China blocks 17.5 million plane tickets for people without enough 'social credit'

Would-be passengers blacklisted for offences as minor as walking dogs without lead.

The Chinese government blocked 17.5 million would-be plane passengers from buying tickets last year as a punishment for offences including the failure to pay fines, it emerged.
Some 5.5 million people were also barred from travelling by train under a controversial “social credit” system which the ruling Communist Party claims will improve public behaviour.

The penalties are part of efforts by president Xi Jinping‘s government to use data-processing and other technology to tighten control on society.
Human rights activists warn the system is too rigid and may lead to people being unfairly blacklisted without their knowledge, while US vice-president Mike Pence last year denounced it as “an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every facet of human life”.

Authorities have experimented with social credit in parts of China since 2014. Points are deducted for breaking the law, but also, in some areas, for offences as minor as walking a dog without a lead.
Offences punished last year also included false advertising and violating drug safety rules, said China’s National Public Credit Information Centre. It gave no details of how many people live in areas with social credit systems.

Social credit is one facet of efforts by the ruling party to take advantage of increased computing power, artificial intelligence and other technology to track and control the Chinese public.
In 2000 the police ministry launched an initiative dubbed “Golden Shield” to build a nationwide digital network to track individuals.

The ruling party is spending heavily to roll out facial recognition systems, and human rights activists say people in Muslim and other areas with high ethnic minority populations have been compelled to give blood samples for a genetic database.

Those systems rely heavily on foreign technology, which has prompted criticism of US and European suppliers for enabling human rights abuses.

#MassSurveillance #China #why #GoldenShield #HumanRights
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EU court smashes Privacy Shield

The highest court in the EU demands effective protection of European data from mass surveillance in the USA.

The European Court of Justice does not consider the level of data protection in the US to be equivalent to that in the European Union. That is why the court declared a decision by the EU Commission on the transfer of personal data of Europeans* to the USA, known as Privacy Shield, illegal today, Thursday.

👀 👉🏼 PDF:
https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-07/cp200091en.pdf

#masssurveillance #usa #eu #court #privacyshield #pdf
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The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence

The EU wants to have all private chats, messages, and emails automatically searched for suspicious content, generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. The result: Mass surveillance through fully automated real-time messaging and chat control and the end of secrecy of digital correspondence.

In 2020 the European Commission proposed “temporary” legislation aimed at allowing the search of all private chats, messages, and emails for illegal depictions of minors and attempted initiation of contacts with minors. This is to allow the providers of Facebook Messenger, Gmail, et al, to scan every message for suspicious text and images. This takes place in a fully automated process and using error-prone “artificial intelligence”. If an algorithm considers a message suspicious, its content and meta-data are disclosed automatically and without human verification to a private US-based organization and from there to national police authorities worldwide. The reported users are not notified.

Some U.S. providers of services such as Gmail and Outlook.com are already performing such automated messaging and chat controls. Through a second piece of legislation, the EU Commission intends to oblige all providers of chat, messaging and e-mail services to deploy this mass surveillance technology.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/?page_id=594160&lang=en

#eu #privacy #masssurveillance #surveillance #messaging #thinkabout
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Electrospaces (@electrospaces): "The US Supreme Court refused to hear the Wikimedia Foundation's case against the NSA's Upstream collection program under section 702FAA authority: https://www.rawstory.com/letting-secrecy-prevail-scotus-declines-to-hear-challenge-to-nsa-mass-surveillance/" | FOSS.WTF
https://nitter.foss.wtf/electrospaces/status/1628836471892312066#m

#NSA #MassSurveillance #Wikimedia

#France: Allowing #masssurveillance
at Olympics undermines EU efforts to regulate #AI - Amnesty International
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/03/france-allowing-mass-surveillance-at-olympics-undermines-eu-efforts-to-regulate-ai/

Reclaim Your Face (@ReclaimYourFace): "1/7 🗓️Tomorrow, @Europarl_EN has an opportunity to make history. So much of what we have been fighting for for years as #ReclaimYourFacewill be on the line. Read on to understand what's happening, and why it matters, in the fight against biometric #MassSurveillance (BMS)🧵" | nitter – https://nitter.net/ReclaimYourFace/status/1656258504477270016#m

Will MEPs ban Biometric Mass Surveillance in key EU AI Act vote? - European Digital Rights (EDRi) – https://edri.org/our-work/meps-ban-biometric-mass-surveillance-in-eu-ai-act/

The UK’s Secretive Web Surveillance Program Is Ramping Up | WIRED UK – https://www.wired.co.uk/article/internet-connection-records-uk-surveillance

A government effort to collect people’s internet records is moving beyond its test phase, but many details remain hidden from public view.

A government effort to collect people’s internet records is moving beyond its test phase, but many details remain hidden from public view.
The UK government is quietly expanding and developing a controversial surveillance technology that could be capable of logging and storing the web histories of millions of people.

Official reports and spending documents show that in the past year, UK police have deemed the testing of a system that can collect people’s “internet connection records” a success, and have started work to potentially introduce the system nationally. If implemented, it could hand law enforcement a powerful surveillance tool.

#UK #BigBrother #logs #MassSurveillance #Surveillance #BAE #BaeSystems

Press Release (CSA Regulation): Who benefits from the EU Commission's mass surveillance law? - European Digital Rights (EDRi)

The investigation published today confirms our worst fears: The most criticised European law touching on technology in the last decade is the product of the lobby of private corporations and law enforcement. Commissioner Johansson ignored academia and civil society in Europe while she shook hands with Big Tech in order to propose a law that will attempt to legalise mass surveillance and break encryption. “

#DSA #EU #UK #E2E #MassSurveillance #Surveillance #BigBrother

EU’s Plan To Mass Surveil Private Chats Has Leaked

A new version of controversial "chat control" regulation has leaked, revealing unchanged mass surveillance plans and threats to digital privacy.

The latest version of the proposed European Parliament (EP) and EU Council regulation to adopt new rules related to combating child sexual abuse has been made available online.

Despite its declared goal, the proposal, which first saw the light of day in May 2022 and is referred to by opponents as “chat control” is in fact a highly divisive draft of legislation that aims to accomplish the stated objective through mass surveillance of citizens’ private communications

@reclaimthenet
#EU #EUChatControl #ChatControl #BigBrother #MassSurveillance #Surveillance