Tag Archives: surveillance

Chinese government surveillance in Tibet

We hear a little bit about surveillance in Xinjiang in the international press, and even less about Tibet. But the situation is similar, according to this article on Eurasia.com (which I have no prior or independent knowledge of – the author of this article appears to be based in India and towards the bottom has some positive partisan things to say about India’s approach in Kashmir compared to China’s approach in Xinjiang and Tibet).

The AI-driven civilian surveillance systems deployed in the region are derived from military-grade C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) systems.

China has created a “widespread optical fibre cable network” and uses satellite stations (VSAT) to create an effective and secure command and control network across Tibet. Comprehensive broadband connections enable the government to monitor and control the flow of information…

The integration of a panoply of advanced technologies in Tibet  – AI-driven systems fusing facial recognition with internet browsing and app-based monitoring, DNA and genomic surveillance, and GIS tracking data – underlines the emergence of a terrifying approach to governance in the 21st century. It uses machine learning to power systems that prioritise state control and suppression over individual liberties and self-determination.

The situation in these Chinese provinces (and Gaza, which is a much more violent version) is interesting/concerning to me as an example of today’s surveillance and data management technologies taken to extremes in service of sinister social control. It’s probably happening other places that aren’t in the news, and probably happening in more subtle ways right under my nose as I write this.

the “military-digital complex”

The first time I heard this term was in this post from Naked Capitalism, but it sounds right. The article focuses on Palantir and an “alliance” between the US government and tech companies (particularly Palantir) and the Israeli government and tech companies. Palantir does indeed seem sinister. The events in Xinjiang were the first time I had heard of the idea of “social credit scores” to track and control large masses of people, and the events in Gaza take this concept to a new level of (I’m just going to say it) abhorrent violence and immorality.

I read a book once, and I can’t remember or find the title, making the point that these systems for ranking and controlling people go back to at least the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions. If you think about it, the religious authorities of the time would have been the only ones (in their society I mean) with access to the technology and skills needed, such as paper, quills, ink, and literacy. Move on to Tsar, Gestapo, Stasi, and J. Edgar Hoover, and similar ends were accomplished with typewriters and file folders. So it was probably inevitable that modern computerized database technology, and now machine learning technology, would take this to a new level.

And these technologies have many peaceful democratic and economic uses, so we would not want to put this genie back in the bottle even if we could. I also think that as cyber- and bio-weapons of mass destruction become increasingly accessible and dispersed in many more hands, this kind of surveillance will become necessary to manage these risks, which are existential. So the only real options here are to have political controls on the misuse of these technology in democratic societies, and to have updated and strengthened international institutions akin to the nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons control regimes of the past. At the moment, of course, it seems we are going down a dark path of increasingly sinister domestic surveillance with weakening democratic controls, along with weakening international controls. And I don’t know that governments focused on misusing these technologies to oppress their own citizens are going to be the ones most effective at also using them to manage the existential risks.

The International Atomic Energy Agency does in fact have a new(ish) AI-powered surveillance system called MOSAIC designed by…Palantir.

The Palantir, of course, was a crystal ball that figures in the Lord of the Rings. Created by the wise elves, who sure were somewhat elitist and mildly racist, but had the best interests of us common humans at heart overall. But the Palantir fell into the wrong hands and was misused by the forces of darkness. Only wizards and hobbits can save us now.

news coverage of protests in the U.S.

I’m still thinking about Charlie Stross’s concern about U.S. protestors being targeted. I don’t doubt that there was surveillance present at the recent protests, and we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the technology exists to track people. But the news coverage of the event was very muted here in the U.S. compared to what people might have seen abroad. The BBC headline was Anti-Trump protests held in cities across the US. But here in the U.S., many people I spoke to were not even aware they were happening. I happened to be aware because I am on a text list for Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign supporters, which still seems to exist and get used by mainstream Democrats from time to time. (So if there is in fact a cross hairs, I am most likely already in it.) But anyway, I turned on the local news that day in my city, which is a big city and definitely one of the protests sites, and the local protest was not only not the lead story, it was never mentioned in the first 20 minutes of the news broadcast (which was much more local TV news than I normally subject myself to.) Sure enough, leading news outlets in the U.S. including the New York Times, Washington Post, and ABC News seem to have intentionally minimized the event.

