China Archives - ACOMSDave

“World Press Freedom Index 2024”

22/09/2024 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

"World Press Freedom Index 2024"

In a summary of a report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), “World Press Freedom Index 2024”, has stated that more than 50% of the global population resides in countries classified as having a “very serious” press freedom situation, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF)’s 2024 World Press Freedom Index. This alarming statistic highlights the dire circumstances faced by journalists, with individuals in these regions often risking their lives and freedoms to report the news. Presently, 36 countries—up from 31 in 2023—are marked in red on RSF’s press freedom map, indicating severe restrictions, including five of the world’s ten most populous nations: India (159th), China (172nd), Pakistan (152nd), Bangladesh (165th), and Russia (162nd).

Recent elections in these countries have underscored the extent of press freedom violations, with governments exerting control over information and resorting to violence against journalists. For instance, China remains the world’s largest jailer of journalists, while Russia has introduced laws to suppress dissent ahead of its own elections. In Bangladesh, journalist safety deteriorated amidst political turmoil, and Pakistan’s media censorship intensified during election campaigns. In India, disinformation campaigns and harassment of journalists have escalated as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks a third term.

RSF emphasizes that the coming year poses risks for information freedom, as 76 countries with a combined population of 4.1 billion are set to hold elections, creating fertile ground for government manipulation of news. The situation is already tense in other populous nations like Mexico and Indonesia, highlighting a worrying trend for media freedom worldwide.

The report calls on the 36 countries categorized as having severe press freedom issues to address and rectify these obstructive practices.

Links:

Surveillance and Big Brother

23/03/2020 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

On December 14, 2019 Annalee Newitz in the New Scientist wrote:

‘Who owns your face? Smart doorbells containing cameras can be fun, but we can’t be sure what pictures of our faces are used for – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg’

The data captured by these devices is uploaded to server farms where the data is mined for the ‘better-good’ of the company supplying the device, ‘but also for you’; but does the use of data end there? The answer is no, for the data can be access with your authority if you own a device by police and other services, and obviously governments are taking a high (low) level interest in this data.

The problem is that the police and other government agencies who access this data will do so and then run facial recognition software, which is currently very unreliable, particularly when it comes to people of colour. Obviously, the tech companies are working on shortening this gap, and they are thinking outside the box to do so (like Google hiring a contractor to take photographs of the homeless to increase the range of their app)

But it is not just tech companies, it is also governments. When you have a chance research the deal that the Chinese government struck with the Zimbabwe government to do amass surveillance of the faces of Zimbabweans; and there are other things that the Chinese government have done that really make you despair for the human race and its civil liberties.

As a sideline to this article, tucked in a side strip on page seven of the New Scientist, was an article about a DNA site being sold to a firm aiding the police. The GEDmatch site has more than 1.2 million people and their results stored there, and the US police used this site to trace a suspected serial killer, and this site has been bought by Verogen whose CEO, Brett Williams, stated:

‘…a vision for the site that focuses on solving crimes, not just connecting family members via DNA’

obviously, he and his team foresee a very lucrative market in government and government agency circles.

India has also announced that it wants (intends) to build one of the largest facial recognition systems in the world. The question must be asked what is the Indian Government’s reason? Also, considering my note on facial recognition software being unreliable for people of colour, what does this really mean for a country which has major problems inherently with the social groups who live in the country?

Maya Wang at Human Rights watch, said:

…The proposed system won’t just affect privacy, it will have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to exercise other rights, such as freedom of assembly or expression…

In George Orwell’s story “1984” he used the phrase ‘Big Brother is Watching You’. The phrase referred to the government’ surveillance of the people (by the people and for the people) by a myriad of techniques including listening devices and cameras. This was reinforced through the use of posters used by the government to reinforce that the government wants complete obedience…

The phrase has since become a symbolic representation of dictators and dictatorial regimes … but people don’t say this phrase outwardly in those regimes!

Now today’s government will site the fact of global terrorism and their need for ‘Big Brother’ techniques to combat, but one must ask at what cost to our rights and civil liberties. Where and what point do we say enough is enough, or will it be too late when we do say it, will the barn door be blown away and the horse long gone?

The European Union is considering banning facial recognition for up to five years, however with Brexit being undertaken by the UK it is more than conceivable that Westminster and all the various government quangos will jump quickly (and quietly) on the band wagon to say they urgently need this technology now that we have to go on our own. Will this also have an impact on our border relationships with Ireland the border between North and South?

