[D66] China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone

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https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/china-surveillance/552203/

China's Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone

    By Larry Diamond, Anna Mitchell, www.theatlantic.com
    View Original
    February 2nd, 2018

Imagine a society in which you are rated by the government on your
trustworthiness. Your “citizen score” follows you wherever you go. A
high score allows you access to faster internet service or a
fast-tracked visa to Europe. If you make political posts online without
a permit, or question or contradict the government’s official narrative
on current events, however, your score decreases. To calculate the
score, private companies working with your government constantly trawl
through vast amounts of your social media and online shopping data.

When you step outside your door, your actions in the physical world are
also swept into the dragnet: The government gathers an enormous
collection of information through the video cameras placed on your
street and all over your city. If you commit a crime—or simply
jaywalk—facial recognition algorithms will match video footage of your
face to your photo in a national ID database. It won’t be long before
the police show up at your door.

This society may seem dystopian, but it isn’t farfetched: It may be
China in a few years. The country is racing to become the first to
implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing
advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to
construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist
party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good”
behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will
constantly monitor citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and
terrorism. While the expanding Orwellian eye may improve “public
safety,” it poses a chilling new threat to civil liberties in a country
that already has one of the most oppressive and controlling governments
in the world.

China’s evolving algorithmic surveillance system will rely on the
security organs of the communist party-state to filter, collect, and
analyze staggering volumes of data flowing across the internet.
Justifying controls in the name of national security and social
stability, China originally planned to develop what it called a “Golden
Shield” surveillance system allowing easy access to local, national, and
regional records on each citizen. This ambitious project has so far been
mostly confined to a content-filtering Great Firewall, which prohibits
foreign internet sites including Google, Facebook, and The New York
Times. According to Freedom House, China’s level of internet freedom is
already the worst on the planet. Now, the Communist Party of China is
finally building the extensive, multilevel data-gathering system it has
dreamed of for decades.

While the Chinese government has long scrutinized individual citizens
for evidence of disloyalty to the regime, only now is it beginning to
develop comprehensive, constantly updated, and granular records on each
citizen’s political persuasions, comments, associations, and even
consumer habits. The new social credit system under development will
consolidate reams of records from private companies and government
bureaucracies into a single “citizen score” for each Chinese citizen. In
its comprehensive 2014 planning outline, the CCP explains a goal of
“keep[ing] trust and constraints against breaking trust.” While the
system is voluntary for now, it will be mandatory by 2020. Already,
100,000 Chinese citizens have posted on social media about high scores
on a “Sesame Credit” app operated by Alibaba, in a private-sector
precursor to the proposed government system. The massive e-commerce
conglomerate claims its app is only tracking users’ financial and credit
behavior, but promises to offer a “holistic rating of character.” It is
not hard to imagine many Chinese boasting soon about their official scores.

While it isn’t yet clear what data will be considered, commentators are
already speculating that the scope of the system will be alarmingly
wide. The planned “citizen credit” score will likely weigh far more data
than the Western FICO score, which helps lenders make fast and reliable
decisions on whether to extend financial credit. While the latter simply
tracks whether you’ve paid back your debts and managed your money well,
experts on China and internet privacy have speculated—based on the vast
amounts of online shopping data mined by the government without regard
for consumer privacy—that your Chinese credit score could be higher if
you buy items the regime likes—like diapers—and lower if you buy ones it
doesn’t, like video games or alcohol. Well beyond the realm of online
consumer purchasing, your political involvement could also heavily
affect your score: Posting political opinions without prior permission
or even posting true news that the Chinese government dislikes could
decrease your rank.

Even more worrying is that the government will be technically capable of
considering the behavior of a Chinese citizen’s friends and family in
determining his or her score. For example, it is possible that your
friend’s anti-government political post could lower your own score.
Thus, the scoring system would isolate dissidents from their friends and
the rest of society, rendering them complete pariahs. Your score might
even determine your access to certain privileges taken for granted in
the U.S., such as a visa to travel abroad or or even the right to travel
by train or plane within the country. One internet privacy expert warns:
“What China is doing here is selectively breeding its population to
select against the trait of critical, independent thinking.”

While Westerners and especially civil liberties groups like the ACLU are
horrified by such a prospect—one commentator called the possibility
“authoritarianism, gamified”—others argue that because lack of trust is
a serious problem in China, many Chinese welcome this potential system.
However, a state-run, party-inspired, data-driven monitoring system
poses profound questions for the West about the role of private
companies in government surveillance. Is it ethical for private
companies to assist in massive surveillance and turn over their data to
the government? Alibaba (China’s Amazon) and Tencent (owner of the
popular messaging platform WeChat) possess sweeping data on each Chinese
citizen that the government would have to mine to calculate scores.
Although Chinese companies now are required to assist in government
spying while U.S. companies are not, it is possible to imagine Amazon in
Alibaba’s position, or Facebook in place of Tencent. While private
companies like credit scoring bureaus have always used data to measure
consumers’ creditworthiness, in any decent society there must be a clear
distinction between private-sector and public-sector scoring mechanisms
that could determine access to citizen rights and privileges, without
recourse.

This planned data-focused social credit system is only one facet of
China’s rapidly expanding system of algorithmic surveillance. Another is
a sprawling network of technologies, especially surveillance cameras, to
monitor people’s physical movements. In 2015, China’s national police
force—the Ministry of Public Safety—called for the creation of an
“omnipresent, completely connected, always on and fully controllable”
national video surveillance network. MPS and other agencies stated that
law enforcement should use facial recognition technology in combination
with the video cameras to catch lawbreakers. One IHS Markit estimate
puts the number of cameras in China at 176 million today, with a plan to
have 450 million installed by 2020. One hundred percent of Beijing is
now blanketed by surveillance cameras, according to the Beijing Public
Safety Bureau.

The stated goal of this system is to capture and deter criminals.
However, it also poses obvious and massive risks to privacy and the
modicum of freedom Chinese citizens have managed to gain since the
Maoist era. The penalties for small crimes seem unreasonable:
Authorities in Fuzhou are publishing the names of jaywalkers in local
media and even sending them to their employers. More ominous, though,
are the likely punishments that will be inflicted on people who
associate with dissidents or critics, who circulate a petition or hold
up a protest sign, or who simply wind up in the wrong place at the wrong
time. Thus, the installation of an all-seeing-eye for the government
alarms civil liberties and privacy advocates worldwide. The government
already constantly monitors the cell phones and social media of
human-rights activists in the name of “stability maintenance.” A video
surveillance system would enable further pervasive and repressive
surveillance. Making streams publicly available, too, would threaten
every citizen’s privacy: A busybody neighbor could easily spy on the
activities of the family next door as they run errands or go on vacation.

China’s experiments with digital surveillance pose a grave new threat to
freedom of expression on the internet and other human rights in China.
Increasingly, citizens will refrain from any kind of independent or
critical expression for fear that their data will be read or their
movements recorded—and penalized—by the government. And that is exactly
the point of the program. Moreover, what emerges in China will not stay
in China. Its repressive technologies have a pattern of diffusing to
other authoritarian regimes around the world. For this reason—not to
mention concern for the hundreds of millions of people in China whose
meager freedom will be further diminished—democracies around the world
must monitor and denounce this sinister creep toward an Orwellian world.