<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">---------- Forwarded message ---------<br>From: <strong class="gmail_sendername" dir="auto">Nick Buxton</strong> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:nick@tni.org">nick@tni.org</a>></span><br>Date: Fri, Sep 7, 2018 at 10:43 PM<br>Subject: [Authoritarian-working-group] Who needs democracy when you have data?<br>To: <<a href="mailto:authoritarian-working-group@lists.tni.org">authoritarian-working-group@lists.tni.org</a>>, <<a href="mailto:associates@lists.tni.org">associates@lists.tni.org</a>><br>Cc: Stephanie Olinga-Shannon <<a href="mailto:s.olingashannon@tni.org">s.olingashannon@tni.org</a>><br></div><br><br>
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A disturbing read that sounds like a sci-fi novel but is already
here - in China clearly but in various forms everywhere. Ironically
I suspect the focus on China is because they are more open about
this surveillance of citizens than many in the West are. Watching
the film Snowden this week reminds you of that. But China is clearly
a prominent testing ground for a new arena of not just
authoritarianism but digital totalitarianism<br>
<br>
<h1 class="m_-8409738126521186332article-topper__title">Who needs democracy when you have
data?</h1>
<div class="m_-8409738126521186332article-topper__hgroup--bottom">
<h2 class="m_-8409738126521186332article-topper__subtitle">Here’s how China rules using
data, AI, and internet surveillance.</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democracy-when-you-have-data/" target="_blank">https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democracy-when-you-have-data/</a>
<br>
</p>
<ul class="m_-8409738126521186332article-topper__meta-info">
<li class="m_-8409738126521186332article-topper__meta-item"> by <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/profile/christina-larson/" target="_blank">Christina
Larson</a> </li>
</ul>
</div>
<p><span class="m_-8409738126521186332dropcap">I</span>n 1955, science fiction writer
Isaac Asimov published a short story about an experiment in
“electronic democracy,” in which a single citizen, selected to
represent an entire population, responded to questions generated
by a computer named Multivac. The machine took this data and
calculated the results of an election that therefore never needed
to happen. Asimov’s story was set in Bloomington, Indiana, but
today an approximation of Multivac is being built in China.</p>
<p>For any authoritarian regime, “there is a basic problem for the
center of figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across
society,” says Deborah Seligsohn, a political scientist and China
expert at Villanova University in Philadelphia. How do you
effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on
the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if
you don’t allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral
feedback? How do you gather enough information to actually make
decisions? And how does a government that doesn’t invite its
citizens to participate still engender trust and bend public
behavior without putting police on every doorstep?</p>
<p>Hu Jintao, China’s leader from 2002 to 2012, had attempted to
solve these problems by permitting a modest democratic thaw,
allowing avenues for grievances to reach the ruling class. His
successor, Xi Jinping, has reversed that trend. Instead, his
strategy for understanding and responding to what is going on in a
nation of 1.4 billion relies on a combination of surveillance, AI,
and big data to monitor people’s lives and behavior in minute
detail.</p>
It helps that a tumultuous couple of years in the world’s
democracies have made the Chinese political elite feel increasingly
justified in shutting out voters. Developments such as Donald
Trump’s election, Brexit, the rise of far-right parties across
Europe, and Rodrigo Duterte’s reign of terror in the Philippines
underscore what many critics see as the problems inherent in
democracy, especially populism, instability, and precariously
personalized leadership.
