20th
Beijing’s 70,000 taxis have had equipment installed in the run up to the Olympics, that enable the authorities to bug them, track them via GPS and disable them remotely. Apparently this is all in the name of driver safety, but then, that is the official line.
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China is an interesting case study for this kind of invasive technology. In democracies, we often believe the line that people, who do no wrong, have nothing to fear. While it’s possible that regime change would happen, it seems a pretty remote concept, even though I’m sure most Germans felt the same thing in the early 1930s. But imagine what Hitler and later, Stalin and his successors in East Germany, could have done if they could track every move their citizens made and every word they spoke, along with the ability to monitor patterns of words analysed by the powerful computing technology of today.