The movie V for Vendetta presents the idea of a utopian future, with a fascist government in power that controlled and monitored everything. Today, you don’t need to watch a movie to find similarities in the current world.
The unpopular measure pushed by the central Chinese government that would allow the extradition of Hong Kong citizens to mainland China raised alarms for many people who wanted to protest against such a policy[81].
The problem for these people determined to march is that they did not want to end up being persecuted by the Chinese authorities, so they took all possible privacy precautions. One of them involved changing how people got to the march. In Hong Kong, as in many other metropolises, people use a magnetic card to take the train. During the protests, people changed this routine and long lines of individuals were seen waiting to buy single-use physical tickets, manually, using cash, to avoid being tracked for participating in the protests due to the use of their train cards or their debit or credit cards to record the purchase. While the logic behind this idea is correct, it is not enough. As long as we have a cell phone on, receiving a signal, in our pockets, we cannot hide from a government like China’s that controls everything. The government could ask mobile phone companies to triangulate the position of our devices at the time of a march and thus effectively know who was there, even if the GPS function was turned off. All this leaving aside the facial recognition cameras that now flood the streets of that country. Could this lead to people protesting less publicly due to the exposure this would generate against the current rulers? What will be the effect of facial recognition programs developed by Huawei and Alibaba to identify Uighurs, a persecuted Muslim minority in China[82]? Will they dare to protest publicly knowing they will be watched? Is there a connection between this and the Chinese Social Credit System? In Iran, local authorities have already stated that they will use this technology to identify women who do not comply with the law that since 1983 has ordered them to cover their heads with a veil known as hijab, which can be severely sanctioned[83].
Evidently, the concessions of the Chinese Communist Party to capitalism have made it more difficult to monitor a population close to 1.4 billion people. Online censorship, along with censorship of the free press, seems no longer sufficient and that is why the Social Credit System takes center stage. It is one of the most ambitious projects of the Asian giant and consists of a points system that evaluates each citizen’s actions individually. The logic is very simple: if you commit an offense, points will be deducted, and if you lose points, you also lose rights in society. Crossing the street when the light is red, throwing cigarette butts on the street, shouting in public and disturbing the social order are all actions that will deduct points. Without them, you will not be able to apply for bank loans, use all means of transport, and you may even be denied the right to purchase a home or contract the internet. In this way, the Chinese authorities aim to create a better society, or at least a more controlled and orderly version of it. Critics, on the other hand, argue that this marks the beginning of an era characterized by technological authoritarianism and a mechanism to keep people under control. George Orwell fell short. The security cameras distributed and located ubiquitously throughout the Asian giant, along with technologies that facilitate facial recognition through AI, are what make this dystopia already a reality.
In 2017, BBC correspondent John Sudworth traveled to China to conduct an experiment with the local police authorities. Knowing in advance that the eastern country had built the world’s largest surveillance camera system, John went to the city of Guiyang, where he allowed local authorities to take his photo and upload it to their database. Guiyang has stored and cataloged the images of all its residents. In this city, some cameras detect license plates and others detect faces, age, ethnicity, and gender. What happened next can be considered fascinating and controversial at the same time, depending on the individual perception of privacy each reader has. Once his photo was taken, John left the building and decided to walk the streets of that city. As soon as John left the building, local authorities issued an alert about him and all the city’s cameras began looking for him. This journalist’s walk didn’t last long. In just 7 minutes, he was detained by the police. Although this was a consensual experiment and John’s safety was never in danger as the alert issued about him only asked for his detention, it demonstrates the surveillance power of China’s central authorities. In 2017, they had 170 million facial recognition cameras deployed in the country. By 2019, they had reached 200 million, and the official intentions are to reach 400 million cameras in a few years. Welcome to the social control of 21st-century false communism.
Video of John Sudworth escaping cameras in Guiyang[84]
What if we don’t need to install as many cameras as we think? What if the 360º cameras of autonomous vehicles also start transmitting information to security forces if they detect images of an illicit activity or an event of interest? Perhaps automakers could be required to store the images obtained by their vehicles in the cloud for a certain number of days on their servers, so if someone reports an illicit activity, and an autonomous vehicle, equipped with its wide-angle cameras, passed by the place at the time of the crime, we could request and use these recordings as evidence. Of course, we could also wonder if it violates our privacy for them to know and then show our location on the map at a given moment if they find the evidence sought. What if we were somewhere we weren’t supposed to be and that later destroys a personal relationship or causes us to lose our job? What is the middle ground? Should they ask for our permission first? Can we refuse to cooperate if we don’t want to reveal our past location to the rest of society? The idea of being able to present these recordings without the active participation of the vehicle owner could be problematic in the era of deepfakes, a term we will explain later in the book but which we could summarize for now as videos edited computationally to show a person doing or saying something that did not actually happen. Just because something appears to be real doesn’t mean it is, and that’s why having more variables that contribute to the validation of the data obtained becomes crucial.
