Spies of the world - more and more countries are implementing surveillance systems for citizens

Chinese scientists have developed artificial intelligence in a camera system with a total resolution of 500 megapixels (1). It is able to capture thousands of faces at the same time, such as in a stadium, in great detail, then generate face data stored in the cloud and instantly locate the specified target, the wanted person.

The camera system was developed at Fudan University in Shanghai and Changchun Institute, the capital of the northeastern province of Jilin. This is several times the resolution of the human eye at 120 million pixels. A published research paper on the subject states that it is capable of producing films at the same high resolution as photographs thanks to two special layouts developed by the same team.

1. Chinese 500 megapixel camera

Although officially this is, of course, another success of Chinese science and technology, voices were heard in the Celestial Empire itself that citizen tracking system it is already “perfect enough” and needs no further improvement. He said, among other things

Wang Peiji, Ph.D., School of Astronautics, Harbin Institute of Technology, quoted in Global Times. According to him, the creation of a new system should be costly and cannot bring great benefits. Cameras can also compromise privacy, Wang added, as they transmit high-definition images from a very long distance.

I don't think you need to convince anyone that China surveillance country (2). As the English-language South China Morning Post reported in Hong Kong, the country's authorities are still using new technologies to further control their citizens.

It suffices to mention only biometrics for passenger identification in the Beijing subway smart glasses used by the police or dozens of other methods of surveillance as part of a well-oiled total system of state pressure on citizens, headed by social credit system.

2. Chinese flag with the symbol of universal surveillance

However, some methods of spying on the people of China are still surprising. For several years now, for example, more than thirty military and government agencies have been using special drones that resemble living birds. They are reported to be flying in the sky in at least five provinces within program called "Dove"under the guidance of prof. Song Bifeng of Xi'an Polytechnic University3).

Drones can simulate wing flapping and even climb, dive and accelerate in flight just like real birds. Each such model is equipped with a high-resolution camera, GPS antenna, flight control system and satellite communication system.

The weight of the drone is about 200 grams, and its wingspan is about 0,5 m. It has a speed of up to 40 km/h. and it can fly non-stop for half an hour. The first tests showed that the "pigeons" are almost indistinguishable from ordinary birds and allow the authorities to conduct surveillance on an even larger scale than before, fixing the behavior of citizens in almost any situation.

3 Chinese spy drone

Democracies are also interested in espionage

China remains the world leader in facial recognition technology and other emerging technologies. Not only do they use the same handfuls, but different Chinese companies, from Huawei Technologies Co. above all, they export spy know-how all over the world. These are the thesis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in a report published in September this year.

According to this study, The world's largest sellers of artificial intelligence technologies for espionage are Huawei, the Chinese company Hikvision and the Japanese NECCorp. and American IBM (4). At least seventy-five countries, from the United States to Brazil, Germany, India and Singapore, are currently deploying large-scale artificial intelligence systems to monitor citizens. (5).

4. Who sells spy technology

5. Progress in espionage around the world

Huawei is a leader in this field, supplying this type of technology to fifty countries. For comparison, IBM sold its solutions in eleven countries, providing, among other things, the so-called technology () for monitoring agglomerations and data analysis.

“China is exporting monitoring technology to democratic countries as well as to authoritarian countries,” notes report author Steven Feldstein, prof. Boise State University.

His work covers data from 2017-2019 on states, cities, governments, as well as quasi-state facilities such as airports. It takes into account 64 countries where government agencies have acquired facial recognition technology using cameras and image databases, 56 countries where smart city technologies such as sensors and scanners are used that collect information analyzed in command centers, and 53 countries where authorities use "intellectual police". systems that analyze data and try to predict future crimes based on it.

However, the report fails to distinguish between legitimate use of AI surveillance, cases that violate human rights, and cases that Feldstein calls a "nebulous intermediate zone."

An example of ambiguity may be known in the world Projects is a smart city on the Canadian east coast of Toronto. It's a city full of sensors designed to serve society because they're designed to "solve everything" from traffic congestion to healthcare, housing, zoning, greenhouse gas emissions and more. At the same time, Quayside has been described as a "dystopia of privacy" (6).

6. Google's Big Brother Eye in Toronto Quayside

These ambiguities, i.e. projects created with good intentions, which, however, can lead to a far-reaching invasion of the privacy of residents, we also write about in this issue of MT, describing Polish smart city projects.

Residents of the UK are already accustomed to hundreds of cameras. However, it turns out that the police have other ways to track the movement of citizens. Tens of millions were spent in London city ​​mapswhich were called "oysters" ().

