Learn from the best in mass surveillance

aelf

Ashen One
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How can I be a patriotic citizen if I don't promote stories about my country? And, this time, it concerns the USA too.

It's a very long article, so I will just quote excerpts.

The Social Laboratory

Singapore is testing whether mass surveillance and big data can not only protect national security, but actually engineer a more harmonious society.

In October 2002, Peter Ho, the permanent secretary of defense for the tiny island city-state of Singapore, paid a visit to the offices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Defense Department's R&D outfit... Ho didn't want to talk about military hardware. Rather, he had made the daylong plane trip to meet with retired Navy Rear Adm. John Poindexter, one of DARPA's then-senior program directors and a former national security advisor to President Ronald Reagan. Ho had heard that Poindexter was running a novel experiment to harness enormous amounts of electronic information and analyze it for patterns of suspicious activity -- mainly potential terrorist attacks.
"I was impressed with the sheer audacity of the concept: that by connecting a vast number of databases, that we could find the proverbial needle in the haystack," Ho later recalled. He wanted to know whether the system, which was not yet deployed in the United States, could be used in Singapore to detect the warning signs of terrorism.
Ho returned home inspired that Singapore could put a TIA-like system to good use... Using Poindexter's design, the government soon established the Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning program (RAHS, pronounced "roz") inside a Defense Ministry agency responsible for preventing terrorist attacks and "nonconventional" strikes, such as those using chemical or biological weapons -- an effort to see how Singapore could avoid or better manage "future shocks." Singaporean officials gave speeches and interviews about how they were deploying big data in the service of national defense -- a pitch that jibed perfectly with the country's technophilic culture.
Because of such uproars, many current and former U.S. officials have come to see Singapore as a model for how they'd build an intelligence apparatus if privacy laws and a long tradition of civil liberties weren't standing in the way. After Poindexter left DARPA in 2003, he became a consultant to RAHS, and many American spooks have traveled to Singapore to study the program firsthand. They are drawn not just to Singapore's embrace of mass surveillance but also to the country's curious mix of democracy and authoritarianism, in which a paternalistic government ensures people's basic needs -- housing, education, security -- in return for almost reverential deference.
Most Singaporeans I met hardly cared that they live in a surveillance bubble and were acutely aware that they're not unique in some respects. "Don't you have cameras everywhere in London and New York?" many of the people I talked to asked. (In fact, according to city officials, "London has one of the highest number of CCTV cameras of any city in the world.") Singaporeans presumed that the cameras deterred criminals and accepted that in a densely populated country, there are simply things you shouldn't say. "In Singapore, people generally feel that if you're not a criminal or an opponent of the government, you don't have anything to worry about," one senior government official told me.
This year, the World Justice Project, a U.S.-based advocacy group that studies adherence to the rule of law, ranked Singapore as the world's second-safest country. Prized by Singaporeans, this distinction has earned the country a reputation as one of the most stable places to do business in Asia. Interpol is also building a massive new center in Singapore to police cybercrime. It's only the third major Interpol site outside Lyon, France, and Argentina, and it reflects both the international law enforcement group's desire to crack down on cybercrime and its confidence that Singapore is the best place in Asia to lead that fight.

Looks like the USA and the decadent West is finally catching on.

Many major Western countries are stuck in a situation where political parties either support low taxes and civil liberties or high taxes and a lot of regulation. You people need political parties that support low taxes, regulation of civil society and mass surveillance. Believe me, the corporates love it.

So do you agree?
 
Yep, Singapore is awesome, and the entire world should be modelled on it because it is so awesome. The pinnacle of human civilization has been figured out by these Singaporeans, it's about time the rest of us start catching up and signing on.

I thought that was Poland?
 
I thought that was Poland?

Not Poland, Poland is an anarchist wasteland where teenagers roam the streets chewing bubble gum, homosexuals fornicate legally in the privacy of their own bedrooms, and people hug eachother openly in the streets like the freaks that they are.
 
Many major Western countries are stuck in a situation where political parties either support low taxes and civil liberties or high taxes and a lot of regulation. You people need political parties that support low taxes, regulation of civil society and mass surveillance. Believe me, the corporates love it.

So do you agree?

Dunno. Maybe.

The UK has a great deal of surveillance, and I think, even now, someone is watching my every key stroke. (They're totally wasting their time on me, though.)

As for outdoor surveillance, I'm all for it. As far as I know, the best deterrence for petty criminal activity, and all kinds of antisocial behaviour, is fear of getting caught, and if someone is watching public spaces they're quite likely to be caught.
 
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