The combination of this ocean of available data, with the advance of deep learning and facial recognition technologies, could even alert security forces about people with arrest warrants circulating on the street if security forces could access all this material constantly. We have known for a long time that privacy on the internet does not exist, perhaps today we are living our last years of privacy in the physical world as well.
It is likely that if a society cedes the right to its privacy in the physical world, the street crime rate will be considerably reduced. But is this right? I believe this is a decision that each society must make, without accepting canned solutions from other latitudes by default, and much less leaving this decision solely in the hands of engineers and programmers. The right thing to do would be to present each group of individuals with the possibilities each option offers. For example, while British and Chinese citizens, and tourists visiting London or Beijing, are constantly filmed on the streets by security cameras; this might not be the case for someone walking the streets of Berlin due to German opposition to surveillance after the sad memories of the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany.
Caution, facial recognition is not necessarily bad. Undoubtedly, there will be dozens of applications that will make our lives easier. It is likely that in the near future, the facial recognition systems of our cell phones will serve elderly people to give their proof of life to public bodies, such as those responsible for administering their retirement, thus avoiding the need for people to be forced to go to a physical branch of a bank or state agency. If we go further into the future, it is even possible to think that when we have an open, decentralized, and third-party audited system, we could even vote with our faces from the comfort of our homes.
Despite this, it is no longer just individuals whose privacy is put at risk, but States also see their secrets in danger. And although I did not intend to refer to whistleblowers like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, I want to make it clear that the crime they are accused of seems absurd to me. Both published true information. Information that embarrassed many political leaders, yes, but it did not harm anyone. What did harm various individuals, including civilians, were some of the military operations carried out by the US forces that these characters simply brought to the headlines of major news portals by exposing those secrets. Civil disobedience carried out peacefully helps push our societies and institutions forward. The only ones upset with whistleblowers are the major governments and corporations that committed irregular acts in the first place, while a large part of civil society hails figures like Assange and Snowden and turns them into heroes. This is yet another clear example of how the silent majority is overwhelmed by a powerful minority. Let us not allow the same to happen with the application of AI in our daily lives. Any demonstration, even those protected by the constitution of the countries, is viewed with special attention and caution by those in power when they see their authority challenged. However, as I said at the beginning of this paragraph, I did not want to elaborate too much on Assange and Snowden, but I wanted to talk to you about Strava.
Strava is a mobile application for exercising. This app collects various information about its users’ workouts, including their movements thanks to the GPS connection embedded in modern mobile phones. The problem arose when the company decided to publish a public heat map, indicating the routes of people using this application to train[85]. It turns out that many members of the US armed forces, who have secret bases scattered around the globe, use Strava to track their workouts. This revealed the location of various US military bases, creating an unprecedented risk for the country and its military personnel.
Here, part of the problem was the idea that the individual who consents to the policies and terms of use of an application, which we all tend to accept without reading first, does so being aware of the risks to which they may be exposed, and that is not real. It is prudent to assume that Strava did not intend to reveal the coordinates of US military bases, but they did. This company, and many other tech companies, have good intentions and act in good faith, yet they fail to accurately convey the type of risk we may be exposing ourselves to.
Just as we mentioned Assange and Snowden, a special mention is deserved for Jack Teixeira, arrested in April 2023[86]. While Assange declassified information about past acts, such as attacks on the civilian population that had been covered up, or espionage of other world leaders, and Snowden exposed a network of espionage that also affected civilians, Teixeira veered off in another direction, endangering the lives of innocent civilians. His case is astonishing to me. Depending on your age, you may or may not know what Minecraft is, a very popular video game with millions of users. The other thing you need to know is that there is a platform called Discord, which allows online communities to be created similarly to how the first forums on the internet did. The issue is that Teixeira, 21 years old, was a user of the game in question and used the Discord platform to connect with other players, most of them minors. However, Teixeira was not just another young person. He worked as an information systems administrator for the United States National Guard. Although he did not work directly in the field of what we call Intelligence, part of his job was to protect this type of data. Therefore, he had access to very valuable information. However, this power was used to impress other community users. While the high commands of the United States could not decipher how their information was being leaked, not knowing if it was an internal mole or a hacker, reality surpassed fiction. The Discord server called Thug Shaker Central was the place where Teixeira shared hundreds of pages of secret intelligence documents of the United States. The worst part is that he did not do it, apparently, for ideological or political reasons, but because he was bored, showing off his access to confidential information in an online forum when someone called him a liar, so the 21-year-old proceeded to share the documents in question. Jack began publishing images of Ukraine’s battle plans. He demonstrated how deeply infiltrated US intelligence and its allies were on the Russian front, which has allowed Ukrainian forces to be alerted to attacks planned by Putin’s forces. Although Teixeira may not have premeditated it, he endangered the lives of Ukrainian civilians and alerted Russia to its intelligence weaknesses. Today the young man faces the weight of the law. It was not China, Russia, or elite hacker groups from North Korea. It is impressive how no one thought that giving access to such information to a 21-year-old might not be a good idea. Sometimes surveillance capitalism forgets loose ends that jeopardize the game of hide and seek.