So either it was a small event not worthy of much coverage, or there was some censorship here. It was not a tiny event. In my city (Philadelphia), I know they closed off four blocks of a major downtown street, and I heard eyewitness accounts of people who were there. (I would have liked to be there but I can plead child care issues. Lack of child care is a pretty effective way to suppress political energy among working parents.) Anyway, this article from Fair.org, which is a left-leaning organization, offers some facts and figures:

  • 1400 cities
  • “At a conservative minimum, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to resist the Trump administration’s many assaults on democracy; organizers estimate the total reached into the millions.”

500,000 people spread over 1400 locations works out to an average of 400 per location. So say you had a few thousand at the larger protests. A few thousand people sounds like a lot, but spread over a few city blocks it is not exactly going to go un-noticed but it may not attract a huge amount of attention. The 2020 George Floyd protests in Philadelphia were estimated at 50,000 – 80,000 people, and those were impressive. I tend to think we may have spent a generation’s political energy on those, and it is questionable what we got. Besides more awareness of police violence, an important but narrow issue in my view in terms of the number of people affected, we possibly got some tangible reductions in the prison population, which is something.

The Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl parade crowd this year was estimated at 1 million people. That is a big, borderline dangerous crowd and gives a sense of how packed with people it is possible for the city streets to get.

private surveillance

Private companies are making money vacuuming up photos of things in the public realm, like license plates and peoples’ faces, and selling them to law enforcement. I think we have to accept that the technology of potential tyranny is here to stay, and in fact it is necessary in a world of mass shootings and potentially much worse things, like bioterrorism. We need to figure out a way to regulate and channel it to positive purposes in democratic societies, but we will never be able to make it go away or even slow it down.

Chinese government and genocide

There are reports that the Chinese government is forcibly sterilizing women in detention camps.

Women who had fewer than the legally permitted limit of two children were involuntarily fitted with intrauterine contraceptives, says the report.

It also reports that some of the women said they were being coerced into receiving sterilisation surgeries.

Former camp detainees said they were given injections that stopped their periods or caused unusual bleeding consistent with the effects of birth-control drugs.

Guardian

The report goes on to say this might be genocide. I don’t understand the “might”. Let’s review the UN definition of genocide. And remember these people are either in detention camps or under heavy surveillance designed to suppress their religion, language and culture.

…genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

a. Killing members of the group;

b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

UN

I just don’t see the ambiguity.

I’m not against intrauterine devices by the way. They are safe, effective, and reversible. Maybe we should pop one into every girl around age 13 or so (I don’t know the minimum safe age, I’m not a doctor), then let her decide when and if to take it out as an adult. The seemingly intractable abortion debate might go away. We need an equally safe, effective, and reversible male contraceptive too.

Snowden on Snowden

Fresh Air called up Edward Snowden in his Moscow apartment and had an hour-long conversation with him. Among the interesting things he talked about is the idea that the combination of surveillance technology and cheap data storage means the NSA is essentially trying to collect all the world’s electronic communications, store them forever, and have them available both to search algorithms and human searchers. In other words, the idea is that an NSA staffer can just type in anyone’s name in the world and pull up any and all of the communications they have ever been involved in.