But where did CCTV start?

In October 1942, German engineers led by Wernher von Braun, sat in a remote control watching a television screen and monitored the test of the V2 (the Vergeltungswaffe or “vengeance weapon”. This control room was situated some 2.5km (1.4 miles) away from the launch pad. So why is this the birth of CCTV and monitoring ‘Big Brother’ style; from these modest beginnings that monitoring developed to the extent it is today.

…the pictures in that control room were the first example of a video feed being used not for broadcasting, but for real-time monitoring, in private – over a so-called “closed circuit”. Tim Hartford (Jan 2020).

CCTV was the start of what has now developed into an extremely large and lucrative industry for some, and the demolishing of civil liberties for many.

This Disturbing Video Exposes China’s ‘Electroshock’ Gay ‘Conversion’ Methods

21/10/2015 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

Curtis M. WongGay Voices Senior Editor, The Huffington Post

Beijing activist John Shen went undercover in an effort to expose the use of controversial “conversion” methods that promise to “cure” gay and lesbian people in China.
U.K. television network Channel 4 has produced a new documentary titled, “Unreported World,” which follows John, 22, and other members of China’s largest LGBT rights group, theBeijing LGBT Center, as they take viewers behind the scenes for a close-up look at a few of the outlandish, horrifying techniques — including electroshock therapy — used in clinics across the country. These “cures,” of course, have absolutely no basis in science.
Still, the resulting footage is quite unsettling.
“Your current conditioned reflex is when you see the same sex, you feel love,” one medical professional at a clinic in Tianjin told Shen in the report. She went on to suggest drugs and electric shocks as methods for ridding one’s self of same-sex attraction. “Now what I want to make you feel is scared,” she said.
Another clinician is shown physically administering an electric shock treatment at a hospital outside of Beijing.
The report is particularly disconcerting given that it comes less than a year after a Chinese psychological clinic was ordered to pay 3,500 yuan ($560) to a gay man for administrating such treatments. The 30-year-old patient, Yang Teng, had taken the clinic to court for administering electric shocks and hypnosis with the aim of making him heterosexual. He’d voluntarily visited the clinic in 2014 after pressure from family members to marry and have a child, according to the Associated Press.
The court ruled that such “conversion” treatments were illegal.
China dropped homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 2001. Still, the nation has no anti-discrimination legislation acknowledging the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in place, and same-sex marriage remains illegal.
You can check out the full “Unreported World” documentary here.

China Approves First Film About Gay Relationship

04/09/2015 By ACOMSDave Leave a Comment

By Natalie Ilsley | International Business Times

Chinese Director

Chinese film regulators have approved screenings of a movie featuring a gay relationship for the first time, according to its director, Wang Chao, who broke the news via a post on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Chao described the decision as “a small step for the film department and a big step for the members of the film industry.”
The film, called Seek McCartney, follows a secret cross-cultural relationship between a French and Chinese man and is being hailed by critics as “a breakthrough in the country’s heavily censored media,” reports AFP. It was co-produced by studios in France and China, and stars popular Chinese singer and actor Han Geng and French actor Jeremy Elkain, playing the lead roles.
However, Chinese LGBT filmmaker and rights activist, Fan Popo, said it was too soon to celebrate given the Chinese government’s unpredictable implementation of censorship. “The fact that this film can be released in theatres doesn’t mean gay films in the future will be able to be released in China,” he told AFP, adding that the screening “depends heavily on the individual censor’s whims.”
While gay characters have appeared in supporting roles in Chinese films, Seek McCartney is the first film permitted for release in the country to feature a plot centered entirely on a homosexual couple. Previously, films with narratives about homosexual relationships have been banned from release in China, including Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain in 2006. Chinese regulators Variety.

Homosexuality in China was only decriminalised in 1997 and removed from the Ministry of Health’s list of mental illnesses in 2001. According to newspaper US-China Today, homosexuality is reportedly becoming more accepted in cities. Walter Williams, a University of Southern California professor who has been studying gender and sexuality in Asia since 1983, told the newspaper: “China right now is very similar to the U.S. in the 1960s, in regards to homosexuality…but I think that at the rate China is moving along, we will see China at the forefront of gay liberation.”