organization:state council

China blacklists millions of people from booking flights as ’social credit’ system introduced

Officials say aim is to make it ‘difficult to move’ for those deemed ‘untrustworthy’.

Millions of Chinese nationals have been blocked from booking flights or trains as Beijing seeks to implement its controversial “#social_credit” system, which allows the government to closely monitor and judge each of its 1.3 billion citizens based on their behaviour and activity.

The system, to be rolled out by 2020, aims to make it “difficult to move” for those deemed “untrustworthy”, according to a detailed plan published by the government this week.

It will be used to reward or punish people and organisations for “trustworthiness” across a range of measures.

A key part of the plan not only involves blacklisting people with low social credibility scores, but also “publicly disclosing the records of enterprises and individuals’ untrustworthiness on a regular basis”.

The plan stated: “We will improve the credit blacklist system, publicly disclose the records of enterprises and individuals’ untrustworthiness on a regular basis, and form a pattern of distrust and punishment.”

For those deemed untrustworthy, “everywhere is limited, and it is difficult to move, so that those who violate the law and lose the trust will pay a heavy price”.

The credit system is already being rolled out in some areas and in recent months the Chinese state has blocked millions of people from booking flights and high-speed trains.

According to the state-run news outlet Global Times, as of May this year, the government had blocked 11.14 million people from flights and 4.25 million from taking high-speed train trips.

The state has also begun to clamp down on luxury options: 3 million people are barred from getting business class train tickets, according to Channel News Asia.

The aim, according to Hou Yunchun, former deputy director of the development research centre of the State Council, is to make “discredited people become bankrupt”, he said earlier this year.

The eastern state of Hangzou, southwest of Shanghai, is one area where a social credit system is already in place.

People are awarded credit points for activities such as undertaking volunteer work and giving blood donations while those who violate traffic laws and charge “under-the-table” fees are punished.

Other infractions reportedly include smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online.

Punishments are not clearly detailed in the government plan, but beyond making travel difficult, are also believed to include slowing internet speeds, reducing access to good schools for individuals or their children, banning people from certain jobs, preventing booking at certain hotels and losing the right to own pets.

When plans for the social credit scheme were first announced in 2014, the government said the aim was to “broadly shape a thick atmosphere in the entire society that keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful”.

As well as the introduction in Beijing, the government plans a rapid national rollout. “We will implement a unified system of credit rating codes nationwide,” the country’s latest five-year plan stated.

The move comes as Beijing also faces international scrutiny over its treatment of a Muslim minority group, who have been told to turn themselves in to authorities if they observe practices such as abstention from alcohol.

#Hami city government in the far-western #Xinjiang region said people “poisoned by extremism, terrorism and separatism” would be treated leniently if they surrendered within the next 30 days.

As many as a million Muslim Uighurs are believed to have been rounded up and placed in “re-education” centres, in what China claims is a clampdown on religious extremism.

►https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-social-credit-system-flight-booking-blacklisted-beijing-points-
#Chine #surveillance #contrôle #liberté_de_mouvement #liberté_de_circulation #mobilité #crédit_social #comportement #liste_noire #volontariat #points #don_de_sang #alcool #extrémisme #terrorisme #séparatisme #Ouïghours

via @isskein

Who needs democracy when you have data? - MIT Technology Review
►https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democracy-when-you-have-data

https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/so18-china-1.jpg?cx=2&cy=1509&cw=2344&ch=1319&sw=1200

Hu Jintao, China’s leader from 2002 to 2012, had attempted to solve these problems by permitting a modest democratic thaw, allowing avenues for grievances to reach the ruling class. His successor, Xi Jinping, has reversed that trend. Instead, his strategy for understanding and responding to what is going on in a nation of 1.4 billion relies on a combination of surveillance, AI, and big data to monitor people’s lives and behavior in minute detail.

