Most people seem to think that covert surveillance has only arisen in the USA since 9/11, and this is demonstrably not true. Various, mostly financial, mechanisms have been used since before I was born to deploy carrots and wield sticks based on surveillance.
Since the behavior rewarded isn't suitably prosocial, there's been no overt direction that folks could conform to, and the rewards inure to those that are simply avaricious enough to gain standing in the eyes of their invisible judges.
With the benefit of hindsight, I have managed to note certain points in my life where the mechanisms employed to prevent my success were brought more to bear, and where broader application of those applied to me were brought to bear on the general population.
Back in the late 90s I discovered astounding proof of surveillance I was subjected to. This was confirmed through another event years later. At the time I was acquiring assets via privately financed means, having long ago realized banks were not worthy of trust.
In retrospect I have realized that banks are used to apply the covert metrics of the users of the surveillance data to either harm or help those folks data management technology allowed. As big data becomes a thing, China's ubiquitous and public social control mechanisms become possible.
In the 90s such surveillance as is now unavoidable in cities needed to be undertaken for specific targets by teams of operatives, and this is how I became aware of it.
My working outside the box of the credit system obviated much of the control that box potentiated, and it is through specific persons that revealed direct interference in my financial operations that I became aware of how that stick was wielded against me.
This largely informed my present practice of simply not playing the financial game, as the economy is ever more finely controllable through extant surveillance, and covert blessing or cursing of individuals is automated. While this mechanism remains operant, adding the overt social control mechanism provides suitably insipid carrots for driving desired behavior in the population that population can see and seek to attain. Being availed of public transport isn't a great prize, IMHO.
The covert blessing and cursing of financial success isn't suitable for motivating the general population, as so few are actually rewarded thereby. Looking at persons that have bootstrapped their way to grand success financially, the metrics by which those mechanisms operate becomes somewhat definable. Essentially sociopathic and psychopathic traits are strongly selected for via that effort, while little else isn't damned with faint praise, at best.
Behavior considered 'good' by most people, such as working hard, paying bills on time, and other such metrics are those most cursed through covert siphoning of such predictable and available assets generated thereby.
By working outside that system, I rendered such controls moot. Drastic measures resulted, which glaringly revealed the players coordinating their opposition. I was amazed to discover decades long operations involving players at the international and federal levels applying regional, local, and private parties' efforts in carefully directed ways, and that I had serendipitously sidestepped most of the power of such efforts by working outside the box.
Certain events in my youth must have gained their attention, and caused their covert suppression to be undertaken. Then, as now, local cops are the finest grained direct sources of intel, and application of oppositional tactics. What surprised me was the top down direction of such tactics from parties I would never have suspected to take interest in such micromanagement of society.
In the movie 'War Games' the AI points out at the end of the movie (spoiler alert) that the only way to win is not to play.
This is the essential truth regarding the banksters, as well as China's social credit system.
