Is This Our Future?

Is this what Trump’s leading us to?

How China Keeps Tabs on Foreigners

An unsecured police dashboard was a rare window into how the authorities track foreigners by collecting and aggregating vast amounts of private data.

New York Times

By Lily Kuo and Pei-Lin Wu

Aug. 2, 2026

Most days, Marc Hofer, a cybersecurity researcher and journalist based in Amsterdam, trawls the internet for clues about how China surveils its citizens, a subject that has fascinated him since he worked there as a foreign correspondent.

Mr. Hofer, 46, was doing his usual scan earlier this year when he came across something called “Dynamic Control Platform for Overseas Personnel.” It was a futuristic dashboard — like something from the movie “Minority Report” — that appeared to track foreigners in the northern Chinese city of Zhangjiakou, a popular skiing spot that co-hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics.

The system’s dashboard said it tracked more than 700 foreign residents living in the city. In total, it had entries for nearly 12,000 people, which included fugitives, people from Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as more than 300 foreign journalists. Some of them had not been to Zhangjiakou.

Is this what we are starting to do here? Making us into a police state? Where I live, the crime reports show a safety grade of A, which is 74% better than the U.S. average.

But still, there were comments like this:

• Would someone please tell me what freedoms you’re losing in the name of safety? Because it sounds to me like you’re mad that you can’t speed and run stoplights
• I don't understand why people hate FLOCK cameras so much. If you’re not doing anything wrong, why does it bother you? These cameras solve crimes, find stolen cars, and help catch people who think they can get away with anything.
• There’s cameras everywhere anyway, so who cares at this point?

People are divided into two camps: those who don't think there's anything wrong with tracking citizens, as in China, as long as it reduces crime. (Of course, even now, they have no real idea what the actual crime rate is.) They don't seem to care that this approach leads society down the path toward totalitarianism. Truthout wrote back in 2015, before this discussion even began:

From 1933 through 1945, before being destroyed and dismantled, buildings here housed the Secret State Police (Gestapo), the leadership of the SS (Protection Squad of the Nazi Party) and the Reich Security Main Office. These institutions used cold and brutal methods to serve cold and brutal purposes. Following World War II, Communist Party secret police in East Germany surveilled people’s mail, telephone calls and foreigners. With 500,000 professional and civilian informants — and estimates as high as 2 million (if occasional informants are included) — to monitor a population of 17 million, the Stasi have been described the most intrusive surveillance organizations in world history.

Totalitarian regimes in Germany made widespread use of mass surveillance in order to dominate freedom and carry out horrific crimes. It is no surprise then that Germany is today a top-ranking country globally for data privacy and protection laws, that Berlin has evolved to become one of the world capitals for hackers and data privacy advocates, and that one of the first peer-to-peer computational platforms to guarantee user privacy against unwanted electronic surveillance, Enigma, is named after the tool that the Nazis used to broadcast coded messages from. Yet, ironically, the power of today’s mass surveillance systems — like those of the NSA, brought to light by Edward Snowden’s revelations — far exceed what previous totalitarian regimes could have imagined. Surveillance has spread like a pandemic.

And are we heading down that path?

As more of our personal information moves from our own computers to cloud services, an increasing share of our digital lives is stored by third parties. That makes it potentially more accessible to ICE, CBP, and other federal agencies than when it existed only on a personal device. Combined with advances in AI and data analytics, many civil liberties advocates worry this could enable increasingly comprehensive surveillance of ordinary citizens. Previously, they had to come to your house, but when it is in the vapors of the cloud... who knows who can get access to it without your knowledge!

Do you have stuff up in the clouds? I do. I have all the slide presentations I have given, from the cultural diversity ones to the ones on trans history, on Google Drive.