As far as we know, there is no single master blueprint linking technology and governance in China. But there are several initiatives that share a common strategy of harvesting data about people and companies to inform decision-making and create systems of incentives and punishments to influence behavior. These initiatives include the State Council’s 2014 “Social Credit System,” the 2016 Cybersecurity Law, various local-level and private-enterprise experiments in “social credit,” “smart city” plans, and technology-driven policing in the western region of Xinjiang. Often they involve partnerships between the government and China’s tech companies.

The most far-reaching is the Social Credit System, though a better translation in English might be the “trust” or “reputation” system. The government plan, which covers both people and businesses, lists among its goals the “construction of sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, and judicial credibility.” (“Everybody in China has an auntie who’s been swindled. There is a legitimate need to address a breakdown in public trust,” says Paul Triolo, head of the geotechnology practice at the consultancy Eurasia Group.) To date, it’s a work in progress, though various pilots preview how it might work in 2020, when it is supposed to be fully implemented.

Blacklists are the system’s first tool. For the past five years, China’s court system has published the names of people who haven’t paid fines or complied with judgments. Under new social-credit regulations, this list is shared with various businesses and government agencies. People on the list have found themselves blocked from borrowing money, booking flights, and staying at luxury hotels. China’s national transport companies have created additional blacklists, to punish riders for behavior like blocking train doors or picking fights during a journey; offenders are barred from future ticket purchases for six or 12 months. Earlier this year, Beijing debuted a series of blacklists to prohibit “dishonest” enterprises from being awarded future government contracts or land grants.

A few local governments have experimented with social-credit “scores,” though it’s not clear if they will be part of the national plan.

“The idea of social credit is to monitor and manage how people and institutions behave,” says Samantha Hoffman of the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin. “Once a violation is recorded in one part of the system, it can trigger responses in other parts of the system. It’s a concept designed to support both economic development and social management, and it’s inherently political.” Some parallels to parts of China’s blueprint already exist in the US: a bad credit score can prevent you from taking out a home loan, while a felony conviction suspends or annuls your right to vote, for example. “But they’re not all connected in the same way—there’s no overarching plan,” Hoffman points out.

One of the biggest concerns is that because China lacks an independent judiciary, citizens have no recourse for disputing false or inaccurate allegations.

In the last two years thousands of checkpoints have been set up at which passersby must present both their face and their national ID card to proceed on a highway, enter a mosque, or visit a shopping mall. Uighurs are required to install government-­designed tracking apps on their smartphones, which monitor their online contacts and the web pages they’ve visited. Police officers visit local homes regularly to collect further data on things like how many people live in the household, what their relationships with their neighbors are like, how many times people pray daily, whether they have traveled abroad, and what books they have.

All these data streams are fed into Xinjiang’s public security system, along with other records capturing information on everything from banking history to family planning. “The computer program aggregates all the data from these different sources and flags those who might become ‘a threat’ to authorities,” says Wang. Though the precise algorithm is unknown, it’s believed that it may highlight behaviors such as visiting a particular mosque, owning a lot of books, buying a large quantity of gasoline, or receiving phone calls or email from contacts abroad. People it flags are visited by police, who may take them into custody and put them in prison or in reeducation camps without any formal charges.

#Chine #Surveillance #Social_ranking #Social_credits

Egypt : Supreme Constitutional Court validates Tiran and Sanafir treaty, overturns previous rulings | MadaMasr

▻https://www.madamasr.com/en/2018/03/04/feature/politics/supreme-constitutional-court-validates-tiran-and-sanafir-treaty-overturns-

The current legal contest over the maritime border demarcation agreement transferring sovereignty of the Tiran and Sanafir islands to Saudi Arabia was brought to a close on Saturday, when the Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) issued two verdicts that effectively overturned previous rulings, favoring cession of the islands.

This decision has ended the protracted judicial dispute over the deal that kicked off in 2016 and opened onto several fronts, according to lawyer Tarek Negeida. He adds that the next stage in legally contesting the agreement is likely to begin and could take years to resolve.

