Chinese citizens feel their government is doing such a fine job with surveillance Chinese residents are generally comfortable with widespread use of surveillance technology, according to a year-long project conducted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and an unnamed non-government research partner. The project mainly investigated how state surveillance is conducted by Beijing and how the …
How do they know it was really a foreign survey and not their own government looking for rabble rousers? Or that their own government's surveillance would report how they answered? I'm not sure such a survey would reflect their true viewpoint.
What they should have done, is at the end of the survey, ask whether the person draws their curtains in the evening, or has net curtains up etc.
If they answer "yes", then you can probably discount the "we are ok with being monitored 24/7" response.
I don't see how any of the reported opinions here could be trusted. When you live in a country where expressing any kind of opinion which is critical of the government on the Internet can end up with you being sent to a work camp for 20 years, the results of any survey have to be regarded with extreme suspicion.
The fact that this report was created by a five-eyes participant who would love to be able to implement such far ranging surveillance on it's own population should immediately raise a huge red flag regarding the impartiality and possible propaganda aspects of the report.
From the Wikipedia article:
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) is a defence and strategic policy think tank based in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, founded by the Australian government, and funded by the Australian Department of Defence along with overseas governments, and defence and technology companies.
Now why would a government funded think tank with ties to the defence industry and most of the players who stand to make lots of money from implementing Chinese style surveillance on the Australian population be regarded as impartial in any way?
This article is a surveillance propaganda exercise.
The survey was a surveillance propaganda exercise, the article was just a useful idiot in the wider privacy debate.
Is this the same ASPI who suggested our new, yet to be built, NBN class* nuclear submarines be based in Brisbane because of both our and the US subs based here during ww2?
Those rocket surgeons totally ignoring that subs will need to surfaced to use the one channel into the port which starts near Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast, 90 or so km long.
*Some blogs I am on refer to them as such because they will cost a lot mor than budgetted, hellishly late and a 3 world solution, as opposed to the cancelled "Turnbull" class of French origin.
There could be three possible reasons for this.
1) They are genuinely happy.
2) They answered they are happy because they were worried about potential reprisals if they didn't.
3) They have been observed so closely for so long that they accept this kind of close monitoring as part of every day life, and even like it.
The general sentiment here is that this survey must be complete rubbish. I lean in that direction, and certainly hope it is, but...
I remember that after 9/11, most of my fellow USAians were perfectly happy to give up liberty in the pursuit of "security". Core values we supposedly had of a right to a fair trial, freedom from surveillance, etc. were merrily discarded. (As they had been fifty years earlier during the McCarthy era. And somewhat so during the post-WW1 Red Scare.)
The Chinese government has almost total control of what their citizens know about, of the sort Western politicians can (thus far) only dream of. I doubt most Chinese people think that they, personally, need to be surveilled. But they may be convinced that everybody else on the planet needs to be surveilled.
Nobody sensible will reply in anything other than effusively positive terms, because you never know if the data could be de-anonymized in future. There's no benefit in saying something that could come back to bite you.
There are protocols (Randomized Response Surveys) that allow you to draw conclusions from real data mixed in with random data, but unless they have used them, the survey is junk propaganda. RRS's give participants deniable answers.
The problem with this is that the survey power is diluted (so you need more participants); and in addition, simply being identified as a participant (especially if by de-anonymization) is probably enough to get you marked for further watching by the authorities, more so if the results of the survey are controversial, even if they can't pin particular answers on you.
There's a more pressing problem, as to whether the respondents believe that the survey is anonymous and randomised. In the case of authoritarian governments, any sensible participant will rightly assume that they cannot afford to trust promises of anonymity, moreover they'd be sensible to assume the survey is a government subterfuge to identify people who have wrong thoughts. Mind you, the EU isn't far off that: https://eu.boell.org/en/homegrown-disinformation
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