A control mechanism that only a totalitarian could love - ominous.
Complete article at link - excerpt below.
'Social credit score': China set to roll out 'Orwellian' mass surveillance tool
By Bill Gertz - The Washington Times - Monday, December 9, 2019
China is developing a new high-tech system of mass surveillance and coercion aimed suppressing political dissent among its 1.4 billion people, while forcing American and Western businesses to conform to the government’s communist policies if they want to operate there.
The system that critics call an Orwellian national-level control system has been dubbed the Social Credit System (SCS) and was set for launch in the coming year, although recent reports from China now say the rollout could be delayed until 2021.
The massive system has been tested in several major Chinese cities and uses millions of surveillance cameras linked to supercomputers containing massive databases. Face and voice recognition technology then identifies and monitors people with the goal of controlling behaviors that range from dissident political activity to jaywalking, ostensibly as part of a financial credit monitoring system similar to those used in the West.
Vice President Mike Pence called out the program in a recent speech, warning that China’s surveillance state is “growing more expansive and intrusive — often with the help of U.S. technology.”
“By 2020, China’s rulers aim to implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life — the so-called social credit score,” Mr. Pence said. “In the words of that program’s official blueprint, it will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven, while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.’”
Facial recognition tools are widely used now in China bolstered by cameras deployed along streets, on buildings, in train stations, in classrooms and subway lines. With the emergence of next-generation 5G telecommunications technology, the reach of the surveillance networks is only expected to increase.
As part of the stepped-up surveillance, the Chinese governmentannounced this month that all who purchase SIM cards for mobile phones must first produce a facial recognition print.
Pilot projects for the SCS have been under way for the past several years around China.
The system has its kinks. A Western corporate executive leaving Chinafaced a fine after an SCS search claimed she ran a traffic light and failed to pay the fine. A diplomatic source familiar with incident said the executive’s only crime was that her face appeared in a photograph that was part of bus advertisement and was captured by a surveillance camera when the bus ran the light.
A gray market in China has started for people with bad social credit who can boost their scores by buying points online. China’s Alibaba online retailer has listed available social credit from people in rural areas.
One Chinese national in the country who declined to be identified by name said those who fail the social credit system are called “laolai” — roughly translated as serial scoundrel or rascal.
“It is quite an insulting term,” the person said. “In a totalitarian state, everyone is expected or forced to be a small, useful cog of the society. It happened now and then in the human history and it is happening now.”
Another Chinese citizen said social media discussion of the SCS is being heavily censored.
“Basically, as far as I know, the system connects everything and perhaps controls everything,” this person said. “For example, all my bank cards and payment accounts, my WeChat and other social media accounts, the accounts to buy train and air tickets, my phone number, and even my face ID, are connected to my identity card in China.”
The official government website, creditchina.gov.cn, described the social credit system only as “an important part of the socialist market economic system and social governance system.”
Outside China, the international variant is known as the “corporate social credit system” and is already been used by Beijing to coerce foreign businesses that fail to toe China’s political line on issues such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Tibet.
Paying the price
The official National Public Credit Information Center, reported last year that a total of 23 million people were “discredited” and barred from traveling by air or rail. Another 17.5 million Chinese could not purchase airline tickets, while 5.5 million were barred from buying high-speed train tickets — all due to poor social credit scores.
Among those caught up in the SCS was Chinese actress Michelle Ye Xuan. She was unable to board a flight last March after information about a recent court case popped up on a computer screen at an airport checkpoint. She was found guilty of defaming her boyfriend’s ex-lover and failed to apologize. The ban was lifted after she apologized.
Beijing euphemistically calls the program part of “social management” — a key element of communist ideology to shape and control society.
In reality, critics say, the system is designed to preserve the power of the Communist Party of China, blacklisting and punishing anyone who is spotted by the system engaging in any unapproved activities. It’s marks a high-tech upgrade of traditional measures of control.
In the past, the party relied on a system called “dongan” or personal file — millions of dossiers on citizens filled with personal information ranging from comments made in high school to remarks made to coworkers.
The SCS is expected to take the dongan system to new levels of surveillance by the use of use of advanced technology.
“At its core, the system is a tool to control individuals,’ companies’ and other entities’ behavior to conform with the policies, directions and will of the [Communist Party of China],” said Samantha Hoffman, a Chinaspecialist with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra. “It combines big-data analytic techniques with pervasive data collection to achieve that purpose.”
The heart of the SCS is the more than 200 million video cameras that line streets and alleys, all networked to vast stores of personal data sifted by increasingly advanced data mining software. China plans to have as many as 626 million cameras deployed by next year.
Low credit scores — whether due to political activity, financial impropriety or even minor offensives like smoking on a train — employment, can result in schooling and travel being blocked or restricted.
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https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2...illance-tool-/
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