Just like China, the United States is developing its own race to identify, label, and pursue its citizens. However, unlike China, the United States faces opposition from numerous human rights organizations, which it has to listen to to a certain extent, rather than being able to ignore them completely. Western society is not culturally prepared to give up its privacy so openly. Chinese culture, after decades of strict government control over people’s lives, is more prone to yielding in this type of advance.
It is very likely that one is horrified by the surveillance and scoring system designed and implemented by China. The reality, whether we like it or not, is that all of us are constantly being scored, no matter if we live in a Western democracy. We are all analyzed by algorithms, some belonging to the State, and others, the vast majority, to private companies. These algorithms not only decide what products or services to recommend to us but also shape our worldview. Google’s algorithms do not have to know what is good and what is bad. What they do know is that they must try to retain our attention as much as they can, even if it means feeding us false news or scientifically discredited conspiracy theories. If you like that, Google will give you that. As Leonardo Fariña, an Argentine businessman who testified as a repentant witness in one of the country’s most memorable corruption cases, said: “They wanted fiction, I gave them fiction”[87].
The ownership of information will become a critical component, and we should avoid its monopolistic concentration. We must not allow a new asymmetric distribution of power, and this is precisely what the battle between the United States and China for control of 5G networks is about. The problem the United States has in this fight, as I heard in one of the panels I participated in at the technology camp for civic space defenders at Stanford University’s Global Digital Policy Incubator and the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, is that while China offers major infrastructure works to developing countries, the United States only offers a narrative tied to Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. The agreements linked to China’s Belt & Road Initiative are not free and, in many cases, can be detrimental in the long term to the beneficiary countries, but it is difficult for a sitting ruler facing high unemployment rates and lacking access to cheap international credit to refuse to sign these agreements. Maybe China today does not have the capacity to analyze all this data transmitted through its technology, but it is likely that they will eventually achieve it.
If information is power, the geopolitical relevance of AI is even greater than that of a missile arsenal. The main difference between China and the United States, regarding this point, is that, paradoxically, China is transparent about it; in fact, https encryption is prohibited in its territory[88], which is a secure text transfer protocol used by virtually all the websites you surely visit and that you can easily detect if you see a padlock before the URL. We are on the verge of entering a new type of colonialism, that of information, an unlimited and replicable commodity. Has the dream of a free and open internet died? Can liberal democracy survive the internet?
[81] Brooks, S. (2019). Hong Kong’s extradition law changes spark mass protests over fears about Beijing’s reach. Viewed April 18, 2021, on ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-09/hong-kong-extradition-law-changes-spark-mass-protests/11187374.
[82] Bhuiyan, J. (2021). “There’s cameras everywhere”: testimonies detail far-reaching surveillance of Uyghurs in China. The Guardian. Viewed December 20, 2021, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/30/uyghur-tribunal-testimony-surveillance-china.
[83] Johnson, K. (2023). Iran Says Face Recognition Will ID Women Breaking Hijab Laws. WIRED. Viewed March 1, 2023, at https://www.wired.com/story/iran-says-face-recognition-will-id-women-breaking-hijab-laws.
[84] BBC News. (2017). China: “the world’s biggest camera surveillance network” – BBC News [Video]. Viewed April 14, 2021, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNf4-d6fDoY.
[85] Hern, A. (2018). Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases. The Guardian. Viewed October 23, 2022, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracking-app-gives-away-location-of-secret-us-army-bases.
[86] Toler, A., Triebert, C., Willis, H., Browne, M., Schwirtz, M., & Mellen, R. (2023). The Airman Who Gave Gamers a Real Taste of War. The New York Times. Viewed April 19, 2023, at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/13/world/europe/jack-teixeira-pentagon-leak.html.
[87] La Capital. (2013). Leo Fariña aseguró que todo lo que dijo en la cámara oculta fue “ficción”. La Capital. Viewed January 10, 2022, at https://www.lacapital.com.ar/edicion-impresa/leo-farina-aseguro-que-todo-lo-que-dijo-la-camara-oculta-fue-ficcion-n569801.html.
[88] Catalin Cimpanu. (2020). China is now blocking all encrypted HTTPS traffic that uses TLS 1.3 and ESNI. ZDNET. Viewed March 24, 2023, at https://www.zdnet.com/article/china-is-now-blocking-all-encrypted-https-traffic-using-tls-1-3-and-esni.