<p>Since becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party
in 2012, Xi has laid out a raft of ambitious plans for the
country, many of them rooted in technology—including a goal to
become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. Xi has
called for “cyber sovereignty” to enhance censorship and assert
full control over the domestic internet. In May, he told a meeting
of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that technology was the key to
achieving “the great goal of building a socialist and modernized
nation.” In January, when he addressed the nation on television,
the bookshelves on either side of him contained both classic
titles such as Das Kapital and a few new additions, including two
books about artificial intelligence: Pedro Domingos’s <em>The
Master Algorithm </em>and Brett King’s<em> Augmented: Life in
the Smart Lane</em>.</p>
<p>“No government has a more ambitious and far-reaching plan to
harness the power of data to change the way it governs than the
Chinese government,” says Martin Chorzempa of the Peterson
Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. Even some
foreign observers, watching from afar, may be tempted to wonder if
such data-driven governance offers a viable alternative to the
increasingly dysfunctionallooking electoral model. But
over-relying on the wisdom of technology and data carries its own
risks.</p>
<p><strong>Data instead of dialogue</strong></p>
<p>Chinese leaders have long wanted to tap public sentiment without
opening the door to heated debate and criticism of the
authorities. For most of imperial and modern Chinese history,
there has been a tradition of disgruntled people from the
countryside traveling to Beijing and staging small demonstrations
as public “petitioners.” The thinking was that if local
authorities didn’t understand or care about their grievances, the
emperor might show better judgment.</p>
<p>Under Hu Jintao, some members of the Communist Party saw a
limited openness as a possible way to expose and fix certain kinds
of problems. Blogs, anticorruption journalists, human-rights
lawyers, and online critics spotlighting local corruption drove
public debate toward the end of Hu’s reign. Early in his term, Xi
received a daily briefing of public concerns and disturbances
scraped from social media, according to a former US official with
knowledge of the matter. In recent years, petitioners have come to
the capital to draw attention to scandals such as illegal land
seizures by local authorities and contaminated milk powder.</p>
<p>But police are increasingly stopping petitioners from ever
reaching Beijing. “Now trains require national IDs to purchase
tickets, which makes it easy for the authorities to identify
potential ‘troublemakers’ such as those who have protested against
the government in the past,” says Maya Wang, senior China
researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Several petitioners told us
they have been stopped at train platforms.” The bloggers,
activists, and lawyers are also being systematically silenced or
imprisoned, as if data can give the government the same
information without any of the fiddly problems of freedom.</p>
<u></u> <u></u>
<u></u> <u></u> <u></u> <img class="m_-8409738126521186332article-img m_-8409738126521186332article-img--8col" src="https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/so18-china-3.jpg?sw=1080&cx=0&cy=0&cw=2109&ch=1406" alt="Photo of a facial recognition software applied to video
footage of shoppers."> A Shanghai startup’s demo of its system for
facial recognition.
<p>The idea of using networked technology as a tool of governance in
China goes back to at least the mid-1980s. As Harvard historian
Julian Gewirtz explains, “When the Chinese government saw that
information technology was becoming a part of daily life, it
realized it would have a powerful new tool for both gathering
information and controlling culture, for making Chinese people
more ‘modern’ and more ‘governable’—which have been perennial
obsessions of the leadership.” Subsequent advances, including
progress in AI and faster processors, have brought that vision
closer.</p>
<p>As far as we know, there is no single master blueprint linking
technology and governance in China. But there are several
initiatives that share a common strategy of harvesting data about
people and companies to inform decision-making and create systems
of incentives and punishments to influence behavior. These
initiatives include the State Council’s 2014 “Social Credit
System,” the 2016 Cybersecurity Law, various local-level and
private-enterprise experiments in “social credit,” “smart city”
plans, and technology-driven policing in the western region of
Xinjiang. Often they involve partnerships between the government
and China’s tech companies.</p>
<p>The most far-reaching is the Social Credit System, though a
better translation in English might be the “trust” or “reputation”
system. The government plan, which covers both people and
businesses, lists among its goals the “construction of sincerity
in government affairs, commercial sincerity, and judicial
credibility.” (“Everybody in China has an auntie who’s been
swindled. There is a legitimate need to address a breakdown in
public trust,” says Paul Triolo, head of the geotechnology
practice at the consultancy Eurasia Group.) To date, it’s a work
in progress, though various pilots preview how it might work in
2020, when it is supposed to be fully implemented.</p>
<p class="m_-8409738126521186332pullquote__text m_-8409738126521186332pullquote__text--quote">The algorithm is
thought to highlight suspicious behaviors such as visiting a
mosque or owning too many books.</p>
<p>Blacklists are the system’s first tool. For the past five years,
China’s court system has published the names of people who haven’t
paid fines or complied with judgments. Under new social-credit
regulations, this list is shared with various businesses and
government agencies. People on the list have found themselves
blocked from borrowing money, booking flights, and staying at
luxury hotels. China’s national transport companies have created
additional blacklists, to punish riders for behavior like blocking
train doors or picking fights during a journey; offenders are
barred from future ticket purchases for six or 12 months. Earlier
this year, Beijing debuted a series of blacklists to prohibit
“dishonest” enterprises from being awarded future government
contracts or land grants.</p>
<p>A few local governments have experimented with social-credit
“scores,” though it’s not clear if they will be part of the
national plan. The northern city of Rongcheng, for example,
assigns a score to each of its 740,000 residents, Foreign Policy
reported. Everyone begins with 1,000 points. If you donate to a
charity or win a government award, you gain points; if you violate
a traffic law, such as by driving drunk or speeding through a
crosswalk, you lose points. People with good scores can earn
discounts on winter heating supplies or get better terms on
mortgages; those with bad scores may lose access to bank loans or
promotions in government jobs. City Hall showcases posters of
local role models, who have exhibited “virtue” and earned high
scores.</p>
<p>“The idea of social credit is to monitor and manage how people
and institutions behave,” says Samantha Hoffman of the Mercator
Institute for China Studies in Berlin. “Once a violation is
recorded in one part of the system, it can trigger responses in
other parts of the system. It’s a concept designed to support both
economic development and social management, and it’s inherently
political.” Some parallels to parts of China’s blueprint already
exist in the US: a bad credit score can prevent you from taking
out a home loan, while a felony conviction suspends or annuls your
right to vote, for example. “But they’re not all connected in the
same way—there’s no overarching plan,” Hoffman points out.</p>
<p>One of the biggest concerns is that because China lacks an
independent judiciary, citizens have no recourse for disputing
false or inaccurate allegations. Some have found their names added
to travel blacklists without notification after a court decision.
