Posted on 11/14/2018 11:34:26 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
Chinese telecoms giant ZTE is helping Venezuela build a system that monitors citizen behavior through a new identification card. The "fatherland card," already used by the government to track voting, worries many in Venezuela and beyond.
At the headquarters of Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp, they learned how China, using smart cards, was developing a system that would help Beijing track social, political and economic behavior. Using vast databases to store information gathered with the card’s use, a government could monitor everything from a citizen’s personal finances to medical history and voting activity.
As part of a $70 million government effort to bolster “national security,” Venezuela last year hired ZTE to build a fatherland database and create a mobile payment system for use with the card. A team of ZTE employees is now embedded in a special unit within Cantv, the Venezuelan state telecommunications company that manages the database, according to four current and former Cantv employees.
The fatherland card is troubling some citizens and human-rights groups who believe it is a tool for Chávez’s successor, President Nicolás Maduro, to monitor the populace and allocate scarce resources to his loyalists.
The fatherland card, they argue, illustrates how China, through state-linked companies like ZTE, exports technological know-how that can help like-minded governments track, reward and punish citizens.
The database, stores such details as birthdays, family information, employment and income, property owned, medical history, state benefits received, presence on social media, membership of a political party and whether a person voted.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
THIS is similar to why we can’t trust Apple, Google, etc:
They are HELPING China to work against their people.
I suspect they are doing something similar, here.
You know it is coming here. The second the Democrats believe they can get away with it.
We passed that a long time ago.
The Left will be among the first in line to take the MotB when it’s available.
In Venezuela you will say what the corrupt government tells you to say. Nice(/s).
Let’s send every American professor to Venezuela.
Yep
What a great idea ... wait until the socialist crowd hears ... they’ll be all over it.
$ 70 million?
Yeah, great, because they really don't need anything else like oh... FOOD.
.
I am sure that spying on all of their people will fix all the damage socialism has caused to their country.
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