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That's roughly 10% of the population (23M). At its peak, the Stasi in the DDR had files on about 30% of the East German population.
by lainga 8y ago
That's roughly 10% of the population (23M). At its peak, the Stasi in the DDR had files on about 30% of the East German population.
- felipelemos 8y agoNot in real time.
- walrus01 8y agoThe technology and social tracking tools that the authorities in Beijing have at their disposal would make the Stasi drool in envy.
- pandapower2 8y agoI'm not sure what point you are trying to make...
- lainga 8y agoTheir surveillance efforts have reached roughly the same order of magnitude as the Stasi, and (as others point out) with far less effort.
- nabla9 8y agoStasi files were actual files in an archive. You needed actual manpower to walk into archive, retrieve, analyze and act. Any new entry took time to enter into the system. Chinese can have thousands of datapoints per day (with their mandatory phone apps, cameras, checkpoints). They can automatically analyze them in real time. They can get summaries and automatically classify people.
- coldtea 8y agoAnd doesn't NSA and co track 100% of the population?
- ngcc_hk 8y agoEven if so, you agree? Acceptable? Silly statement.
- bigmonads 8y agoI think the point of coldtea's comment is that: - We're being inconsistent with our criticism, unwilling to apply it as a universal standard - We're talking about others (Chinese) needing to rebel, blaming this on brainwashing, without adknowledging our own inability and unwillingness to act, without being willing to label this brainwashing - We're building over the course of increasingly ignorant veiled-criticism posts of foreign cultures a dog-whistle for Chinese racism within our tech culture - We're narrowly conceptualizing the issues fundamental to these technologies, spending our energy on exasperation that contributes to nationalistic sentiment, rather than addressing the global systemic abuse - Our "blindspot" of admitting our own state the abuse of information fundamentally carves out, via the course of international law and sovereignty, the justification for other countries to do the exact same In essence: fixing this kind of thing starts at home in the United States. Sunday morning HN comment anguish over the Uighurs of China is navel gazing.
- coldtea 8y agoThat. To add: 1) The complaints are often either hypocritical or naive, mirroring whatever target the official US policy (and thus media) have at that year. People oblivious to 99% of the goings-on around the world merely parrot opinions they read in the media about 1-2 select places, in tandem with official national "interests" against those places. At the same time when you see tons of blog posts, and media stories and so on (and movies and TV series) against country/situation X, you don't see any about country Y which is similarly or much worse, but an ally (or indifferent). E.g. complaining about the treatment of gay/women in place X but always forgetting Saudi Arabia unless it happens to coincide with some beef their country has with it. 2) Opinions used to sell state action and interventions, with blatant disregard for nuance and for the people in the area they're supposed to help. E.g. whenever there was an intervention to "bring democracy" etc, it created worse power vacuums and civil war hellholes in the places it touched (e.g. Iraq, Libya, Syria, jut in the last 15 years) -- but of course it also sold trillions of war merchandise.
- bigmonads 8y agoChina's population was 1.386 billion in 2017. Do you mean 10% of the subpopulation pertinent to the region?
- pizza 8y agoThe population of East Germany was 18 million in 1950 and 16 million in 1990. On the same order of magnitude. But I think it would be much easier for China to keep tabs on millions nowadays than the Stasi back then.
- anoncoward111 8y agoCompletely agree. If I was sadistic enough, a few web scrapers and .csv files and some workers on fiverr could keep enough tabs on millions of people so as to be scary.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]