When it comes to spying on internet users, who’s out of step here?
The Chinese government is developing the technology that will enable it to detect so-called terrorist behavior, very much along the lines of Minority Report’s Department of Pre-crime.
Basically, the Chinese authorities will be able to detect when somebody does things that might be considered different to their usual patterns of behavior based on their financial transactions, their travel arrangements, and who they meet. To carry out this surveillance, China’s police will be using technologies developed and made by companies in the West, such as facial recognition cameras, analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and myriad other ways that monitor what we’re up to and where we are.
China already employs more people to monitor what its citizens are up to on the internet than it does in its fearsome army. The censors who spy on what people say on Weibo, the country’s micro-blogging site, which a former employee has revealed, is one of the most sophisticated systems for controlling what people can say ever. And of course the excuse for all this is to protect the system itself.
Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia and in some of the Arab emirates, we know that governments use GPS to closely monitor the movements of their populations, making it possible to know where somebody is at any time, and of course without the need for a court order; the authorities there also use filters, bugs, and other monitoring systems.
Supposedly, all this paraphernalia is going to make life difficult for the hordes of insurgents, criminals, and terrorists out there… but of course in reality, we know that what really worries the authorities in these countries are women that are “too independent” or anybody who belongs to the LGBT community.
When we read about these things we might well ask ourselves whether we see them as throwbacks to theocratic and autocratic models of governance that will, hopefully, and with a little pressure from us, move forward toward the more open and democratic models we enjoy, or whether they are actually a portent of things to come, and that the new normal will soon be how China and Saudi Arabia do things, meaning we will have to “catch up”.
I certainly don’t like the idea of my television listening to me. But the idea that my government can know what I watch is much more frightening. I find the ongoing wrangle between the FBI and Apple highly worrying. As I look around my own country it seems there are fewer and fewer politicians prepared to stand up for the most basic principles of civil rights, and that, perhaps more than what is going on across the other side of the world, is something that really worries me.
(En español, aquí)
