Cartoon, circa 1970
Just 2 links to articles on this site which are primarily about the science & technology of social control but have been put under different categories:
“Hong Kong – its relevance to the rest of us…
&
Cameravirus…Facial recognition cameras, etc.
These have considerable similarities, the second reproducing much of the first though differing in focus and with additional material
https://roarmag.org/magazine/algorithmic-control-smartphone-internet-apps/
“There is little doubt that innovations in mobile technologies are part
of emerging methodologies of social control. In particular, games and
applications that make use of the Google Maps back-end system —
including Uber, Grindr, Pokémon Go and hundreds of others — which should
be seen as one of the most important technological developments of the
last decade or so, are particularly complicit in these new regulatory
practices. Putting the well-publicized data collection issue aside, such
applications have two powerful ideological functions. First, they
construct the new “geographical contours” of the city, regulating the
paths we take and mapping the city in the service of both corporate
interest and the prevention of uprisings. Second, and more
unconsciously, they enact what Jean-Francois Lyotard once called the
“desirevolution” — an evolution and revolution of desire, in which that
what we want is itself now determined by the digital paths we tread.
…
On a smaller scale, this point can be seen in concrete terms with a case
study of London. A recent Transport for London talk discussed the
possibility of “gamifying” commuting. In order to facilitate this
possibility, Transport for London have made the internet API and data
streams used to monitor all London Transport vehicles open source and
open access, in the hope that developers will build London-focused apps
based around the public transport system, thus maximizing profit. One
idea is that if a particular tube station is at risk of becoming clogged
up due to other delays, TfL could give “in-game rewards” for people
willing to use alternative routes and thus smooth out the jam.
While traffic jam prevention may not seem like evidence that we have
arrived in the dystopia of total corporate and state control, it does
actually reveal the dangerous potentiality in such technologies. It
shows that the UK is not as far away from the “social credit” game
system recently implemented in Beijing to rate each citizen’s
trustworthiness and give them rewards for their dedication to the
Chinese state. While the UK media reacted with shock to these
innovations in Chinese app development, a closer look at the electronic
structures of mapping and controlling our own movements shows that a
similar framework is already in its development phase in London too. In
the “smart city” of the future, it won’t just be traffic jams that are
smoothed out. Any inefficient misuse or any occupation of public space
deemed dangerous by the authorities can be specifically targeted.
…
Of course, when it comes to mapping pplications that promise to help us
access the best quality objects of our desire with the greatest
efficiency and the least cost, these tempting forces of joint corporate
and state control are entered into willingly by participants. As such,
they require something else in order to function in the all-consuming
way that they do. Far from simply channeling and transforming our
movements, they also need to channel and even transform our
desires….If the boundaries between the way we search, desire and
acquire our burgers, lovers and Pikachus are dissolving, it is not so
much the old point that everything has become a commodity, but a new
point that this kind of substitutional electronic objectivity endows
corporate and state technologists with unprecedented power to distribute
and redistribute the objects of the desire around the “smart city”.”….
The various forms and objects of each individual’s desire no longer
represent discreet and separable elements of a subject’s life. Instead
we enter a fully cohesive libidinal economy in which we are increasingly
regulated and mapped via the organization of what and how we desire.”
Antwerp begins fingerprint scanning ahead of new ID card launch:
https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/131288/antwerp-begins-fingerprint-scanning-ahead-of-new-id-card-launch/
“It is important to know that the fingerprint is only present on the
card (in the chip) itself, and is not stored in a central database,” the
Antwerp alderman in charge of the process, Nabilla Ait Daoud, told ATV,
adding that only the responsible authorities can read the chip and see
the fingerprints. … In the rest of Belgium, the new ID cards with the
holders’ fingerprints will begin being issued by all Belgian
municipalities by the end of 2020.
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/13/police-surveillance-technology-operation-legend/
“Awash in these federal funds, cities have doubled down on their surveillance investments, even as they face general budget shortfalls in the tens of millions. On August 4, two days before Operation Legend was formally announced in the city, Memphis signed a new contract with Cellebrite, an Israeli forensics manufacturer popular with law enforcement, whose products can hack and extract data from smartphones…Chicago, meanwhile, announced on August 14 that it would employ “enhanced” technology for “around-the-clock” monitoring of social media to identify looters. One hundred federal agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives were sent to Chicago through Operation Legend in late July. Though Mayor Lori Lightfoot at first assumed a hostile attitude toward the initiative, in August she also announced a new task force on looting in partnership with the FBI…In Memphis, a unique consent decree from 1978 prohibits law enforcement from engaging in “political intelligence” — collecting information on individuals for political purposes. This decree was the backbone of the 2018 American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, which held that Memphis had violated the law. City law enforcement has lobbied to amend and strike the decree, but so far, it has held.