Petitioners and investigative journalists are monitored according
to another system, and people who’ve entered drug rehab are
watched by yet a different monitoring system. “Theoretically the
drug-user databases are supposed to erase names after five or
seven years, but I’ve seen lots of cases where that didn’t
happen,” says Wang of Human Rights Watch. “It’s immensely
difficult to ever take yourself off any of these lists.”</p>
<p>Occasional bursts of rage online point to public resentment. News
that a student had been turned down by a college because of her
father’s inclusion on a credit blacklist recently lit a wildfire
of online anger. The college’s decision hadn’t been officially
sanctioned or ordered by the government. Rather, in their
enthusiasm to support the new policies, school administrators had
simply taken them to what they saw as the logical conclusion.</p>
<p>The opacity of the system makes it difficult to evaluate how
effective experiments like Rongcheng’s are. The party has squeezed
out almost all critical voices since 2012, and the risks of
challenging the system—even in relatively small ways—have grown.
What information is available is deeply flawed; systematic
falsification of data on everything from GDP growth to hydropower
use pervades Chinese government statistics. Australian National
University researcher Borge Bakken estimates that official crime
figures, which the government has a clear incentive to downplay,
may represent as little as 2.5 percent of all criminal behavior.</p>
<p>In theory, data-driven governance could help fix these
issues—circumventing distortions to allow the central government
to gather information directly. That’s been the idea behind, for
instance, introducing air-quality monitors that send data back to
central authorities rather than relying on local officials who may
be in the pocket of polluting industries. But many aspects of good
governance are too complicated to allow that kind of direct
monitoring and instead rely on data entered by those same local
officials.</p>
<p>However, the Chinese government rarely releases performance data
that outsiders might use to evaluate these systems. Take the
cameras that are used to identify and shame jaywalkers in some
cities by projecting their faces on public billboards, as well as
to track the prayer habits of Muslims in western China. Their
accuracy remains in question: in particular, how well can
facial-recognition software trained on Han Chinese faces recognize
members of Eurasian minority groups? Moreover, even if the data
collection is accurate, how will the government use such
information to direct or thwart future behavior? Police algorithms
that predict who is likely to become a criminal are not open to
public scrutiny, nor are statistics that would show whether crime
or terrorism has grown or diminished. (For example, in the western
region of Xinjiang, the available information shows only that the
number of people taken into police custody has shot up
dramatically, rising 731 percent from 2016 to 2017.)</p>
<u></u> <u></u>
<u></u> <u></u> <u></u> <img class="m_-8409738126521186332article-img m_-8409738126521186332article-img--8col" src="https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/so18-china-4.jpg?sw=1080&cx=0&cy=0&cw=2000&ch=1333" alt="Photo of a large monitor in a busy intersection showing
images of a suspect."> In the city of Xiangyang, cameras linked to
face-recognition technology project photos of jaywalkers, with
names and ID numbers, on a billboard.