2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • JANUARY: Cape Town, South Africa looked to be in imminent danger of running out of water. They got lucky, but the question is whether this was a case of serious mismanagement or an early warning sign of water supply risk due to climate change. Probably a case of serious mismanagement of the water supply while ignoring the added risk due to climate change. Longer term, there are serious concerns about snowpack-dependent water supplies serving large urban populations in Asia and western North America.
  • FEBRUARY: Cape Town will probably not be the last major city to run out of water. The other cities at risk mentioned in this article include Sao Paulo, Bangalore, Beijing, Cairo, Jakarta, Moscow, Istanbul, Mexico City, London, Tokyo, and Miami.
  • MARCH: One reason propaganda works is that even knowledgeable people are more likely to believe a statement the more often it is repeated.
  • APRIL: That big California earthquake is still coming.
  • MAY: The idea of a soft landing where absolute dematerialization of the economy reduces our ecological footprint and sidesteps the consequences of climate change through innovation without serious pain may be wishful thinking.
  • JUNE: The Trump administration is proposing to subsidize coal-burning power plants. Meanwhile the long-term economic damage expected from climate change appears to be substantial. For one thing, Hurricanes are slowing down, which  means they can do more damage in any one place. The rate of melting in Antarctic ice sheets is accelerating.
  • JULY: The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • AUGUST: Noam Chomsky doesn’t love Trump, but points out that climate change and/or nuclear weapons are still existential threats and that more mainstream leaders and media outlets have failed just as miserably to address them as Trump has. In related news, the climate may be headed for a catastrophic tipping point and while attention is mostly elsewhere, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is still one of the more serious risks out there.
  • SEPTEMBER: A huge earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be by far the worst natural disaster ever seen.
  • OCTOBER: The Trump administration has slashed funding to help the U.S. prepare for the next pandemic.
  • NOVEMBER: About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.
  • DECEMBER: Climate change is just bad, and the experts seem to keep revising their estimates from bad to worse. The Fourth National Climate Assessment produced by the U.S. government is not an uplifting publication. In addition to the impacts of droughts, storms, and fires, it casts some doubt on the long-term security of the food supply. An article in Nature was also not uplifting, arguing that climate change is happening faster than expected due to a combination of manmade and natural trends.

Climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics. If I go back and look at last year’s post, this list of existential threats is going to be pretty much the same. Add to this the depressing grind of permanent war which magnifies these risks and diverts resources that could be used to deal with them. True, we could say that we got through 2018 without a nuclear detonation, pandemic, or ecological collapse, and under the circumstances we should sit back, count our blessings, and wait for better leadership. And while our leadership is particularly inept at the moment, I think Noam Chomsky has a point that political administration after political administration has failed to solve these problems and this seems unlikely to improve. The earthquake risk is particularly troublesome. Think about the shock we felt over the inept response to Katrina, and now think about how essentially the same thing happened in Puerto Rico, we are not really dealing with it in an acceptable way, and the public and news media have essentially just shrugged it off and moved on. If the hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts just keep hitting harder and more often, and we don’t fully respond to one before the next hits, it could mean a slow downward spiral. And if that means we gradually lose our ability to bounce back fully from small and medium size disasters, a truly huge disaster like an epic earthquake on the west coast might be the one that pushes our society to a breaking point.

Most hopeful stories:

I believe our children are our future…ya ya blahda blahda. It’s a huge cliche, and yet to be hopeful about our world I have to have some hope that future generations can be better system thinkers and problem solvers and ethical actors than recent generations have been. Because despite identifying problems and even potential solutions we are consistently failing to make choices as a society that could divert us from the current failure path. And so I highlighted a few stories above about ideas for better preparing future generations, ranging from traditional school subjects like reading and music, to more innovative ones like meditation and general system theory, and just maybe we should be open to the idea that the right amount of the right drugs can help.

Fossil fuels just might be on their way out, as alternatives start to become economical and public outrage slowly, almost imperceptibly continues to build.

There is real progress in the fight against disease, which alleviates enormous quantities of human suffering. I mention AIDS, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease above. We can be happy about that, of course. There are ideas about how to grow more food, which is going to be necessary to avoid enormous quantities of human suffering. Lest anyone think otherwise, my position is that we desperately need to reduce our ecological footprint, but human life is precious and nobody deserves to suffer illness or hunger.

