During the construction of the futuristic city The Line progress, fears of total surveillance of the future residents become louder. The project is based on the Crown Prince’s vision Mohammed bin Salmanhis ties with China’s leaders Xi Jinping increasingly strengthened. The two have agreed to equip the new city with powerful surveillance technology from China.
The two leaders announced their collaboration at the end of last year. This should take place on several levels.
Normalize the monitored public
The People’s Republic of China has already provided surveillance technology to countries such as Egypt and Serbia to create so-called “safe cities”, which are based on facial recognition and collect user data. Loud Kill Jili of the Harvard University, researching China’s global ambitions, Xi Jinping seeks “to normalize and legitimize his vision of state-run cyberspace and a surveilled public.”
The Saudi Crown Prince is likely to want to implement such projects on a large scale. The Line is scheduled to be completed by 2045 9 million inhabitants be able to record. According to city planners, the collected data should be used for the purposes of a smart city, as reported by Business Insider. Sea James Hiresthink tank researcher Chatham House in London, the crown prince wants to link services such as garbage collection, health services or train intervals with data from mobile phones and surveillance technologies.
Under this guise, such smart cities could be used as an instrument for invasive surveillance and Experts fear that the privacy of the residents will be endangered. In the past, Saudi Arabia has repeatedly used electronic means to spy on and track government critics and then use the information gathered to make accusations, some of which are unjustified. If you also link this to the real-time location data of all residents and have access to all electronically transmitted data via transmission masts, WLAN, etc., this is tantamount to complete surveillance.
city without cars
The Line is probably the best-known region of NEOM and was planned without cars – all important infrastructure should be within a maximum of 5 minutes walking distance. The city is basically a giant, mirrored skyscraper said to be 500 meters high and 170 kilometers long. 90 percent of the administration should be done by artificial intelligence.
