China's 'One Person, One File': Road to digital totalitarianism
One Person, One File" (OPOF) mass surveillance program represents an escalation of China's efforts to create a ruthless digital censorship. Under this prospective system, Shanghai aims to triple its deployment of facial recognition cameras, compiling exhaustive personal data files on every single resident, China experts told ET.
It encapsulates the Chinese Communist Party's remorseless efforts to strangle human freedom through Orwellian levels of technology-enabled social control. OPOF is more than just another Benthamite panopticon surveilling the watch. It is an attempt to construct an omniscient digital surrogate for every Chinese citizen — an individualized file encoding each person's relationships, activities, behaviors and very existence into ones and zeroes for the Party's domineering oversight, according to China experts
Under Xi Jinping's hardline leadership, China has doubled down on eliminating any perceived ideological threats, both real and imagined, in a neo-Stalinist political paradox. His «New Era» has become a retrograde period of high-tech totalitarianism married with ancient totalitarian habits of societal lockdown and paranoia.
The human rights implications of OPOF and related surveillance systems are catastrophic. Relying on artificial intelligence, facial recognition and data analytics to assess potential «risks» to the Communist Party, these Orwellian tools essentially accuse citizens of Orwellian «thought-crimes» well before any
