I (Chris) write to you about all kinds of threats – from the trade war… to a market crash… to a wipeout of fiat currencies.
But what really keeps me awake at night has nothing to do with how much money I have in the bank… or where the Dow is trading… or the purchasing power of the dollar.
These are all small potatoes by comparison.
My No. 1 fear is the rise of a digital surveillance society in China… and that it won’t be long before something similar takes shape in America.
Last week, a new law went into force in China.
It requires Chinese citizens to submit to a facial recognition scan before getting a new cellphone number.
This takes the Beijing government’s efforts to spy on its people 24/7 to a whole new level.
You can pussyfoot around it if you like. But China is a dictatorship. There’s a president for life, Xi Jinping. And there is one party in power, the Chinese Communist Party.
And what it fears more than anything is that citizens will use the internet to organize against it.
That’s why the internet is so heavily restricted in China…
Palm Beach Research Group cofounder Tom Dyson spent two months in China with his family earlier this year. He reported:
The internet is fast, and there’s 4G and 5G everywhere, even in the middle of the desert. But it’s a giant headache for us to use the internet because there’s a firewall that blocks many of the sites and apps we like. For example, we can’t use Google, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Chrome, or any of our favorite news and social media sites. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger don’t work, either.
The only way to get around it is to launch a VPN [virtual private network], which is an app on our phones and iPads that tricks the censors into thinking we’re not in China and lets us get outside the firewall. The trouble is, the VPN is temperamental. Often, it doesn’t work, and when it does work, the internet is painfully slow. I’ve wasted hours fiddling with it to get my emails out.
And they’re hard to avoid.
Tom again…
There are surveillance cameras everywhere in China. Above every street corner, on every sidewalk, at every subway exit, over every bus stop, on the buses, in the trains, and along the roads tracking cars.
They even have them in private spaces. Every hostel we stay at has cameras in the common areas. Most restaurants have cameras watching us eat…
And Beijing is ramping up its surveillance efforts.
That may seem like a lot. But the government says it aims to install another 400 million by next year.
That’s roughly one camera for every two people living in China.
And Party bosses are delighted with their all-seeing eye.
Last year, Chinese state media boasted that police used the state surveillance system to identify and arrest one suspect in a crowd of 60,000 at a pop concert.
In many ways, that’s true. I’m typing these words on a laptop and using Wi-Fi that allows me to work from anywhere in the world. And because it’s so easy to get online these days… I can connect to colleagues at Legacy Research HQ in Florida any time I want.
And as our tech expert, Jeff Brown, has been showing readers, technology is accomplishing great things in the world right now. Things like 5G… self-driving cars… artificial intelligence… and gene editing have the power to transform human society for the better.
But the Chinese government is more interested in the dark side of tech.
Every authoritarian regime in history has placed a high value on surveillance.
The Nazis had the Gestapo. The Soviets had the KGB. And the East Germans had the Stasi.
But keeping tabs on millions of people back then was labor-intensive.
For example, in 1944, there were about 16,000 active Gestapo officers policing a population of 66 million Germans.
That’s about one agent for every 4,100 people. For Beijing’s version of Big Brother to achieve that level of surveillance using manpower alone, it would need to employ about 340,000 people.
But with new technologies, they don’t need to.
Here’s Legacy Research cofounder Bill Bonner with more…
Algorithms can now do what used to require squads of spooks, snitches, and sinister agents.
To keep 1.4 billion citizens in line, China’s spooks know they can’t rely on human-powered surveillance. They need high-tech kits and cutting-edge algorithms to reach their goal of total information awareness.
“But Chris, you’re talking about China. There’s no way this kind of thing can happen in the Land of the Free.”
That’s where, sadly, I believe you’re dead wrong. And it’s what gives me nightmares about the future.
As I’ve shown you in these pages, Americans already voluntarily invite Google, Facebook, and Twitter to spy on them online in return for “free” online services.
American cops are already experimenting with mass surveillance and facial recognition technology in U.S. cities.
And the Department of Homeland Security has already rolled out facial recognition boarding-gate scans at 17 U.S. airports.
And Amazon’s facial recognition doorbells are already the fastest-growing home-improvement gadgets since the remote-controlled garage door opener.
Because they’re told it will make them safer.
And throughout history, people have gladly (and stupidly) swapped liberty for safety when they’ve felt under threat. Bill again…
Using the latest in surveillance technology, the feds can keep track of everybody all the time. The temptation will be irresistible to use these tools to control people in the U.S.
Throughout history, any technology – whatever it is – has been taken up by the elite and used by them to increase their control over the rest of the population.
Will that be bad? Well, it depends. I won’t like it. Our readers may not like it. But most Americans will like it, just as they do in most of China. They’ll say, “Well, it’s so much safer now because we’ve gotten the bad guys off the streets.”
I’ll show you how China is exporting this authoritarian tech around the world.
As you’ll see, more than 50 governments around the world are creating their own digital mass-surveillance systems.
I’ll also show you why, instead of China becoming more like America – as Western neoliberal elites believed would happen – America is set to become more like China.
And that includes increasingly intrusive levels of surveillance on U.S. soil.
Think twice about the photos you post of yourself, your family, and your friends online.
Photos posted on social media are used to train facial recognition algorithms.
You may think you’re uploading them just for people you’re connected to… but they’ll almost certainly also end up in a facial recognition database somewhere.
You can also say “no” the next time you’re asked to submit to a facial recognition scan in a U.S. airport. For more pointers on how to do that, read on here.
Regards,
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Chris Lowe
December 9, 2019
New York, USA
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