<p>“It’s not the technology that created the policies, but
technology greatly expands the kinds of data that the Chinese
government can collect on individuals,” says Richard McGregor, a
senior fellow at the Lowy Institute and the author of <em>The
Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers</em>. “The
internet in China acts as a real-time, privately run digital
intelligence service.”</p>
<p><strong>Algorithmic policing</strong></p>
<p>Writing in the <em>Washington Post</em> earlier this year, Xiao
Qiang, a professor of communications at the University of
California, Berkeley, dubbed China’s data-enhanced governance “a
digital totalitarian state.” The dystopian aspects are most
obviously on display in western China.</p>
<p>Xinjiang (“New Territory”) is the traditional home of a Chinese
Muslim minority known as Uighurs. As large numbers of Han Chinese
migrants have settled in—some say “colonized”—the region, the work
and religious opportunities afforded to the local Uighur
population have diminished. One result has been an uptick in
violence in which both Han and Uighur have been targeted,
including a 2009 riot in the capital city of Urumqi, when a
reported 200 people died. The government’s response to rising
tensions has not been to hold public forums to solicit views or
policy advice. Instead, the state is using data collection and
algorithms to determine who is “likely” to commit future acts of
violence or defiance.</p>
<p>The Xinjiang government employed a private company to design the
predictive algorithms that assess various data streams. There’s no
public record or accountability for how these calculations are
built or weighted. “The people living under this system generally
don’t even know what the rules are,” says Rian Thum, an
anthropologist at Loyola University who studies Xinjiang and who
has seen government procurement notices that were issued in
building the system.</p>
<p>In the western city of Kashgar, many of the family homes and
shops on main streets are now boarded up, and the public squares
are empty. When I visited in 2013, it was clear that Kashgar was
already a segregated city—the Han and Uighur populations lived and
worked in distinct sections of town. But in the evenings, it was
also a lively and often noisy place, where the sounds of the call
to prayer intermingled with dance music from local clubs and the
conversations of old men sitting out late in plastic chairs on
patios. Today the city is eerily quiet; neighborhood public life
has virtually vanished. Emily Feng, a journalist for the <em>Financial
Times</em>, visited Kashgar in June and posted photos on Twitter
of the newly vacant streets.</p>
<p>The reason is that by some estimates more than one in 10 Uighur
and Kazakh adults in Xinjiang have been sent to barbed-wire-ringed
“reeducation camps”—and those who remain at large are fearful.</p>
<p>In the last two years thousands of checkpoints have been set up
at which passersby must present both their face and their national
ID card to proceed on a highway, enter a mosque, or visit a
shopping mall. Uighurs are required to install
government-designed tracking apps on their smartphones, which
monitor their online contacts and the web pages they’ve visited.
Police officers visit local homes regularly to collect further
data on things like how many people live in the household, what
their relationships with their neighbors are like, how many times
people pray daily, whether they have traveled abroad, and what
books they have.</p>
<p>All these data streams are fed into Xinjiang’s public security
system, along with other records capturing information on
everything from banking history to family planning. “The computer
program aggregates all the data from these different sources and
flags those who might become ‘a threat’ to authorities,” says
Wang. Though the precise algorithm is unknown, it’s believed that
it may highlight behaviors such as visiting a particular mosque,
owning a lot of books, buying a large quantity of gasoline, or
receiving phone calls or email from contacts abroad. People it
flags are visited by police, who may take them into custody and
put them in prison or in reeducation camps without any formal
charges.</p>
<u></u> <u></u>
<u></u> <u></u> <u></u> <img class="m_-8409738126521186332article-img m_-8409738126521186332article-img--8col" src="https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/so18-china-2.jpg?sw=1080&cx=0&cy=0&cw=1499&ch=999" alt="Photo of people tapping ID cards on a device before
entering a building."> Visitors to Tiananmen Square in Beijing scan
their IDs at a checkpoint.
<p>Adrian Zenz, a political scientist at the European School of
Culture and Theology in Korntal, Germany, calculates that the
internment rate for minorities in Xinjiang may be as high as 11.5
percent of the adult population. These camps are designed to
instill patriotism and make people unlearn religious beliefs. (New
procurement notices for cremation security guards seem to indicate
that the government is also trying to stamp out traditional Muslim
burial practices in the region.)</p>
<p>While Xinjiang represents one draconian extreme, elsewhere in
China citizens are beginning to push back against some kinds of
surveillance. An internet company that streamed closed-circuit TV
footage online shut down those broadcasts after a public outcry.
The city of Shanghai recently issued regulations to allow people
to dispute incorrect information used to compile social-credit
records. “There are rising demands for privacy from Chinese
internet users,” says Samm Sacks, a senior fellow in the
Technology Policy Program at CSIS in New York. “It’s not quite the
free-for-all that it’s made out to be.”</p>
<p><em>Christina Larson is an award-winning foreign correspondent
and science journalist, writing mostly about China and Asia.</em></p>
<pre class="m_-8409738126521186332moz-signature" cols="72">--
-----------------------------------------------------
NICK BUXTON
Futures Lab/Communications/Online Learning
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-----------------------------------------------------
Read my latest book, The Secure and the Dispossessed (November 2015)
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