China’s Big Brother Social Control Goes to Australia

This is a huge development and we can expect this to be rolled out in a town near you wherever you live.

If it wasn't for this item in a local Northern Territories newspaper we would be none the wiser.

Darwin to build future on Smart technology based on cities in China and Taiwan

DARWIN council will use Chinese inspired surveillance technology to gather data on what people are doing on their phones and to put up “virtual fences” that will instantly trigger an alert if crossed.

NTNews,

9 April, 2019

The concept for the “Smart technology” comes from Shenzhen and has seen facial recognition surveillance to create a controversial social credit system where people earn or lose points based on the way they behave.

Council’s Innovation, Growth and Development Services general manager Josh Sattler said the poles, fitted with speakers, cameras and Wi-Fi, would allow council to gain data on how many people walk on what footpaths and where they use certain websites and apps in the city.

“The artificial intelligence program will be watching, we won’t be,” he said. “We’ll be getting sent an alarm saying ‘there’s a person in this area that you’ve put a virtual fence around’ … boom an alert goes out to whatever authority, whether it’s us or police to say ‘look at camera five’.”

The CCTV component of the poles will be rolled out by Anzac Day with the SmartCity platform to be finished by the end of financial year.

Mr Sattler said Darwin would be the first city in Australia to adopt the technology.

“At the moment we’re going off whoever screams the loudest and sometimes that doesn’t represent the full voice of the community,” he said.

“It's about having the data to make the informed decisions and we can get benefits for the rest of the community.”

Mr Sattler said the next six months would see major changes to the technology and local businesses could be the big winners.

“(It will tell us) where people are using Wi-Fi, what they’re using Wi-Fi for, are they watching YouTube etc, all these bits of information we can share with businesses … we can let businesses know ‘hey, 80 per cent of people actually use Instagram within this area of the city, between these hours’,” he said. “What does that tell a business? Get on Instagram between these hours, put up new posts, you’ll connect with a lot more people.”

Charles Darwin University law lecturer Dr Jenny Ng said people can have a technology friendly environment if they learn how to use it safely and have a better understanding of the different levels of privacy.

“It’s only fair to tell the public if the public wifi, for example, is less secure than a personal wifi,” she said.

“In such cases, if you want to have a highly secure network with high privacy features on the Internet, you will have to use your personal wifi which employs such features.”

Dr Ng said the purpose of the Smart techology wasn’t for penalising pedestrians as had been seen in Shenzhen.

“Their intentions are different, they want to track your every move and come up with a social credit system,” she said. “We don’t have that system here, I don’t think we’re going to have it here anyway.”

Instead, CCTV could act as it did in other parts of society.

“We already use (CCTV cameras) in places such as banks, it’s to create safety systems and we don’t object to it ... because we know it creates a safety system.”

China’s Big Brother Social Control Goes to Australia

EpochTimes,

28 April, 2019

Australia is preparing to launch its own version of the Chinese regime’s high-tech system for monitoring and controlling its citizens. The launch will be in Darwin, and will include systems to monitor people and their activity on their cell phones.

The new system is based on monitoring programs in Shenzhen, China, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is testing its Social Credit System. Officials on the Darwin council traveled to Shenzhen, according to NT News to “have a chance to see exactly how their Smart Technology works prior to being fully rolled out.”

In Darwin, they’ve already constructed “poles, fitted with speakers, cameras and Wi-Fi,” according to NT News, which will monitor people, their movements around the city, the websites they visit, and what apps they use. The monitoring will be done mainly by artificial intelligence, but will alert authorities on set triggers.

Just like in China, the surveillance system is being branded as a “smart city” program, and while Australian officials claim it’s operations are benign, they’ve announced it functions to monitor cell phone activity and “virtual fences” that will trigger alerts if people cross them.

“We’ll be getting sent an alarm saying ‘there’s a person in this area that you’ve put a virtual fence around’ … boom an alert goes out to whatever authority, whether it’s us or police to say ‘look at camera five’,” said Josh Sattler—the Darwin council’s general manager for innovation, growth, and development services—according to NT News.

The nature of the “virtual fences” and what type of activity will sound an alarm is still not being made clear.

The system is being promoted as mostly benign. Sattler said it will tell the government “where people are using Wi-Fi, what they’re using Wi-Fi for, are they watching YouTube etc, all these bits of information we can share with businesses … we can let businesses know ‘hey, 80 per cent of people actually use Instagram within this area of the city, between these hours’.”

The CCP’s smart city Social Credit System is able to monitor each person in the society, and tracks every element of their lives—including their friends, their online purchases, their daily behavior, and other information—and assigns each person a citizen score that determines their level of freedom in society.

The tool is a core piece of the CCP’s programs to monitor and persecute dissidents, including religious believers and people who oppose the ruling communist system.

Chinese human rights lawyer and visiting scholar at New York University Teng Biao described the Social Credit system as a new form of tyranny, meant to reactivate the CCP’s totalitarian hold on society.

“In the past, there was the Nazi totalitarianism and Mao Zedong’s totalitarian system, but a totalitarian system powered by the internet and contemporary technology has not existed before,” Teng said, in a recent interview with The Epoch Times.

“The CCP is now taking the first step to build such a high-tech totalitarian system, by using credit ratings and monitoring and recording every detail in people’s daily life, which is very frightening,” he said.

The CCP is also not interested in keeping the technology within its own borders. It is exporting the system, and its “China Model” of totalitarian government, as a service in its One Belt, One Road program. When the CCP builds its infrastructure abroad, its surveillance and social control programs are part of the package.

And in Darwin, Australia, there has been a push to jump on-board the CCP’s program. The local officials made a “friendship” deal with Yuexiu District, in Guangzhou, China, in 2018. According to The Conversation, the deal was branded by Chinese media as “part of President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative.”

This followed a previous deal between Darwin and the CCP, where they signed a 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin to a Chinese company and the CCP. The Chinese owner, Ye Cheng, had referred to the deal as being part of the One Belt, One Road program.

The deals should also raise concern for U.S. Marines stationed in Darwinunder the Obama-era pivot to the Pacific, and whether the CCP is also able to monitor data collected on cell phones from its systems in the area. Under a 2011 deal between the United States and Australia, the U.S. troops will be there until 2040.

And of similar concern, the decision of Australia to begin implementing the CCP’s programs for totalitarian social control represents a major development in the CCP’s China Model push.

As The Epoch Times has reported before, the CCP views Australia as a testing ground for programs it wants to spread to the West. After Australia comes Canada, then the United States—in an apparent imitation of Mao Zedong’s strategy to “surround the cities with the countryside.”

If it wasn't for Max Igan very few of us would have been aware of the dangerous development.

He talks about it here.