The wireless innovation known as “5G” has already gotten a bad rap in some quarters, with talk about how it could disrupt aviation or degrade health. Others just conceptualize it as the promise of faster internet. But it turns out that even the most ardent doomsayers haven’t generally identified the real threat 5G poses: giving government the capacity to monitor and control everything, everyone, everywhere, all the time.
The kicker: The government currently leading in 5G development is today’s “everything, everyone, everywhere, all the time” leviathan — China.
This was the frightening message delivered by Jonathan Pelson, telecom veteran and author of Wireless Wars: China’s Dangerous Domination of 5G and How We’re Fighting Back, on a recent Tucker Carlson Today segment.
As Pelson told host Carlson:
5G is not, despite the advertisements, is not just a faster 4G. The real payoff of 5G is that factories are going to use it to totally interconnect themselves. This thing they call “the Internet of Things”: your traffic systems, license plate readers, facial recognition systems, the way farms operate. There’s devices now and sensors — wireless sensors on tractors … put sensors in the soil to test moisture levels — all of this is going to be connected. The 4G network can’t handle that. The 4G network, if they can handle a thousand calls in one sector, 5G can handle a hundred thousand. So even though the commercials talk about how it’s a lot faster than 4G, that’s almost besides the point.
Of course, a system powerful enough to control everything that could help you is powerful enough to control everything that could harm you. Interviewer Tucker Carlson mentioned this, to which Pelson responded that you “see why China would be so interested in being a dominant supplier of it. There is a bright line between a license plate reader being used to find some kidnapped child and a plate reader being used to find an opposition leader going to run a rally against the sitting elected officials, or ruling officials. China is interested certainly in the second part a lot more than in the first” (video below).
Pelson certainly should know whereof he speaks, too, as he “joined Lucent Technologies during the telecom boom of the ‘90s, helping to create and market some of the company’s breakthrough technology solutions,” according to his Amazon author bio. (Hat tip for the preceding and the sources that follow: Becker News.)
Perhaps this makes it even more troubling that Pelson writes in his aforementioned book, according to its description, of “how America invented cellular technology, taught China how to make the gear, and then handed them the market.”
The book also includes “never-before-told stories from the executives and scientists who built the industry and describes how China undercut and destroyed competing equipment makers, freeing themselves to export their nation’s network gear — and their surveillance state,” the description further informs. Pelson “also reveals China’s successful program to purchase the support of the world’s leading political, business, and military figures in their effort to control rival nations’ [5G] networks.”
For a deeper understanding of 5G, realize that the “G” simply “means it’s a generation of wireless technology,” PCMag explained in January. Each generation has also typically been incompatible with the previous one.
“1G was analog cellular. 2G technologies, such as CDMA, GSM, and TDMA, were the first generation of digital cellular technologies,” PCMag continued. “3G technologies, such as EVDO, HSPA, and UMTS, brought speeds from 200kbps to a few megabits per second. 4G technologies, such as WiMAX and LTE, were the next incompatible leap forward, and they are now scaling up to hundreds of megabits and even gigabit-level speeds.” And, as Pelson pointed out, 5G will be far, far faster still.
To elaborate further, 5G will provide “instantaneous send and response times that will allow our devices to communicate directly with each other, essentially cutting humans out of the equation,” wrote Canada’s CBC in 2019. The outlet then quoted British innovator Kevin Ashton, who coined the phrase “the Internet of Things.”
“In the twenty-first century, because of the Internet of Things,” said Ashton in 2015, “computers can sense things for themselves.”
Of course, as films such as the Terminator series, Colossus: The Forbin Project (back in ’70), and The Matrix reflect, many have long feared über-intelligent machines’ domination. But for now the greater threat is über-aggressive China — and ever-burgeoning Big Brother in general.
Becker News outlines how Beijing is trying to dominate the Internet of Things, insinuate itself like a virus into the machinery of Western civilization, and control all things. Regarding our own statism, as commentator Mark Steyn once put it, how successful would the American Revolution have been if King George III could’ve just pressed a button and frozen all the Colonials’ bank accounts?
Obviously, 5G takes this to a different level altogether, apparently providing the capacity to monitor and, conceivably, control our every move.
Of course, as with any technology, 5G “may be used for the benefit of mankind or for greater social control,” concludes Becker News. So the “real ‘dual use’ of 5G technology may very well be whether it is used for good or for evil.”
It’s also true, however, that, as was the case earlier in history with nuclear weapons, falling behind in 5G development and leaving the field to the thoroughly immoral Beijing government is not an option. Yet whether of foreign or domestic pedigree, tyranny will be our lot if we don’t right our listing libertine ship. As Ben Franklin warned, “As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
And the Internet of Things can give those masters true mastery. As for man’s inability to master himself, one question to ponder is whether we could ever be virtuous enough to manage the kind of technological power our fertile minds produce. Ingenuity and iniquity a deadly marriage make.
