“I think people in every country want a stable and safe society,”
– Dandan Fan (ABC)
The most interesting topic from this week’s lecture was the mass surveillance of China by its government. There come many negatives and positives to having such a high level of surveillance of your population from reducing people right to privacy and reducing crimes respectively. My view is that this is a very amazing step in the right direction to reducing crimes and many other issues like missing individuals, kidnappings, sexual assault, etc. Though China has not had much success with this upgrade in surveillance in the public’s eye I do believe a western country like Australia, Britain, New Zealand could utilize this high-tech surveillance to improve their security.
“We are pioneering artificial intelligence with research and innovation in the hope of creating a safer, faster and healthier world”
– YITU Spokeswoman ( China: facial recognition and state control | The Economist ) Moodle
Being able to have the location of any individual that is moving through a major city would be such a major breakthrough in crime watch, Law Enforcement Officers would be able to respond to situations before they even happen and be able to track individuals that are wanted on charges. I believe that the new generations wouldn’t care if they are being watched due to the fact that they use so much social media their location and information are so widely accessible by authorities. If we are able to uphold our right to privacy while at the same time using the surveillance to locate and identify possible threats against the nation it would help improve our overall security in our Western World.
Jacob Suter 
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