On Mass Surveillance In Singapore

On Why I Travel On

A "Normal" Route

To Counter

Governmental &

Corporate Snooping


Those of us who are harshly and reluctantly entrapped in the system of political control undertaken by our elected government -- through its employment of modern surveillance techniques and technologies --often try to escape from its ensnaring and suffocating restrictions by thinking in terms of fighting the authorities through legal means -- namely, by employing, certainly foolishly, the official services of our compromised and beholden Members of Parliament (elected lawmakers), and by making use of the professional services of our timid and equally compromised lawyers (trained specifically to understand the intricacies -- and also vulnerabilities -- of governmental actions responding to, and confronting the challenges and criticisms posed by opponents and critics of the government, with reference to universal principles of human rights and to international laws and regulations guiding precisely such governmental actions and behaviour).

Such official methods of legal recourse, admittedly, may prevent some of the worst excesses of a surveillance society, but such solutions also DO NOT WORK if THE POLITICAL WILL TO IMPLEMENT SUCH SOLUTIONS -- EFFECTIVELY AND NOT JUST COSMETICALLY -- IS NOT PRESENT.

Without detailed public knowledge of surveillance techniques and technologies, and of the EXTENT to which they are being deployed, the groundswell of public opinion necessary to drive a DEMAND for such solutions will remain lacking.

The main concern of dissident bloggers like me, who write outside of the intellectual and political (and "systematic") confines set by mainstream snoopers and manipulators of targetted victims in our surveillance society here, is to learn as much as we can about (and to reveal bravely and publicly about the results of such learning) the AMOUNT and EXTENT of data (not data collection itself) that are being collected by the authorities and their COLLATION within ever-more-massive databases!

Question: What are the safeguards (will they be observed and followed in the first place?), should our society ever demand them, to ensure privacy principles are respected and to allay other important privacy concerns? Thus, citizens who are dissident bloggers like me, have a real concern, and it is about widespread INSTITUTIONAL surveillance of individuals and/or groups in a society!

Such massive surveillance efforts by the government is the result of The Party's desire to collate and form national databases -- and this is extremely disturbing.

The system of "due process of law" is long embodied in the laws of the United Kingdom, the United States of America and Canada (and in the systems of jurisprudence derived from them). Such a system is relied upon by most citizen-victims of governmental surveillance to protest against such humiliating and oppressive forms of control over their lives -- including their moments of privacy.

That is the reason why non-mainstream bloggers and political critics resort to other (shall we say, un-systematic?) forms or methods of countering the restrictive or constraining influences from the ubiquitous surveillance officers who, normally, with an unknowing, unknowledgeable and unaware -- and hence supine and acquiescent -- citizenry at their feet, will exploit their advantages (in terms of logistics, finances, and knowledge and information -- based precisely on the formation of national databases, etc.) and also their awesome, comprehensive legal and juridical powers, to subjugate and suppress the controlled population (although they would never admit to doing so openly!).

Dissident bloggers like me have this part of a bigger picture of covert control over the population by stealthy and manipulative surveillance officers in mind when we blog or write about corporate or governmental snooping and manipulation (which are never discussed or covered here -- and also never denied either -- by journalists, editors and commentators in the obsequious local mass media).

As Mark Weiser, Chief Technologist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), said (in 1991), on the danger of an ubiquitous technological environment:

"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it."

Fellow citizens and attentive readers, you have now been duly informed and fore-warned.

Please do take care!

On State Spying and the Death of Privacy In The Postmodern World

The Truth About My Past "Schizophrenia" (Part Two)

Why did I behave, think and express myself the way I did--often irrationally and so fruitlessly--throughout the last 36 years? And why was there a point of reference in the year 1972? What actually did take place in my life in that year?

I want to establish what certain events did occur to me during that year and subsequently. I'm not interested, as biased postmodern officials of the PAP Government would be, in 'proving' to the public that these certain events meant what prejudiced official representatives of the PAP Government wanted them to mean--in other words, in support of, or favouring, their loaded interpretations of those events!

