I think the author drank a bit too much of the Kool-Aid: Singaporean officials stress that citizens are free to criticize the government, and they do. In fact, one of the countrys most popular books this year has been a provocative rebuttal to the decades-old official dogma concerning the countrys existential peril. Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus, by Donald Low and Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, argues that the ruling Peoples Action Party, which has held uninterrupted power since 1959, may have invented the notion that Singapore is one step away from ruin in a bid to subdue the masses and cement the governments hold on power. And in other paragraphs Im unsure if the author is praising or damning Singapore: many current and former U.S. officials have come to see Singapore as a model for how theyd build an intelligence apparatus if privacy laws and a long tradition of civil liberties werent standing in the way... by U.S. standards, Singapores privacy laws are virtually nonexistent, and its possible that the government collected private communications, financial data, public transportation records, and medical information without any court approval or private consent... But RAHS doesnt need to rely only on open-source material or even the sorts of intelligence that most governments routinely collect: In Singapore, electronic surveillance of residents and visitors is pervasive and widely accepted... Most Singaporeans I met hardly cared that they live in a surveillance bubble and were acutely aware that theyre not unique in some respects... The more time Singaporeans spend online, the more they read, the more they share their thoughts with each other and their government, the more theyve come to realize that Singapores light-touch repression is not entirely normal among developed, democratic countries -- and that their government is not infallible. To the extent that Singapore is a model for other countries to follow, it may tell them more about the limits of big data and that not every problem can be predicted.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 12:12:16 +0000
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