The first of the SCC’s Saturday verdicts rejected two lawsuits filed by the Egyptian State Lawsuits Authority (SLA), the body which represents the government in judicial proceedings. The suits contested the State Council’s jurisdiction over the case, pertaining to two previous rulings issued by administrative courts, on the basis that the deal can be categorized as a “sovereign action.”

The first State Council ruling was issued by the Court of Administrative Justice (CAJ) in June 2016, invalidating the prime ministers’ signature on the agreement. The second came in January 2017 when the appellate circuit of the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) upheld the June decision and ruled that the executive branch of the government does not have the administrative authority to cede territory to Saudi Arabia.

China unveils plan for ’Polar Silk Road’ across the Arctic | The Independent
▻http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-polar-silk-road-arctic-xi-jinping-shipping-global-warming-a8178

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2018/01/26/08/polar-silk-lane.jpg

China has outlined its ambitions to extend President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative to the Arctic by developing shipping lanes opened up by global warming.

Releasing its first official Arctic policy white paper, China said it would encourage enterprises to build infrastructure and conduct commercial trial voyages, paving the way for Arctic shipping routes that would form a “#Polar_Silk_Road”.

“China hopes to work with all parties to build a ’Polar Silk Road’ through developing the Arctic shipping routes,” the paper, issued by the State Council Information Office, said.

China, despite being a non-Arctic state, is increasingly active in the polar region and became an observer member of the Arctic Council in 2013.
[…]
China’s increasing prominence in the region has prompted concerns from Arctic states over its long-term strategic objectives, including possible military deployment.

“Some people may have misgivings over our participation in the development of the Arctic, worried we may have other intentions, or that we may plunder resources or damage the environment,” Vice-Foreign Minister Kong Xuanyou said at a briefing.

“I believe these kinds of concerns are absolutely unnecessary.”

#One_Belt_One_Road #OBOR
#Route_de_la_soie_polaire

Big data meets Big Brother as #China moves to rate its citizens | Wired
►http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion

n June 14, 2014, the State Council of China published an ominous-sounding document called “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System”. In the way of Chinese policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry affair, but it contained a radical idea. What if there was a national trust score that rated the kind of citizen you were?

Imagine a world where many of your daily activities were constantly monitored and evaluated: what you buy at the shops and online; where you are at any given time; who your friends are and how you interact with them; how many hours you spend watching content or playing video games; and what bills and taxes you pay (or not). It’s not hard to picture, because most of that already happens, thanks to all those data-collecting behemoths like Google, Facebook and Instagram or health-tracking apps such as Fitbit. But now imagine a system where all these behaviours are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number, according to rules set by the government. That would create your Citizen Score and it would tell everyone whether or not you were trustworthy. Plus, your rating would be publicly ranked against that of the entire population and used to determine your eligibility for a mortgage or a job, where your children can go to school - or even just your chances of getting a date.

A futuristic vision of #Big_Brother out of #control? No, it’s already getting underway in China, where the government is developing the #Social_Credit_System (SCS) to rate the trustworthiness of its 1.3 billion citizens. The Chinese government is pitching the system as a desirable way to measure and enhance “trust” nationwide and to build a culture of “sincerity”. As the policy states, “It will forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious. It will strengthen sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity and the construction of judicial credibility.”

Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens
►http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion

The Chinese government plans to launch its Social Credit System in 2020. The aim ? To judge the trustworthiness – or otherwise – of its 1.3 billion residents On June 14, 2014, the State Council of China published an ominous-sounding document called “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System”. In the way of Chinese policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry affair, but it contained a radical idea. What if there was a national trust score that rated the kind of (...)

