Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

According to this story, China’s newspapers have already declared China the winner of the most gold medals in the 2008 Olympics. With 43 gold medals already bagged, Chinese media declares, the United States has been defeated.
Confused? China’s Dongguan Times is not. Headline : “China Is Not Confused.”
I’d have written more about the onslaught of totalitarian-tech that has been on display during the Beijing Olympics - the ultra-surveillance, the constant body scanning, the crushing of free protest in the streets and free speech online, the massive databases that suck up every online detail of everyone who enters the country and generates multiple profiles, the military vehicles roaming public events laden with yet more cameras and yet more scanners - if this was not the way cities in Australia, across the UK, the US, Europe, even New Zealand were already heading.

Surveillance, luggage and body scanning and profiling technology developed in Australia and the US, and elsewhere in the west, was marketed to China for the Beijing Olympics years ago. They brought at least a billion dollars worth of totalitarian-tech tested in the streets of cities like Sydney, London, Melbourne, New York, LA, specifically for the Games.

What worked here, was sold there. And what is perfected there, while our media shouts “Look! Look how unfree they are!”, will be sold back to our governments, and added to the arsenal of anti-privacy measures available to those we bless with control over us.

We may not be right there with China on the re-education camps, the many executions, the farming of organs from political prisoners, but the same attitude, the same unwarranted distrust of your own people, the same disturbing desire to digitally lock away their secrets while stealing yours, is there. Here.

For today at least, you will still be captured on surveillance cameras more times walking through the streets of London then you would were you in Beijing, attending the Olympics.

The next big marketing mecca for normalising the daily, often deeply personal intrusion of totalitarian-tech will be, of course, the London Olympics in 2012.

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