Kenan Malik: Think only authoritarian regimes spy on their citizens?
The mass surveillance system installed by the French city of Marseille goes by the Orwellian name of Big Data of Public Tranquility
Almost half the world’s countries now deploy AI surveillance systems. So says a new report, The Global Expansion of AI Surveillance, from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Such technologies vary from “smart city” projects, which use real-time data on residents to aid delivery of public services and enhance policing, to facial recognition systems, to border security, to governments spying on political dissidents.
Almost half the world’s countries now deploy AI surveillance systems. So says a new report, The Global Expansion of AI Surveillance, from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Such technologies vary from “smart city” projects, which use real-time data on residents to aid delivery of public services and enhance policing, to facial recognition systems, to border security, to governments spying on political dissidents.
The main driver is
China. The tech company Huawei alone is responsible for providing AI
surveillance technology to at least 50 countries. But it’s not just Beijing
pushing such technology. Western companies, from IBM to Palantir, are deeply involved. In Saudi Arabia, for instance,
Huawei is helping create smart cities, Google and Amazon are building cloud
computing servers for government surveillance and the UK arms firm BAE is
providing mass monitoring systems.
While authoritarian
countries are investing heavily in such technology, it is most widespread in
democracies. “Liberal democratic governments,” the report observes, “are
aggressively using AI tools to police borders, apprehend potential criminals,
monitor citizens for bad behaviour and pull out suspected terrorists from
crowds.” Projects range from Baltimore’s secret use of drones for daily surveillance of the city’s
residents, to Marseille’s mass monitoring project, built largely by the Chinese
firm ZTE and given the very Orwellian name of Big Data of Public Tranquility, to the array of advanced
surveillance techniques being deployed on the US-Mexico border.
The technologies raise
major ethical issues and questions about civil liberties. Yet even before we’ve
begun to ask such questions, the technology has become so ubiquitous as to
render the debate almost redundant. That should be as worrying as the
technology itself...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/22/think-only-authoritarian-regimes-spy-on-their-citizens
