peoples’ safety,” Trudeau said in French while addressing media in Vancouver on May 24.
“Because, as we know, what happens in the virtual world has impact in the real world. It doesn’t stay on the internet.”
Trudeau is the threat.
The 2002 film Minority Report was a box office success and, like the Matrix franchise, emerged as one of the most talked-about movies of recent times. The crux of the film involved a “precrime” policing unit that could act to prevent crimes before they were committed, on evidence provided by a team of comatose subjects with precognitive abilities. Of course, the plot was utterly absurd, demanding major suspension of viewer disbelief, but nonetheless provocative in its social and political implications.
Nina Jankowicz, the former director of the Disinformation Governance Board, made a video where she referred to herself as “The Mary Poppins of Disinformation.”
To be charitable, she should keep her day job.
President Joe Biden recently signed a law mandating (persondating?) that all new vehicles sold after 2026 must be equipped with electronic “kill switches.” These switches could conceivably be used by government officials — or hackers — to seize control of one’s car without permission or oversight.
Oddly enough, the law was essentially hidden inside of the administration’s LGBTQ-friendly $1.2-trillion infrastructure bill that was passed late last year.
