{"id":42378,"date":"2019-01-07T20:01:42","date_gmt":"2019-01-08T01:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42378"},"modified":"2019-01-07T20:01:42","modified_gmt":"2019-01-08T01:01:42","slug":"commentary-2019-will-be-the-year-of-more-state-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42378","title":{"rendered":"Commentary: 2019 will be the year of more state control"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Commentary: 2019 will be the year of more state control<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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A signature theme of the new year is the possibility of a malign confrontation between the world\u2019s greatly enhanced capacity for electronic surveillance and the weakening of democratic control. The antidote to that risk is the democratic spirit and civil freedoms \u2013 both of which are suffering world-wide. These are not dead, but they are unwell, at times untended.<\/p>\n

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A man goes through the process of eye scanning for Aadhaar, India’s national government database, at a registration centre in New Delhi, Jan. 17, 2018. REUTERS\/Saumya Khandelwal<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The world\u2019s two most populous states, China and India \u2013together, around 37 percent of the global population<\/a> \u2013 have rolled out nationwide digital systems of monitoring and classification. These combine the collection of personal information needed for fuller citizenship with the capacity for fuller surveillance and intervention by the state.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s system overtly seeks to monitor the behavior of its 1.4 billion people and to reward those actions the state\/Communist Party defines as \u201cgood\u201d or punish those it defines as \u201cbad.\u201d It is the secular alternative to religiously-guided societies, substituting the commandments of a god mediated through a priesthood with the criteria of a state whose ruling party claims virtual infallibility through its interpretation of the philosophy of Karl Marx aided by a gloss provided by its president<\/a> \u2013 the \u201cXi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,\u201d now written into China\u2019s constitution.<\/p>\n

The country\u2019s \u201csocial credit system<\/a>\u201d combines face, voice and fingerprint recognition technology with monitoring of public and private behavior such as internet use, educational choices and social networks, as well as a huge web of paid informants who report unusual activities.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commentary: 2019 will be the year of more state control A signature theme of the new year is the possibility of a malign confrontation between the world\u2019s greatly enhanced capacity for electronic surveillance and the weakening of democratic control. The antidote to that risk is the democratic spirit and civil freedoms \u2013 both of which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[130,204,23749,422,23748,683,10689],"class_list":["post-42378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-china","tag-democracy","tag-electronic-surveillance","tag-india","tag-john-lloyd","tag-reuters","tag-state-control"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42378"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42379,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42378\/revisions\/42379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}