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RACING TOWARDS THE MARK
"And He causeth all, both
small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a
mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no
man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark"
Rev.13:16,17
China's High-Tech Tracking Methods
Compiled from articles by Keith Bradsher, NY Times News Service;
Richard Spencer, Electronic Telegraph; Elaine Kurtenbach, Associated
Press.
Shenzhen, China—At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are
being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon
be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed
company to automatically recognize the faces of police suspects and
detect unusual activity.
Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across
Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with
powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to
most citizens.
Data on the chip will include not just the citizen's name and address
but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity,
police record, medical insurance status, and landlord's phone number.
Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of
China's "one child" policy. Plans are being studied to add credit
histories, subway travel payments, and small purchases charged to the
card.
Security experts describe China's plans as the world's largest effort
to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the
activities of a population.
The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply
technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to
150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired
permanent residency.
Shenzhen, a computer manufacturing center next to Hong Kong, is the
first Chinese city to introduce the new residency cards. It is also
taking the lead in China in the large-scale use of law enforcement
surveillance cameras—a tactic that would have drawn international
criticism in the years after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989.
However, rising fears of terrorism have lessened public hostility to
surveillance cameras. This has been particularly true in Britain,
where the police already install the cameras widely on lamp poles and in
subway stations and are developing face recognition software as well.
New York police announced last month that they would install more
than 100 security cameras to monitor license plates in Lower
Manhattan by the end of the year. Police officials also said they hoped
to obtain financing to establish links to 3,000 public and private
cameras in the area by the end of next year.
The U.S. has also announced that it is to expand the use of spy
satellites for domestic surveillance, turning its "eyes in the sky"
inward to combat terrorism and eventually for law enforcement.
Shenzhen already has 180,000 indoor and outdoor closed-circuit
television cameras owned by businesses and government agencies, and
the police will have the right to link them on request into the same
system as the 20,000 police cameras, according to China Public Security.
Every police officer in Shenzhen now carries global positioning
satellite equipment on his or her belt. This allows senior police
officers to direct their movements on large, high-resolution maps of the
city that China Public Security has produced using software that runs on
the Microsoft Windows operating system.
Western security experts have suspected for several years that
Chinese security agencies could track individuals based on the location
of their cell phones, and the Shenzhen police tracking system
confirms this.
When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global
positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the
location of the officer's cellphone, based on the three nearest
cellphone towers. A security official used a real-time connection to
local police dispatchers' computers to demonstrate a detailed computer
map of a Shenzhen district and the precise location of each of the 92
patrolling officers, represented by caricatures of officers in blue
uniforms and the routes they had traveled in the last hour.
Shenzhen's all-encompassing security system is known as the Golden
Shield Project. It includes computer and mobile phone monitoring
through the so-called "Great Firewall" of Internet censorship.
China already screens e-mail, censors online chat rooms, and blocks
access to foreign Web sites considered subversive. SMS [text]
messages are also being screened. Xinhua, the Chinese news agency,
reports that new SMS surveillance systems can automatically alert police
and keep records of suspect messages, based on their content.
[end of article]
(Commentary:) China is becoming one of the most high-tech, heavily
watched surveillance societies in the world today.
China is no longer poor and primitive, and
what once hardly seemed possible is now a reality. And if such things
can come to pass in China—this sort of cutting-edge monitoring of tens
of millions of people that's taking place—do you think it couldn't
happen in the rest of the world, in countries that are far more
developed? It certainly can, and it will!
The technology to implement this sort of digital surveillance society is
easily available, affordable, and is becoming more widespread and
commonplace all the time. And
China, which is still a communist nation, doesn't have any trouble
getting the technology and programs from these big American capitalistic
companies, because it's not the red color of its government that matters
but the green color of its money. These big multinational companies
figure that if they don't sell China what it wants, China will just go
to their nearest competitors in some other country. National politics
aren't nearly as important nowadays as profits are.
China says these cameras, ID cards, tracking devices and monitoring
systems are to crack down on criminals and terrorists, which is much the
same excuse that Western nations use for the same sort of program.
And they'll be used for that, to some extent, both now and in the days
of the Antichrist's world government to come. The Antichrist will be
very tough on crime! His empire will be like a revival of the Roman
Empire of old and he won't put up with petty crooks and criminals.
That'll be one of his reasons for implementing the Mark of the Beast
economic plan, for that matter—to help stamp out crime by the total
regulation of economic affairs. If there's no profit in crime, or
illegal profits can be traced and confiscated and the criminal can
quickly be arrested, it puts a real damper on crime!
However, one of the main reasons for the implementation of this enormous
surveillance system will be control, pure and simple, just as it is in
China today. If you know that the
police or the government could be watching you on a surveillance camera,
monitoring your phone calls and e-mails, and keeping track of every
significant detail of your life via your ID card—or Mark—then you won't
want to do anything or say anything that might get you in trouble. And
even if they don't happen to be watching you or monitoring you at the
moment, just the possibility that they could be will be enough to keep
many people in line.
And naturally, if the Antichrist's police or the government say that
Christians are dissidents, extremists, and terrorists—because they
agitate against the Mark, won't worship the Beast,
and go so far as to call down plagues and
pestilences and problems on those who do—then any good citizen of the
Antichrist government won't want to have anything to do with such
Christians and their literature in public, because someone might be
watching.
Of course, that won't stop us and the Lord and multitudes of other
Christians around the world, and it won't stop the spread of the Lord's
love and message and the salvation of souls!
No matter what the Devil, Antichrist, and
evil men do, the Lord can nullify it or get around it or under it or
overcome it in some way! Nothing can stop God and His children from
fulfilling His plan and gathering many into His eternal Kingdom of love!
The Lord cannot and will not be defeated! The Devil may think he has
won, but his downfall and defeat have been written in God's Word for
thousands of years, and will come to pass just as surely as every other
prophecy written there has come to pass—or will yet. (See Daniel
8:23-25; Revelation 19:19-21.) There's a happy ending coming to this
world full of evil men and hardship, and it will be a heavenly life
forever after for those who know and love the Lord! We'll see you there!
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