Yet the Memphis law does not apply to federal law enforcement. “That’s the harsh truth. The decree only covers the city,” explained Tom Castelli, legal director for the ACLU of Tennessee, though per the decree, the city cannot collaborate on unlawful surveillance with outside agencies. Still, Memphis Police Director Michael Rallings has alluded to partnering with the FBI to get around some of the decree’s restrictions, later confirming through a city spokesperson that he “told [federal officials] that we are restricted by the consent decree and depend on them to catch threats articulated on social media.”…”
More than just carting a lot of heavily armed filth into some selected cities. The extent to which some of the surveillance networks have been constructed is notably spooky.
“There was a report about an old man surnamed Xie, of Shanghai’s Pudong District, who passed away in January of this year. Recently, his family received a traffic ticket that claimed the elderly Mr. Xie ran a red light at an intersection on October 1. The fine: 20 yuan. When the police discovered the mistake, they personally went to the Xie household to apologize, claiming they would upgrade and update the system as soon as possible, increase manual verification, and improve the recognition accuracy of their systems as much as possible.
It was a humorous and intriguing case of misjudgment by the traffic police artificial intelligence system. But the story leaves us with two conversation points: First, the only reason they had to admit the system made a mistake this time was because Mr. Xie had already passed away. If the system mistakenly targeted a living person, how would they be cleared of wrongdoing and get rid of this random ticket? Second, is it really okay to use a public intersection as a biological information collection point, and then to make that private information public?
According to the police officers, the computer system mistakenly identified someone else running the red light as Mr. Xie. The system matched the individual with old household registration data. So first there was an error with the data collected by the crosswalk camera, and then it associated that data with the wrong person. One possibility is that the image, which was taken haphazardly at the front end, was superimposed onto an equally messy database. The AI used by the traffic police made a quiet mistake in a place hidden from human view…”
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/10/translation-dead-mans-jaywalking-ticket-raises-questions-about-ai-policing/
Sharp Eyes Surveillance Program Expands Dramatically –
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2020/10/sharp-eyes-surveillance-program-expands-dramatically/
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48276660
SanFrancisco bans facial recognition cameras
Some Simple Suggestions for a Daily Approach to Smarter Communication and Digital Footprint –
https://enoughisenough14.org/2020/11/11/radiofragmata-taking-ourselves-seriously-article-1-digital-harm-reduction/#more-85796
“Cellebrite claims its tech can now crack Signal, which is regarded as
the most encrypted app and is commonly used by journalists to
communicate with sources … In an earlier, now deleted, version of the
blog post, the company went as far as to say: “Decrypting Signal
messages and attachments was not an easy task. It required extensive
research on many different fronts to create new capabilities from
scratch. At Cellebrite, however, finding new ways to help those who make
our world a safer place is what we’re dedicated to doing every day.”
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/tech-news/.premium-israeli-spy-tech-firm-says-it-can-break-into-signal-app-previously-considered-safe-1.9368581
From T:
https://www.frontierweekly.com/views/jul-20/10-7-20-
“Foer’s[13] World without Mind is essentially a book about the forces in
the world that have spurred confusion, conformism, and, sad to say,
stupidity. Though the defeat of the higher ideal is hardly final, Foer
examines how the truth is manufactured by the big-techs in a make
believe world. The author hopes to persuade us that another course is
still possible. The Europeans have charmingly, and correctly, lumped
them together as GAFA (Google, Apple, Face book, Amazon) – says Foer.
For example, Facebook can predict user’s race, sexual orientation,
relationship status, and drug use on the basis of their “likes” alone.
‘The crowd’ gets what it wants and deserves. We’re in the earliest days
of this revolution, of course, says Foer. The whole effort of all the
neo-tech is to make human beings more predictable, to anticipate their
behavior, which makes them easier to manipulate. Even the father of
Capitalism, Adam Smith, didn’t anticipate this manipulative market of
this extent through information. Knowledge never entered deeply into
Smith’s thinking about trade. But now “Knowledge factories” have become
a reality.
With the big tech entry we also entered a kind of ‘noisy world.’ It is a
condition called ‘Total Noise.’ It’s is no more a stable and
predictable knowledge; it is peripatetic, where a wealth of information
creates a poverty of attention.[14] The new way of offering us
information is always in the order of shock and disbelief. Everyone
acquainted with ‘social media’ is aware of this new environment. See for
example a well-known method of social media news: “9 out of 10 Americans
Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact.” The moment you come
across such news, you will invariably drawn to read it or hear it
instantly. Millions of readers couldn’t contain themselves and followed
that link. “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.”[15] On most occasion
the content would be absolutely either irrelevant or full of vanity. The
news is not just news, it’s always ‘breaking’ or ‘trending.’ Indians
have, of late, become ‘news maniacs,’ and the social media is more
virulent and corrupting in India than anywhere else in the world. Almost
every linguistic region has more than two dozens of vernacular
audio-visual media and hundreds of social media cites. News ‘production’
has already reached the level of ‘industrial production’! “
Following Facebook bans etc, Instagram are now banning their use by revolutionaries:
https://de.crimethinc.com/2020/12/21/surviving-the-social-media-crackdown-the-instagram-ban-and-how-to-keep-following-us