The Chinese government has in the past years greatly intensified her crackdown on anybody who expressed any disagreement at all with Communism. This is consistent with patterns in Chinese history, for it is a well-documented paradigm that as China enters into a period of relative prosperity and her people’s lives begin to improve, the Chinese government does not make efforts to better the lives of her people and expand outward, but begins to turn inward at attempt to make rash comparisons as to who is a “better citizen” than others. This always results in an erosion of the forward progress made before and turns China against herself in a process of self-cannibalism that in time always collapses into revolution and invasion by foreign powers.
The persecutions that the government inflicts on her people vary by the tools implemented and that which is available in current times. However, the fundamental principles remain the same.
In modern times, the advent of the Internet has opened up great prospects for China have without question benefited her. However, the Chinese now appear to be entering into their historical cycle of self-cannibalism, where the Internet is being seen as a threat as well as access to information. Instead of attempting to self-modify and work with the Internet, the Chinese are now attacking it as well as anybody who says anything critical of China on the Internet in a way that is beginning to hurt the people. This is also at the same time that China is implementing a “social credit” system that rewards or punishes people based on their obedience to ridiculous ideas of “support” of the Chinese government and the Communist party.
China has now, following her common historical trajectory, decided to gravely worsen her situation by combining the two in a new rule which requires residents to pass a facial recognition test in order to apply for an internet connection via smartphone or computer. After Dec. 1, 2019, no cell phone or landline number can be transferred to another person privately.
First, all telecom carriers must use facial recognition to test whether an applicant who applies for internet connection is the owner of the ID that they use since Dec. 1. At the same time, the carriers must test that the ID is genuine and valid.
Second, all telecom carriers must upgrade their service’s terms and conditions and notify all their customers that they are not allowed to transfer or resell their cell phone SIM card to another person by the end of November 2019.
Third, telecom carriers should help their customers to check whether there are cell phone or landline numbers that don’t belong to them but registered under their names since Dec. 1. For unidentified numbers, the telecom carries must investigate and close the lines immediately.
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“The reason why the Chinese regime asks people to register their real identities to surf the internet is because it wants to control people’s speech,” U.S.-based commentator Tang Jingyuan told The Epoch Times on Sept. 27.
The ultimate purpose of such integration would seem to be in order to connect any website that a person visits to the entire social credit system and thus theoretically track any website, down to the minute clicks that a person makes on various links online and then to adjust his “score” based upon this. It is a massive attempt to control public opinion in a very serious and detailed way that will likely take away free speech permanently, as people would naturally be in fear of expressing their real opinions online because it would result in them being traced.
While this system is being installed in China, there are legitimate fear that a variant of it could be applied in all countries around the world, where technology, once hailed as a friend and savior, becomes an enemy used to enslave men.
That said, there are two immediate options which need to be looked at for circumventing or causing havoc in such a system.
The first option is the emergence of blockchain web access. Based upon the same principle of Bitcoin, while blockchain does not permanently prevent a person from being shielded from discovery, the nature of the transaction creates a more difficult process by which one can be discovered.
The second option is general mayhem and trolling, something not uncommon to the Internet at large.
In the Internet world, there are some people who do things which just cause chaos. This can be identity theft, financial fraud, or just posting random things online that are disgusting or confusing to people. While not necessarily in the individual acts themselves, the processes of such acts can break down the levels of social trust and confuse people as to what truth actually is.
The Chinese social credit system runs on a presumption of truth as determined by an AI computer. However, even the best AI is not a human and cannot detect all of the fine nuances that a man can, nor ever will under purely natural circumstances.
That said, what if people started trolling members of the Chinese Communist party online? It could take any number of forms, including the posting of random things, anti-Chinese things, or just anything that would trigger a “warning” in the social credit system that flags officials and “lowers” their score.
It doesn’t have to be just major officials. It could be small things or small officials in the party. What matters is not the response of the person, but how the computer that sees what he sees responds.
For example, consider an average communist official. These people have emails, twitters, etc. by which they communicate and people respond to them and naturally interact with them, even if it is only limited.
What is to say that a person starts sending these people emails saying, in Chinese, things such as “You are right, the Chines communist party is a bunch of idiots and Chairman Mao was a stupid ape.”?
Now one is assuming that such officials do not believe these things, and if they did, they would never say them. Most likely they would delete the emails.
But that does not matter. If the IP was masked to appear to be from China, and given the clear nature of the emails, what would the AI computer think?
It might “lower” his score, which would cause chaos in the ranks of the party.
One can take this as far as one wants. Using the same example, what if one was to mask the IP as though the email came from Japan, and have text that says “CJK 400 all is well, sun is rising on the Nanjing project.” (sun refers to the Japanese imperial flag, and Nanjing referring to the Nanjing Massacre at the hands of Japan).
What would the computer think of this?
Undoubtedly there are more ways of equal creativity and possibly with greater effects.
I’m not even saying that individual Chinese living in China may be able to do this with ease. However, one cannot doubt that some will try, possibly even using stolen cellphones or stolen Internet access capabilities.
Here is another possibility- consider the AI facial manipulation videos that Shoebat.com has discussed. Could they not be manipulated to manufacture events that could be used to confuse a Chinese AI system?
Imagine the consequences this could have.
China can clamp down as hard as she wants, even in historically incomparable ways. But no system is foolproof, and the more complex it is, for the clever mind, the more seriously in can be exploited to its own self-destruction.