What were those past attempts, based on my remembrances or memories, by the intelligence and security personnel of the PAP Government, to manufacture and concoct so-called recorded "evidences" (of incidents, escapades and happenings in the course of the last 36 years of my life) that would seem, yes!, to 'prove' my alleged "unsound" or "schizophrenic" mind, and, yes!, to discredit me as a man, human being, and citizen with long-held moral and political principles, convictions, beliefs, ideals, and values?--and, yes, finally, to nullify any cherished ambition and aspiration of mine to be a serious published writer (of quality books and essays) with honest motives and intentions?

Why would the PAP Government, since 1972, want to treat me--yes, to regard me, officially or otherwise--as a spy working covertly or overtly, for the PAP Government? What were its motives, its intentions--in manipulating and turning me into such as unproductive and inefficient spy--in those planned different roles, capacities, guises and ways adopted or undertaken, over the past 36 years, by an aspiring and single-minded writer like me?

I'm trying to reconstruct, as accurately and as completely as possible, the key momemts of my last 36 years in my mind now--probably not in the exact sequences in which they have occurred--and then using such a reconstructed picture or understanding, to provide a definitive selection of such events in my life (which I would eventually reveal in future essays of mine but which I would now use, as the basis of my present attempt to give to the public a rational--in other words, a questioning and probing--account of my life) as a so-called "spy", writer, lover and dissident!

This essay is by an oppositionist--one who rejects postmodernism--like me! And I will not entertain the public by telling stories or interpreting events in a way that contains so much ambiguities, contradictions, inconsistencies and illogicalities. I'm going to give the public a conventional or traditional historical account of my life. It will be based on a self-chosen series of aesthetic and moral choices. It is not going to give readers a multiplicity of viewpoints or interpretations, which the biased PAP Government will hold and interweave into a number of different and conflicting narratives.

I want now to reveal the multiplicity of VOICES purporting to represent the official Party, which has been maintaining lines and tricks of communication with those citizens they have focussed their attention on (from their enclosed base of operation up in the Top Secret location in Singapore)--and concentrating their efforts and energy, second-by-second, minute-by-minute, day-by-day, in their close control and surveillance of such (knowing and unknowing) citizens by telling bizarre stories, sometimes as raving lunatics, sometimes as vulgar, cruel and unmannerly critics, and sometimes in a cunningly and sexually tempting manner!, in their feverish and nightmarish work as official postmodernists, for such a long time now, yes, from mid 20th century to the present moment, early in the 21st century!

And who were -- and still are (!) -- these VOICES? They are from the following (both male and female) members of The Special Top Secret Project (under the Project Director, Military Security Department, MINDEF) a covert operation known to the CORE GROUP of leading power-players in the PEOPLE'S ACTION PARTY, namely: Tan Hong Huat, Ang, David Ong, Phyllis Balakrishnan, Melinda, Nancy, Wendy, Ms Oh, Ms Lum, Ms Heng, Catherine, Irene Fong, (and a host of other masturbating pricks and cunts, unknown to me, yet!).

But for how long can they sustain such "imprisonment" of me--and of each and every one of the other controlled (especially unknowingly) citizens? Till each and every one of them die?

This is my advice to these Party officers or officials: Improve your mind! Cultivate a taste for fine reading! There are certain qualities in a man's being that money and other temptations cannot buy. You know you can't win by reasoned arguments and persuasion. So you people used, instead, threats, force or other cunning (especially linguistic) trickeries in your long-distance communications with us -- the victims of governmental surveillance and control -- to make your points or to achieve your goals. Why? Are you so insecure, so weak, and so deficient?

As often-disrespectful voices from the ministries, you are simply not respecting human rights!

