“Every move in my own home is monitored,” Yang said, sitting behind black curtains that block him from the glare of police lights trained straight at his house. “Their surveillance makes me feel unsafe all the time, everywhere.”
Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers like the Yangs are trapped in a digital cage, barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus. Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide: the United States.
Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.
Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang — targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population to forcibly assimilate and subdue them.
Template for what they’re planning here.
Test run in another country
Then gradually remove all the safeguards that were supposed to keep it from happening here and claim you’re cutting unnecessary bureaucracy and making things more efficient. Even though those safeguards may have been necessary at one point, they aren’t anymore.
And now we’ve really come full circle and the descendents of the factory owners have finally stripped away the rights our ancestors fought very hard for bc we got lazy and assumed we couldn’t go backwards.
Across China, surveillance systems track blacklisted “key persons,” whose movements are restricted and monitored. In Xinjiang, administrators logged people as high, medium, or low risk, often according to 100-point scores with deductions for factors like growing a beard, being 15 to 55 years old, or just being Uyghur.
Wow that sounds like some highly sophisticated tech. A deduction for being 15-55 years old? Why toss a coin or throw a dart when you can convince people that giving up their personal liberty, and investing a lot of money into some completely worthless (but very expensive bullshit), is necessary for their safety and a sign of inevitable progress.
Also, a social deduction for just being Uyghur?
I feel like you don’t need any highly sophisticated predictive tech, to predict the likelihood the U.S. is already using similar bullshit to discriminate against all non-white ethnicities across the country.
Well, considering China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs, yes I think that alters the score.
They got this surveillance in place and normalized rounding up a minority group and imprisoning humans indefinitely in re-eduction camps.
Clearly, nothing like the U.S.
I certainly don’t want to be defending the US in regard to the camps they have for deporting people, but there is a big difference between genocide and deportation. Don’t defend China with whataboutism.
I’m definitely not defending the Chinese government. I’m saying the tech companies that are currently helping to run the U.S. government, first helped the Chinese government create the surveillance network that was used to disproportionately target and round people up.
Now these same people are removing safeguards in the U.S., implementing live facial recognition surveillance networks, and a very similar pattern is starting to emerge.
People aren’t just being deported, they’re being held in private prisons indefinitely without due process, and it’s making the same people that are creating these policies very wealthy.
Don’t ask me to close my eyes, stick my fingers in my ears, and pretend I don’t see what’s happening right in front of me.
Did I ask you to do that? Or is that what you’ve chosen to hear?
I guess I just assumed that by accusing me of whataboutism you were implying that I was making an incorrect comparison. It seems like a glaringly obvious comparison that I would only be missing if I refused to see it.
I certainly don’t want to be defending China in regards to its attempted genocide of the Uyghur people, but what exactly have they done that the US hasn’t? Just quoting off the Wikipedia page, “mass arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, family separation, forced labor, sexual violence, and violations of reproductive rights” are all things that have happened in ICE camps already as well. See generally
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/civil-rights-organizations-raise-alarm-over-conditions-and-rights-violations-at-immigrant-detention-facilities-run-by-federal-agencies (arc)
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/hundreds-of-immigrants-have-reported-sexual-abuse-at-ice-facilities-most-cases-arent-investigated (arc)
And this is without bringing up how widespread abuse by guards, neglect of detainees’ medical needs, arbitrary detention and wrongful convictions are throughout the regular US criminal “justice” system.
At the end of the day, both governments are way worse than any human being on this planet should tolerate and they both put a ton of effort into covering up the worst things they do, so plebs like us really aren’t in a position to say who is actually worse, and frankly it doesn’t matter because they’re both bad enough that they would torture and kill either of us if they thought it would help them achieve their interests.
Attempted genocide? Yikes. They have mass graves. Yeah the US is slipping dangerously into fascism, but there aren’t mass graves of immigrants (yet!)
Nope, there are mass graves at CECOT at least (arc, and probably more we don’t know about (like, we didn’t find out about the ones at Indian boarding schools and juvenile detention centers in the US until years after the fact)