#CCTV #biométrie #facial #surveillance #vidéo-surveillance

China’s Shanghai sets population at 25 million to avoid ‘big city disease’ | World news | The Guardian

▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/26/chinas-shanghai-sets-population-25-million--big-city-disease

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d725395732915ea773306e8140340db42e9b1a1e/745_944_6615_3968/master/6615.jpg?w=1200&h=630&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=crop&crop=faces%2Centropy&bm=normal&ba=bottom%2Cleft&blend64=aHR0cHM6Ly91cGxvYWRzLmd1aW0uY28udWsvMjAxNi8wNS8yNS9vdmVybGF5LWxvZ28tMTIwMC05MF9vcHQucG5n&s=7ba7d59355ade5d17ed51c89cda9befc

hina’s financial hub of Shanghai will limit its population to 25 million people by 2035 as part of a quest to manage “big city disease”, authorities have said.

The State Council said on its website late on Monday the goal to control the size of the city was part of Shanghai’s masterplan for 2017-2035, which the government body had approved.

“By 2035, the resident population in Shanghai will be controlled at around 25 million and the total amount of land made available for construction will not exceed 3,200 square kilometres,” it said.

#urban_matter

In China, a Three-Digit Score Could Dictate Your Place in Society | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit

https://media.wired.com/photos/5a299c2a41e00716c855cfa0/191:100/pass/Social_Score_Platforms_Horizontal.jpg

In 2013, Ant Financial executives retreated to the mountains outside Hangzhou to discuss creating a slew of new products; one of them was Zhima Credit. The executives realized that they could use the data-collecting powers of Alipay to calculate a credit score based on an individual’s activities. “It was a very natural process,” says You Xi, a Chinese business reporter who detailed this pivotal meeting in a recent book, Ant Financial. “If you have payment data, you can assess the credit of a person.” And so the tech company began the process of creating a score that would be “credit for everything in your life,” as You explains it.

Ant Financial wasn’t the only entity keen on using data to measure people’s worth. Coincidentally or not, in 2014 the Chinese government announced it was developing what it called a system of “social credit.” In 2014, the State Council, China’s governing cabinet, publicly called for the establishment of a nationwide tracking system to rate the reputations of individuals, businesses, and even government officials. The aim is for every Chinese citizen to be trailed by a file compiling data from public and private sources by 2020, and for those files to be searchable by fingerprints and other biometric characteristics. The State Council calls it a “credit system that covers the whole society.”

For the Chinese Communist Party, social credit is an attempt at a softer, more invisible authoritarianism. The goal is to nudge people toward behaviors ranging from energy conservation to obedience to the Party. Samantha Hoffman, a consultant with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London who is researching social credit, says that the government wants to preempt instability that might threaten the Party. “That’s why social credit ideally requires both coercive aspects and nicer aspects, like providing social services and solving real problems. It’s all under the same Orwellian umbrella.”

The State Council has signaled that under the national social credit system people will be penalized for the crime of spreading online rumors, among other offenses, and that those deemed “seriously untrustworthy” can expect to receive substandard services. Ant Financial appears to be aiming for a society divided along moral lines as well. As Lucy Peng, the company’s chief executive, was quoted as saying in Ant Financial, Zhima Credit “will ensure that the bad people in society don’t have a place to go, while good people can move freely and without obstruction.”

As Liu amassed a favorable transaction and payment history on Alipay, his score naturally improved. But it could go down if he neglected to pay a traffic fine, for example. And the privileges that come with a high score might someday be revoked for behaviors that have nothing to do with consumer etiquette. In June 2015, as 9.4 million Chinese teenagers took the grueling national college entrance examination, Hu Tao, the Zhima Credit general manager, told reporters that Ant Financial hoped to obtain a list of students who cheated, so that the fraud could become a blight on their Zhima Credit records. “There should be consequences for dishonest behavior,” she avowed. The good were moving without obstruction. A threat hung over the rest.