You're abusing your ministerial powers and privileges! If you Party representatives, fucking bastards!, force me into displaying bizarre and purposeless behaviour, don't complain later that I disrespect you! Don't try to dirty, corrupt or contaminate my world--or I'll continue to resist you (the "people" or government of Singapore?) with all my resources -- especially intellectual -- and with all my potency, as a human being, man citizen and writer! Surely, you can't help me--assuming that THAT is indeed your aim! no? --to live a good, productive and satisfying life--by precisely interfering with my life!?

I have rejected -- not completely though --postmodernism and unthinking subordination to those who are out to reduce me to a mere abject subject -- without any compelling individuality of my own! I'd rather be, and die, like a poor man -- if I can't compell you, Party officers and officials, to respect me, on my own conditions and terms !

I'll never give up fighting against the Party and insisting on asserting my rights as a man, human being, citizen and writer! I want to have a say in running and leading my own life. Is that too much to ask for in a democratic society?

Are the Party officers' and officials' motives (and intentions) beyond reproach? Why must I be controlled and regarded as a subversive "government agent"--as implied by their usage of the term "implantee" when refering to me (as in: "A man has been implanted as an agent--thus, "implantee"!--in a targetted organization to spy on its personnel?")?

What did I mean by claiming that I'd been put under such close surveillance by the PAP Government? Well, the answer is simple: The People's Action Party -- through its lackeys and toadies working in the Singapore Government -- have been "implanting" its authoritarian and autocratic ideology, beliefs and attitudes -- subtly, cleverly, incrementally, stealthily, and diligently -- since those early days in 1972, into the BRAIN of a helpless, poor, and unfortunate citizen (namely: yours truly, David Chua Chuan Seah) whose own rights, personal beliefs and attitudes had been patiently, dutifully, cunningly and cruelly put under "observation", "examination" and "judgment" by the surveillance authorities in the wards of the Medical Centre at SAFTI, after he had returned from a few days out as an AWOL offender in 1972.

Who (in Singapore or elsewhere) can help me resolve my conflict -- both personal and public -- with these fucking PAP lackeys and toadies -- mostly nameless and faceless "voices", whose identities have been the subject of my investigations and which I've had some inkling of, intermittently, throughout the past 36 years, during which I, by forcing these PAP toadies to "expose" themselves as unprincipled, inept, greedy, power-mad and lazy governmental "controllers" with annoying, irritating, insulting and disrespectful methods and techniques of communications, finally earn my "respect" at last! For they have come to terms, finally, with my insistent determination and persistent efforts to set things right -- yes, to clean up the messiness, dirtiness and sinfulness (like my "schizophrenia", my "subversiveness", my "criminality", my "perversions", and my "immorality") that "I" had created or caused in my life during the past 36 years!

To emphasize, I'm not interested in the PAP Government's viewpoints and interpretations on those certain events in my life during the past 36 years. I want, instead, to establish the historical facts -- the actual events or occurrences in my controlled life, based on my memories (and from documentary "evidences" or official records of such events which have come into my knowledge)!

It matters a lot to my self-respect--that my personal life-history can be understood, examined and accurately, if not comprehensively, recorded with honesty, seriousness and graciousness. I want my leaders NOT to insult my dignity and intelligence any more--from now onwards!

Money, Money, Money!

The Fate of a Horny But

Ageing Writer-Intellectual


I Will Succeed With

Khin

Khin!



In a world where everything seems programmed, even chaos, chance, love, sex and surprise, I've got to defy logic and bewilder people -- as an individualist!

Sharing, individualistic, creative, expressive!

Hugging, kissing, caressing!

Lively and interesting conversation with such a nice woman--again!

I'm an ageing writer, attempting to touch a young woman's mind, heart and body!

I'm sexually experienced, thick-skinned, politically aware, lonely, single, liberated, articulate, intelligent, handsome, trusting, friendly, observant, kind, gentle, honest, free-thinking, successful and wholeheartedly in love with Khin!

The PAP Project versus the Reality of the situation.

