Imagine attending a concert 50 miles away from home with 60,000 fellow music aficionados. Sounds fun, right? Add the Chinese twist to the day’s festivities and things go from bad to worse in a heartbeat, as a resident recently found out.
Apparently, the mammoth investment by officials in Beijing to completely saturate the geographic expanse of the communist state with 170 million HD digital surveillance camera eyes is starting to pay off, and the rest of the world quivers and laughs nervously as “Big Brother” is now a very official member of every Chinese household.
Remember that childhood dream of running from a scary person and never being able to hide or much worse completely get away in spite of the creative and innovative twist and turns thrown at the creep along the way? Wake up, because this is real life.
The BBC reports that a husband and wife were attending a concert more than 50 miles away from home in a packed stadium, when government officials calmly and surgically surrounded the couple, and all before the opening performance. In a situation much more subtle and disturbing than three UCLA basketball players illegally hording knockoff luxury sun glasses in a nearly empty promenade, a series of smart cameras armed with facial recognition software installed at the venue, remotely and almost instantaneously alerted technicians to the man’s presence and dispatched a team to contact the individual, before the couple even had the chance to sit down. Take a deep breath. LaVar Ball cannot talk his way out of this one.
Allegedly, the captured individual somehow reached the unenviable position of losing favor with the government and was taken into custody for “economic crimes”, or basically whatever charges officials want to pony up for a person who is considered to be a political dissident and thus expendable.
Hey Mark Zuckerberg! Are you watching? This is one important reason why we embrace a diversity of perspective and opinion in the US where we agree with it or not, so that we can maintain our individual freedoms and never fear of falling into a totalitarian science fiction level dystopia, which is actually happening as we speak, just across the Pacific. Your platform does not support this crucial notion. Enjoy your wall and your crumbling social network, and the only hope is that future government regulations haunt you everyday, like the millions who indirectly took (take) part in a reckless experiment gone haywire. Where did our data go Mark? I hope you can honestly answer the obvious question.
Read the BBC article here.
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