The algorithm behind my Zhima Credit score is a corporate secret. Ant Financial officially lists five broad categories of information that feed into the score, but the company provides only the barest of details about how these ingredients are cooked together. Like any conventional credit scoring system, Zhima Credit monitors my spending history and whether I have repaid my loans. But elsewhere the algorithm veers into voodoo, or worse. A category called Connections considers the credit of my contacts in Alipay’s social network. Characteristics takes into consideration what kind of car I drive, where I work, and where I went to school. A category called Behavior, meanwhile, scrutinizes the nuances of my consumer life, zeroing in on actions that purportedly correlate with good credit. Shortly after Zhima Credit’s launch, the company’s technology director, Li Yingyun, told the Chinese magazine Caixin that spending behavior like buying diapers, say, could boost one’s score, while playing videogames for hours on end could lower it. Online speculation held that donating to charity, presumably through Alipay’s built-in donation service, was good. But I’m not sure whether the $3 I gave for feeding brown bear cubs qualifies me as a philanthropist or a cheapskate.

Then, in 2010, Suining became one of the first areas in China to pilot a social credit system. Officials there began assessing residents on a range of criteria, including education level, online behavior, and how well they followed traffic laws. Each of Suining’s 1.1 million citizens older than 14 started out with 1,000 points, and points were added or deducted based on behavior. Taking care of elderly family members earned you 50 points. Helping the poor merited 10 points. Helping the poor in a way that was reported by the media: 15. A drunk driving conviction meant the loss of 50 points, as did bribing an official. After the points were tallied up, citizens were assigned grades of A, B, C, or D. Grade A citizens would be given priority for school admissions and employment, while D citizens would be denied licenses, permits, and access to some social services.

Although Liu hadn’t signed up for Zhima Credit, the blacklist caught up with him in other ways. He became, effectively, a second-class citizen. He was banned from most forms of travel; he could only book the lowest classes of seat on the slowest trains. He could not buy certain consumer goods or stay at luxury hotels, and he was ineligible for large bank loans. Worse still, the blacklist was public. Liu had already spent a year in jail once before on charges of “fabricating and spreading rumors” after reporting on the shady dealings of a vice-mayor of Chong­qing. The memory of imprisonment left him stoic about this new, more invisible punishment. At least he was still with his wife and daughter.

Still, Liu took to his blog to stir up sympathy and convince the judge to take him off the list. As of October he was still on it. “There is almost no oversight of the court executors” who maintain the blacklist, he told me. “There are many mistakes in implementation that go uncorrected.” If Liu had a Zhima Credit score, his troubles would have been compounded by other worries. The way Zhima Credit is designed, being blacklisted sends you on a rapid downward spiral. First your score drops. Then your friends hear you are on the blacklist and, fearful that their scores might be affected, quietly drop you as a contact. The algorithm notices, and your score plummets further.

Now I had two tracking systems scoring me, on opposite sides of the globe. But these were only the scores that I knew about. Most Americans have dozens of scores, many of them drawn from behavioral and demographic metrics similar to those used by Zhima Credit, and most of them held by companies that give us no chance to opt out. Others we enter into voluntarily. The US government can’t legally compel me to participate in some massive data-driven social experiment, but I give up my data to private companies every day. I trust these corporations enough to participate in their vast scoring experiments. I post my thoughts and feelings on Facebook and leave long trails of purchases on Amazon and eBay. I rate others in Airbnb and Uber and care a little too much about how others rate me. There is not yet a great American super app, and the scores compiled by data brokers are mainly used to better target ads, not to exert social control. But through a process called identity resolution, data aggregators can use the clues I leave behind to merge my data from various sources.

