Senators and Congressmen of Brazil’s Bolsonaro Go to China to Import Communist Surveillance System of Citizens
By Julio
Severo
Senators and Congressmen of President Jair
Bolsonaro’s party were invited by the Chinese communist government, which is
paying all travel expenses, for them to get a closer look at the facial
recognition system.
“The Chinese are very much ahead of us on
the issue of public safety, and as a representative of the State of Rio de
Janeiro this whole technology interests me very much,” said the Brazilian
congressman Felício Laterça to the Brazilian news site UOL before embarking
with a delegation of 12 lawmakers on their trip to China, on Tuesday (January 15).
Included in the trip are Senator Soraya
Thronicke, and members of the Brazilian Congress Carla Zambelli, Daniel
Silveira, Tio Trutis, Felício Laterça, Bibo Nunes, Charltes Evangelista,
Marcelo Freitas, Sergeant Gurgel and Aline Sleutjes, Delegada Sheila, all from Bolsonaro’s
party.
 |
| Senators and Congressmen of Bolsonaro’s party doing to China |
According to UOL, congressmen and senators
from PSL in the Brazilian Congress will introduce a bill requiring the establishment
of facial recognition technology in public places to assist law-enforcement
agencies in the fight against crime and the capture of suspects or fugitives.
Communist China employs the largest and
most modern surveillance system in the world, which uses facial recognition to
identify citizens — and thus arrest criminals and suspects. The equipment can
recognize the faces of people, allowing to identify their sex and age,
including information such as the car that the citizen uses, his more frequent
routes, his relatives and the people with whom he comes in contact, financial
and professional data and others issues.
The partnership with communist China comes
at a time when the Bolsonaro administration, widely seen as right-wing, has clearly
condemned the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Nevertheless, the
Venezuelan dictatorship has been less communist than the Chinese government,
because Maduro’s dictatorship has not persecuted Christians as much as the
Chinese government has persecuted them. So he who denounces Maduro has the
obligation to denounce much more the Chinese communist dictatorship.
If the Workers’ Party, the socialist party
that ruled Brazil during the Lula or Dilma administrations (2002-2016), had sent its senators and congressman to
China to import into Brazil the Chinese communist surveillance system of citizens,
there would have been an outcry. All conservative and right-wing writers would have
denounced it as a communist maneuver for controlling citizens. But what will
happen now that the right-wing Bolsonaro administration is doing it?
Many supporters of Bolsonaro criticized
Pope Francisco for sending a representative to Maduro’s inauguration. But who
will criticize the senators and congressmen of Bolsonaro’s party for doing
something vastly worse?
Even if Bolsonaro’s party sent its
senators and congressmen to the U.S. to import into Brazil some U.S. surveillance
system of citizens, this would still be a dictatorial control. For many years American
conservatives have denounced the immoral surveillance of the U.S. government
over American citizens. The
exposés of Edward Snowden against this system were widely supported by American
conservatives.
Whether being imported from communist
China or the U.S., constant state surveillance and control of citizens is a
dangerous thing.
Regardless if it is Lula’s Workers’ Party
or Bolsonaro’s PSL that is seeking such control, it should be exposed.
One
of my favorite TV shows was “Person of Interest,” with Jim Caviezel struggling
to keep the U.S. government from gaining control of a supercomputer for
citizens’ surveillance. Unfortunately, the surveillance problem does not exist
only on TV shows. It is a reality that is craved by left-wing governments and —
who could tell? — a right-wing government in Brazil that wants the help of
communist China to monitor Brazilian citizens.
Portuguese
version of this article: Senadores e deputados federais do partido de Bolsonaro
vão à China comunista importar sistema para monitorar cidadãos brasileiros
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