Electronic surveillance

China’s Surveillance Ambitions

If you ask Americans and Europeans to name the biggest threats to their personal privacy, many might say Google or the U.S. National Security Agency. But as Western societies debate the legal limits for collecting and sharing data post-Edward Snowden, and as international companies work on encryption technologies to keep the state at bay and users at ease, a whole new surveillance game is under way in China.

These plans aren’t widely understood in the West, but their contours are already clear. The government will try to link a large amount of public and private data, with the goal of building the world’s first all-encompassing system of cybersurveillance. The consequences of this big-data-enabled, information-technology-backed authoritarianism will be far-reaching, not only for Chinese citizens and businesses but for anyone connected to a person or entity in China.