Read George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 to get ready. His “Big Brother” system previews the pervasive government monitoring that’s coming.
China already uses powerful Big Brother technology to amplify power at home and abroad. Its surveillance technology helped identify and punish almost 900,000 officials last year, an Associated Press investigation found. Outside its borders, China used the technology to threaten wayward officials, dissidents and alleged criminals.
Silicon Valley companies such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft developed the technology. Last week the AP cited a review of hundreds of leaked emails, government procurements, and internal corporate presentations as sources for its findings. The technology, particularly the IBM developed i2 program, mines texts, payments, flights, calls, and other data to identify the friends and family of officials and their assets.
Reporting on Retired Chinese official Li Chuanliang, the AP said “Li’s communications were monitored, his assets seized and his movements followed in police databases. More than 40 friends, relatives, and associates – including his pregnant daughter – were identified and detained, even by tracking down their cab drivers through facial recognition software.”
“They track you 24 hours a day. All your electronics, your phone – they’ll use every method to find you, your relatives, your friends, where you live,” Li said. “No matter where you are, you’re under their control.”
Government sponsored Big Brother surveillance is building on its foothold in America.
The U.S. government has developed a similar, if not more advanced system, reported NPR in November. In addition to the Border Patrol’s nationwide vehicle surveillance system, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has employed new surveillance tools including apps that allow agents to point a cell phone at someone's face to identify them, licensed software with access to vast amounts of location-based data, and spyware that can hack into cell phones.
ICE is also ramping up social media surveillance with new AI-driven software contracts. And it is considering hiring 24/7 teams of contractors to scour databases and platforms like Facebook and TikTok and create dossiers on users.
"Immigration powers are being used to justify mass surveillance of everybody," Emily Tucker, the executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law,” told NPR. "The purpose of this is to build up a massive surveillance apparatus that can be used for whatever kind of policing the people in power decide that they want to undertake," she said.
The climax of Orwell's 1984 showed the Thought Police finally overwhelming the spirit of determined rebel Winston Smith who suddenly realized he “loved Big Brother.”
Will we come to love Big Brother too?
"Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” – Romans 2:2.
Bill Crawford is an author and syndicated columnist from Jackson.