The memory of an individualist -- of his true self: In another "story" or two! [See "Remembrance of Most things Past: 1953-1972" and "Memories (and Records) of My Childhood, Boyhood and Young Adulthood at Tasek Utara Estate" (http://www.trainofmypresence.blogspot.com).]

Can I trust the PAP Government? (It is difficult for me to do so--with such a collection of controllers and their diverse opinions, needs, aspirations and experiences!)

But the PAP has only one aim--to make me join it as a member of the PAP Government!

I'm a critic and writer who can't imagine myself as a member of the PAP Government!

I'll never trust the PAP Government!

Accommodation? Trade-offs? Costs?

The undisciplined use of meaning, construction, symbol, interpretation, and metaphor without any regard for the constraints of knowledge about human behaviour from other sources!

Anarchism! Miseducation! Common Good! Determining Democracy! Failed States. Fateful Triangle! For Reasons of State! Hegemony or Survival! Interventions! Language and Politics! Language and Mind! Language and Thought! Middle Illusions! Media Control! Objectivity and Liberal Scholars! Perilous Power!

Your Full Name, please? Identity? Date of Birth? Educational Level? Occupation? (Yes!)

Ah, the periodic cost of living a stable, boring life (which I have borne all this while)! No to Social Security! No to intensified State Control! I'll not belong to the Party! I'm unwilling to support its politics! (Otherwise, or else, I must be prepared -- or accept being led -- to become a SUBJECT!)

This blog is officially protected! What was required by the officials? (What I myself can morally justify!)

I'm trying to deal with historical truth!

My "blasphemies" against right-wing intellectuals and politicians?

What is your preferred genre--as a symbol and representation of reality?

Are the tyrants and the suppressed masses truly irreconcilable in every respect? (Or is it a matter of unconscious reciprocal stimulation? A central question, one that is valid with respect to artists and authors: What are the conflicts, contradictions, and frustrations of freedom?)

What is the most sensitive aspect of my self-understanding? (My creativity! Or my feeling of forced deracination and intensified risk and insecurity?)

Oh, the clarifying and cathartic functions of writing, again, in my latest blog entries! At its most effective level!

(And I'm eagerly waiting for Khin to appear in my presence, again!--for conversation and ...).

Bizarre Odyssey: My Life As A Man Controlled By The Network's Core Group of Power-Players

Which Side Am I On?

(You Know Which Side!)


The only possible redemption for me from this gruesome and still unconcluded chapter of my life seems to be escaping the boredom--at whatever cost--in this authoritarian and autocratic, yes, totalitarian society (in which nothing is left to chance and nothing is what it seems).

To survive within and against this system--the nameless and faceless but all-present authorities--which are allied to an insidious, chilling and mysterious organisation of sometimes silent and sometimes vocal but usually always listening voices (but which is not an exclusive association, for its membership is also open to those who can "hear" and "speak"!).

The Network! It is everything! The company, the goal, the structure--none of that counts! The important thing is always the way the company ("exotic" indeed!) relates to the system, which uses the most draconian and invasive secret police in the world!

My rebellion and strategy for survival is a calculated carefulness (as opposed to one of calculated carelessness).

For instance, I remain reticent--with, still, the same aim of defying logic and of bewildering people.

I make these stooges believe that I control secret links to which they have no access.

Out of the sheer boredom of a hopeless situation, I embark on the dangerous and futile quest of clearing up my boring/messy life--since 1972!

I am hungry for any truth that might/may survive a struggle with the authorities.

The complicity that the PAP regime imposed, directly and indirectly, on all its subjects!

Duplicity became the disease of the entire country, both at the Party apparatus level and at the level of the masses (who used duplicity for their survival)!

Emotional compromises? Complicity with (or resistance to) the authorities?

Once they are said, lies take their revenge. Lies come true. They become reality. And that's the ultimate truth!

(Reality is not the ultimate truth! A "mad" society--without principles!)

The MADHOUSE has not only corrupted its language but also the innermost psyches of its subjects. The rot is deep. There are few foundations left upon which to rebuild.

