Cards of Control and a Brave Little Toaster
November 17, 2018·0 comments·In Brief
The conversation about surveillance has fixated on the wrong technology. Video recognition systems dominate headlines and fuel anxiety, yet they remain expensive, imprecise, and defeatable with a simple adversarial sticker. Meanwhile, the infrastructure actually reshaping how governments track populations operates almost invisibly through ID cards and app data, which are far more reliable and harder to circumvent.
- Video surveillance feels threatening because it mimics human sight, but the technical reality is messier. Fooling facial recognition requires little more than a specially designed sticker placed on your head. The cost and complexity of processing video at scale makes it an impractical primary surveillance tool.
- The real control infrastructure is hiding in systems most people interact with daily. National ID cards and application data collection achieve what cameras cannot: reliable, comprehensive tracking of movement and behavior without the processing burden or failure rates of video systems.
- Venezuela's implementation of ZTE ID cards reveals how this infrastructure gets deployed in practice. When governments want population-scale control, they're not betting on cameras. They're building systems that create digital records at every checkpoint, transaction, and interaction.
- Most people won't notice or resist because the inconvenience threshold remains low. Staying out of video systems is technically possible. Opting out of ID and app-based tracking requires abandoning modern life itself, so the choice effectively makes itself.
- What remains unclear is how dependent societies become on this kind of data infrastructure once it's woven into the basic functions of daily life. The question isn't whether surveillance is coming. It's whether the systems we're building now become irreversible.
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