Do you take antidepressants? Frequently return clothes to retailers? Write your name in all caps when filling out online forms? Data brokers collect all of this information and more. As in China, you may even be penalized for who your friends are. In 2012, Facebook patented a method of credit assessment that could consider the credit scores of people in your network. The patent describes a tool that arrives at an average credit score for your friends and rejects a loan application if that average is below a certain minimum. The company has since revised its platform policies to prohibit outside lenders from using Facebook data to determine credit eligibility. The company could still decide to get into the credit business itself, though. (“We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans,” a Facebook spokesperson said in response to questions about the credit patent.) “You could imagine a future where people are watching to see if their friends’ credit is dropping and then dropping their friends if that affects them,” says Frank Pasquale, a big-data expert at University of Maryland Carey School of Law. “That’s terrifying.”

#Surveillance #Evaluation #Monnaie_numérique #Chine #Social_credits

Free nighttime electricity offered to ger district residents | The UB Post
▻http://theubpost.mn/2016/12/25/free-electricity-at-night-offered-to-ger-district-residents

On Friday, Prime Minister J.Erdenebat held a briefing on air pollution reduction efforts, and said that a number of projects to reduce air pollution have been carried out, but better outcomes have not been seen so far.

He pointed out that developing an electric heating system is of great importance to reducing Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution, and that a decision has been made to provide ger district residents with free electricity at night.

The Prime Minister noted that the Government of Mongolia is working to execute the following actions to reduce Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution:

Promote construction projects to minimize ger district occupancy and spend aid provided by the Chinese government on ger district re-planning and household relocation, as discussed during Premier of the State Council of the People’s Repoublic of China Li Keqiang’s visit to Mongolia in July.
Promote an electric heating system in Mongolia and provide residents with cheap electric heaters produced in Mongolia.
Help support herders who have lost their livestock to dzud conditions and other natural disasters to address rural-to-urban migration resulting in increased air pollution in Ulaanbaatar.
Promote people’s effective initiatives to reduce air pollution
Prime Minister J.Erdenebat said that a budget of four billion MNT has been set for projects and programs to be implemented in 2017 to reduce Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution.

Eighty percent of the budget will be spent on providing free electricity to ger distrcit households at night and addressing electricity deficits.

(c’était annoncé le 25 décembre 2016)

Summer may be long gone, but the debate over the #burkini ban is far from over

The French public’s discomfort with Muslim women’s clothing is nothing new. Yet the events that unfolded in French coastal towns this summer took us by surprise. At least thirty coastal municipalities, ranging from Menton to Cassis, banned the ‘burkini’, an item of swimwear designed in 2004 by Lebanese-Australian Aheda Zanetti. By the end of the summer, the State Council, the top administrative court in France, ruled the ban unconstitutional. Nonetheless, some local municipalities contested the ruling, amidst 64% public support for the ban.1

▻https://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/blog/summer-may-be-long-gone-but-the-debate-over-the-burkini-ban-is-far-from-ov

Egypte : Projet de loi pour interdire de diffuser des infos en lien avec l’armée, 6 mois à 5 ans de prison et amendes pour ceux qui le feraient - Al-Masry Al-Youm

The State Council’s legislative department received Wednesday a draft law submitted by the Cabinet that would ban news related to the military.

The council is supposed to review the constitutionality of the law.

One article in the draft stipulates the need for prior permission from the Armed Forces’ general command before reporting or broadcasting news about its formations, movements and equipment.

It imposes a jail term from six months to five years and a fine of LE100-500 for violators.

The draft law states that this information is vital to state security, therefore requiring entire secrecy so as not prevent them being leaked to entities that would use them against the country.

Egypt’s military has been struggling against a series of bloody attacks against its troops since the ouster of former president Mohamed Morsy. Authorities accuse Morsy’s Muslim Brotherhood of standing behind the attacks. The MB says it is a peaceful organization.

Criticisms of the army have become more sensitive under incumbet president and former defense minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, in many cases drawing accusations of treason by highly-chauvisinstic, pro-regime media.

Press freedoms advocates are wary that freedom of opinion woudl witness a decline under Sisi’s government as a number of media hosts were banned, with a number of newspapers annoucing intentions to cease any reports critical of the military.