Good street design that lets people get around using mostly their own muscle power. It might not be sexy, but it is one of the keys to physical and mental health, clean air and water, biodiversity, social and economic vibrancy in our cities. Come to think of it, I take that back, it can be sexy if done well.

Good street design and general systems theory – proof that solutions exist and we just don’t recognize or make use of them. Here’s where I want to insert a positive sentence about how 2019 is the year this all changes for the better. Well, sorry, you’ll have to find someone less cynical than me, and/or with much better powers of communication and persuasion than me to get the ball rolling. On the off chance I have persuaded you, and you have communication and/or persuasion super powers, let me know.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Whatever else happens, technology and accumulation of human knowledge in general march on, of course. Computer, robotics, and surveillence technology march on. The human move into space is much slower and painful than many would have predicted half a century ago, and yet it is proceeding.

I’ll never drop the waterless sanitation thing, no matter how much others make fun of me. It’s going to happen, eventually. I don’t know whether we will colonize Mars or stop defecating in our water supply first, but both will happen.

The gene drive thing is really wild the more I think about it. This means we now have the ability to identify a species or group of species we don’t want to exist, then cause it not to exist in relatively short order. This seems like it could be terrifying in the wrong hands, doesn’t it? I’m not even sure I buy into the idea that rats and mosquitoes have no positive ecological functions at all. Aren’t there bats and birds that rely on mosquitoes as a food source? Okay, I’m really not sure what redeeming features rats have, although I did read a few years ago that in a serious food crunch farming rats would be a much more efficient way of turning very marginal materials into edible protein than chicken.

The universe in a bottle thing is mind blowing if you spend too much time thinking about it. It could just be bottles all the way down. It’s best not to spend too much time thinking about it.

That’s it, Happy 2019!

November 2018 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing stories:

  • Coral reefs are expected to decline 70-90% by mid-century.
  • The U.S. stock market is overvalued by about 40% by historic measures, and some economists think a major recession may be looming.
  • About half a million people have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since the U.S. invasions starting in 2001. This includes only people killed directly by violence, not disease, hunger, thirst, etc.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • New tech roundup: People in Sweden are barely using cash at all, and some are paying with microchips embedded in their fingers. New technology may allow screening of multiple airport passengers from 25 feet away with minimal disruption. This is great for airline passengers who are already expecting to be screened intrusively, but of course raises some concerns about potential uses elsewhere in the public realm. Amazon is hiring about 100,000 seasonal workers this year, compared to about 120,000 in past years, and the difference may be explained by automation. There is a new ISO standard for toilets not connected to sewers systems (and not just your grandfather’s septic tank.)
  • A unidentified flying object has been spotted in our solar system, and serious scientists say there is at least a plausible, if very unlikely, chance that it is an alien spacecraft.
  • People are taking micro doses of LSD on a daily basis, believing it boosts creativity, and there is some evidence for this although the science is not rigorous.

new technology that can screen multiple passengers 25 feet away

Here’s some more information on new airport screening tech (LA Times).

The screening device, which is about the size of an old-fashioned PC computer tower and weighs about 50 pounds, reads the outline of people to reveal firearms and explosives hidden under their clothes.

Unlike the TSA’s existing full-body scanners that bounce millimeter waves off of passengers to spot objects hidden under their clothes, Gramer said, the passive terahertz technology reads the energy emitted by a person, similar to thermal imaging used in night-vision goggles…

As a result, Thruvision boasts that its technology can screen up to 2,000 people an hour and detect a concealed device at a distance of up to 25 feet. Initially, the system can be used in addition to the existing full-body scanners already deployed at airports, but Gramer said the device can eventually replace parts of the TSA’s security screening system.

I think anyone will welcome a more convenient flying experience at this point, but it is somewhat sinister to think of this technology being installed in all sorts of public places, work places, police cars, etc.