The Singapore Government and the Mass Media

The Mass Media in Singapore

A society with a free flow of information--that is, where the media is free and independent--ensures that the government remains transparent and accountable. Transparency and accountability, or the lack thereof, is what got Asia into this crisis.

[From: CHEE SOON JUAN, The Power of Courage: Effective political change in Singapore through Nonviolence (Singapore: Chee Soon Juan, 2005)]

The Nature of Man (and The Nature of the PAP Government)

(I) THE NATURE OF MAN

(A) The Non-Productive Orientations
of Certain Character-Types:

[Source of Reference: The Sane Society (London: Routledge Classics, 2002) by Erich Fromm]



1. The Receptive Orientation

(a) Negative Aspects:

• passive, without initiative;
• opinionless, characterless;
• submissive;
• without pride;
• parasitical;
• unprincipled;
• servile, without self-confidence;
• unrealistic;
• cowardly;
• spineless;
• wishful thinking;
• gullible;
• sentimental.

(b) Positive Aspects:

2. The Exploitative Orientation

(a) Negative Aspects:

• exploitative;
• aggressive;
• egocentric;
• conceited;
• rash;
• arrogant;
• seducing.

(b) Positive Aspects:

3. The Hoarding Orientation

(a) Negative Aspects:

• unimaginative;
• stingy;
• suspicious;
• cold;
• lethargic;
• anxious;
• stubborn;
• indolent;
• inert;
• pedantic;
• obsessional;
• possessive.

(b) Positive Aspects:

• practical
• economical
• careful
• reserved
• cautious
• tenacious
• imperturbable
• orderly
• methodical
• loyal

4. The Marketing Orientation

(a) Negative Aspects:

• opportunistic;
• inconsistent;
• childish;
• without a future or a past;
• without principles and values;
• unable to be alone;
• aimless;
• relativistic;
• overactive;
• tactless;
• intellectualistic;
• undiscriminating;
• indifferent;
• silly;
• wasteful.

(b) Positive Aspects:

(B) The Productive Orientation --

Of A Certain

(Modernist) Character-Type

(a) Positive Aspects:

• confident
• resourceful
• self-understanding
• ambitious
• courageous
• achievement-minded
• artistic
• working class
• modernist
• critical
• discerning
• spiritually indomitable
• socially aware

(b) Negative Aspects:

(II) And The Nature of the PAP Government

(AS NOTED FROM NOTABLE QUOTES

ON THE PAP GOVERNMENT TAKEN

FROM THE READINGS

OF A NATIVE SON):

