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indiscretions could be used to apply pressure upon opponents to government policy. cross-reference the serial number on your ID card with your name and address. Stores spend a lot of money acquiring data, so knowing customers’ names and addresses with certainty has really got to be worth something. Customers will no longer be able to hide their identities or give false names on loyalty cards. See ee es addresses with certa Population Surveillance and Social Control something. Customers will no longer be able to hide China has become a laboratory for both capitalism and heir identities or give false names on loyalty cards. the development of new technologies for surveillance and "homeland security". Naomi Klein has written When Employers Use Profiling extensively about this in her book The Shock Doctrine Some corporations already apply psychometric (Picador, 2008) and in articles such as "China's All- profiling to their staff and potential employees to get a | Seeing Eye" and "The Olympics: Unveiling Police State workforce with the "right" profile, the "right" attitudes. 2.0" (www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008?page=1). magine how RFID tracking and profiling could facilitate Some powerful people appear to have decided that his, profiling individuals’ whole lives. capitalism works best in conditions of inequality and By enabling ubiquitous tracking and profiling, could injustice. A by-product of this is instability: bitterness D systems herald a corporate culture of conformity, | and resentment due to the appropriation of land and with enforced redundancy for those who don't fit the resources and forcing peasants off the land to become right profile? sweatshop workers living in unbearable slums. There have been widespread examples of employers This is about the rich getting richer by robbing discriminating against ordinary people, co-opting the individuals on the grounds of power of the state to do so. political or union artiliations. RFID has an obvious his fs the reason for the high e nformation . . . we incidence co) , Commissioner's Office found application: the identities "disturbances" and_ social tot many vert Large end of everyone in a crowd ss! 9 cmtenporn China engaged in illegal practices to could be collected by one What the West has tried to do this. ‘ ‘ m_ do, however, is guarantee What would happen if mingling plain clothes China's stability and help keep employers used data gleaned policeman with an a lid on any trouble by from ID systems and social RFID reader providing China with access to networks analysis to profile the latest surveillance and staff, to find their friends and security technology, to make it associates and any affiliations? a more effective dictatorship. What would it mean to society and political culture i ew technologies that are found to work in the social corporate employers could identify and discriminate aboratory of China can be adopted and applied against political and union activists, making it hard for — elsewhere. them to get a job? Would that be compatible with A good example of this would be facial recognition democracy? echnology, supplied to China by the US, illegally but Emeritus Professor Sheldon S. Wolin, a politica with a nod and a wink, to make it easier for the Chinese philosopher at Princeton University, USA, has warned o} authorities to identify troublemakers in a crowd or the danger of "inverted totalitarianism", as he calls it, | simply follow the movements of people of interest and which "lies in wielding total power without appearing to, perhaps identify any people whom they meet and talk without establishing concentration camps, or enforcing with. Recognition systems now can match one face in a ideological uniformity, or forcibly suppressing dissiden million, good enough to find one face in a city. How elements so long as they remain ineffectual". Such neatly this dovetails with the database of digital images power, as in the USA, shows "how democracy can be _ provided by China's ID system. managed without appearing to be suppressed". (Chellis RFID also has applications in the state security Glendinning, “Every Move You Make", — apparatus. China is issuing hand-held RFID readers to CounterPunch.com, 19 June 2008) its policemen so they can take people's identities from Imagine if the power of the surveillance state were heir ID cards. It has the highest incidence of riots of applied to controlling political dissent, especially in an any country in the world, due to the severe social environment of merger between state and corporate — conditions and inequality. power. Imagine dissidents being driven from their jobs China has adopted the practice of containing or, perhaps more subtly, just denied promotion. disturbances rather than wading in to break them up; Imagine how detailed files on the psychological instead of arresting rioters on the spot, the police weaknesses and vulnerabilities of all individuals, | merely identify them—to arrest one by one at their generated by profiling, and records of any past convenience. application: the identities of everyone ina crowd could be collected by one mingling plain-clothes policeman with an NEXUS ¢ 15 RFID has an obvious RFID reader. OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 2009 www.nexusmagazine.com