Peddling Big Brother

"Peddling Big Brother." Elmer-Dewitt, Philip, by-line writer. "With reporting by John Dunn, Sydney and Narunart Prapanya, Bankgkok." Time 24 June 1991: 62.

"Foreign governments are snapping up surveillance systems that are produced—but proscribed—in the West," says the subheadline; most impressive is a personal I.D. system now in use in Thailand keyed into a "population data base" that allows, in theory, linking independent government data bases to produce in one dossier all the information the government has on an individual. See for real-world referents for motif of governmental surveillance by computer.