1. "Distinguishing the state from the government and the PAP is difficult because Singapore has been governed by the one political party for over thirty years, and headed by one continuous prime ministership until 1990. As it stands, the long-heralded succession of Goh Chok Tong to the prime ministership in November 1990 promised only a change of leadership style, not of strategy." -- CHRIS LEGGETT ("Singapore's Industrial Relations in the 1990s"; Singapore Changes Guard: Social, Political and Economic Directions in the 1990s; edited by Garry Rodan)
2. "At the societal level, as Singapore's economic development progresses, the principal domestic concerns will shift increasingly in the direction that Halal identified, that is, towards issues related to the quality of life, such as occupational stress, a materialistic life-style, the availability of home help, the quality of childcare and of family life, problems of the educational system, elitism and social inequities in society, the myriad restrictions and regulations in society, the domination of the political process by one party, and so on." -- CHEAH HOCK BENG ("Responding to Global Challenges: The Changing Nature of Singapore's Incorporation Into the International Economy"; ibid)
3. "If every Singaporean could internalise a little of 'LKY' in his or her mind, and if Lee was sure that open elections could indefinitely return the PAP, he might even be able to tolerate a more liberal and democratic Singapore. Japan was the utopia that Singapore could strive for." -- JEAN-LOUIS MARGOLIN ("Foreign Models in Singapore's Development and the Idea of a Singaporean Model"; ibid)
4. "To simulate citizenry, therefore, is to always focus on the differences between 'true' and 'false'; between 'real' and "imaginary'. The decision on whether something is 'true' or 'false', i.e. whether one is a 'real' citizen or not, is one determined by the model--the ideology put in place by the government. That model, in Singapore, is mostly a representational one, arguing that the real and the representation of the real (the good citizen, for example) are equivalent. There is no room, therefore, for active difference, alternative visions and non-governmental strategies, despite the fact that 'the next lap' is presented as part of a developing openness in Singapore government and society. Any active (i.e. potentially 'damaging') difference is snipped in the bud by the use of the Internal Security Act and, more frequently, by arguing that proper opposition can only take place within parliament--thereby constructing all opposition in the government's own terms--as a representation of itself." -- DAVID BIRCH ("Staging Crises: Media and Citizenship"; ibid)
5. "Against this view, a recent work by a group of sociologists at the National University of Singapore contends that prevailing views grossly inflate the extent of the middle class (Quah et al. 1991). These authors caution against reading too much into supercial indicators like consumption patterns. Moreover, they reject any suggestions that 'social class distinctions have weakened and economic rewards are both high and evenly distributed' (Quah 1991a, p. 3). For Quah (1991b, p. 71), the idea of a 'middle-class society' equates with the appearance of a 'one-class society'. Yet the study concludes that there 'no evidence of a concentration of people in one homogenous "middle" interval' (Quah 1991c, p. 262). In contrast to Chen's reading of the 1980 census data, Chiew, Ko and Quah (1991, p. 78) also assert that the proportion of blue-collar or manual workers (production, agricultural and service workers and labourers) amounted to 52.7 per cent, again attempting to expose as myth the idea of Singapore as a 'middle-class society'." -- GARRY RODAN ("The Growth of Singapore's Middle Class and its Political Significance"; ibid)
6. "Lastly, political leaders and leaderships, though embedded in a given political culture, exhibit individual psychologies and preoccupations." -- JAMES COTTON ("Political Innovation in Singapore: The Presidency, The Leadershipb and the Party"; ibid)
7. "The Singaporean socioeconomic elites do not conform to the 'liberal' model of professionals who, because of their wealth, skills and predominantly private sector occupations, are economically independent of the state, and therefore politically independent. Thus the percentage of the educated elite employed by the state remains remarkably high, averaging about 40 per cent, and the combination of a stress on deference (which has been promoted as an 'Asian value') and material prosperity has produced a depoliticised culture which is not conducive to the spread of ideas of individual or group liberty rights against the state. Any middle-class pressures towards liberalism have been further weakened by the system of education, which promotes, rather than reduces, the kiasu culture (Ho 1989)." -- DAVID BROWN ("The Corporatist Management of Ethnicity in Contemporary Singapore"; ibid)
8. "The international situation is changing in unpredictable ways, and the results of the PAP's own long-term policies are now being seen all too clearly in the consumerism and materialism that pervade the society, urban congestion andf the general feeling of a well-off population that they want more and if they do not get it they will rapidly become bored. Singapore is paradoxical in many ways, not least in the fact that despite defining itself as a newly-industrialising country (NIC) it is in most respects a mature economy co-existing with a very immature society, the constant preoccupation with identity being a very good indication of this latter fact. The constant changes in economic, educational and social policy combined with the PAP's style of constant sloganeering (speak Mandarin, wash your hands, flush the toilet, cross the road only at designated places etc.) contributes to perpetuating this immaturity, which is politically functional since it keeps the population in a constant state of dependency (itself a symptom of immaturity). At the same time, Singapore is an open society in certain respects-- people travel, read and acquire information from numerous sources, despite the government-controlled media, the exclusion of a wide range of foreign publications and the banning of TV satellite dishes. People also migrate, in alarmingly large numbers, and many Singaporeans have relatives living abroad." -- JOHN CLAMMER ("Deconstructing Values: The Establishment of a National Ideology and its Implications for Singapore's Political Future"; ibid).