They are used billions of times every year, and the information they collect is of interest to law enforcement. On average, the Metropolitan Police Service requests data from the card management system several thousand times a year. Already in 2011, the city transport company received 6258 requests for data, up 15% from the previous year, according to The Guardian.

The data generated by city maps, combined with cellular geolocation data, allows you to establish profiles of people's behavior and confirm their presence in a certain place and at a certain time. With ubiquitous surveillance cameras, it becomes almost impossible to move around the city without the supervision of law enforcement agencies.

A report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shows that 51% of democracies use AI monitoring systems. This does not mean that they abuse these systems, at least not until this is the norm. However, the study cites several examples where civil liberties suffer from the implementation of such solutions.

A 2016 investigation revealed, for example, that the US Baltimore police secretly deployed drones to monitor residents of the city. Within ten hours of the flight of such a machine photos were taken every second. Police also installed facial recognition cameras to monitor and arrest demonstrators during the 2018 urban riots.

Many companies also supply technically advanced US-Mexico border surveillance equipment. As The Guardian reported in June 2018, border towers equipped with such devices can detect people up to 12 km away. Other installations of this kind are equipped with laser cameras, radar and a communication system that scans a 3,5 km radius to detect movement.

The captured images are analyzed by AI to isolate the silhouettes of people and other moving objects from the environment. It is not clear whether such methods of surveillance remain legal or necessary.

The French Marseille is leading the project. It is a program to reduce crime through an extensive public surveillance network with an intelligence operations center and nearly a thousand CCTV smart cameras in the field. By 2020, this number will double.

These leading Chinese spy technology exporters also offer their equipment and algorithms to Western countries. In 2017, Huawei donated a surveillance system to the city of Valenciennes in northern France to demonstrate what is called safe city model. It is an upgraded high-definition video surveillance system and an intelligent command center equipped with algorithms to detect unusual movements and street crowds.

However, what is even more interesting is how it looks…

… Chinese monitoring technology exports to poorer countries

That a developing country cannot afford these systems? No problem. Chinese sellers often offer their goods in bundles with "good" credits.

This works well in countries with underdeveloped technological infrastructure, including, for example, Kenya, Laos, Mongolia, Uganda, and Uzbekistan, where the authorities might not otherwise have been able to afford to install such solutions.

In Ecuador, a network of powerful cameras transmit images to more than a dozen centers that employ more than XNUMX people. Armed with joysticks, officers remotely control cameras and scan the streets for drug dealers, assaults and murders. If they notice something, they increase (7).

7. Monitoring Center in Ecuador

The system, of course, comes from China, is called ECU-911 and was created by two Chinese companies: state-owned CEIEC and Huawei. In Ecuador, ECU-911 cameras hang from poles and rooftops, from the Galapagos Islands to the Amazon jungle. The system also allows authorities to track phones and may soon be able to recognize faces.

The resulting records allow the police to review and reconstruct past incidents. Replicas of this network have also been sold to Venezuela, Bolivia and Angola. The system, installed in Ecuador in early 2011, is a basic version of a computerized control program that Beijing has previously spent billions of dollars on. Its first incarnation was a monitoring system created in China for the needs Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 year

While the Ecuadorian government swears it's only about security and crime control, and the cameras only provide footage to the police, a New York Times journalistic investigation found that the tapes also end up in the National Intelligence Agency, which deals with former President Rafael Correa, harassing, intimidating and attacking political opponents of the government.

Today, almost twenty countries, including Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates, and Germany, use Made in China smart monitoring systems. In the future, several dozens of them are being trained and their implementation is being considered. Critics warn that with Chinese monitoring and hardware know-how currently permeating the world, the global future looks full of technology-driven authoritarianism and massive loss of privacy. These technologies, often described as public safety systems, have the potential to have serious applications as tools of political repression.

says Adrian Shahbaz, director of research at Freedom House.

ECU-911 was introduced to Ecuadorian society as a way to contain the spate of drug-related murders and petty crime. According to privacy advocates, the paradox is that ECU-911 is not at all effective in deterring criminals, although the installation of the system did coincide with a decrease in crime rates.

Ecuadorians cite numerous examples of robberies and other illegal acts that took place right in front of the cameras without any reaction from the police. Despite this, faced with a choice between privacy and security, Ecuadorians in large numbers choose monitoring.

Beijing's ambitions go far beyond what has been sold in these countries. Today, police across China are collecting footage from tens of millions of cameras and billions of data about citizens' travel, Internet use, and economic activities to monitor them. The list of potential criminals and potential political opponents of China already includes 20 to 30 million people.

As the Carnegie Endowment report notes, surveillance need not be the result of governments willing to repress their citizens. It can play an important role in the prevention of terrorism and enable the authorities to track various threats. However, technology has also introduced new ways of being observed, resulting in a rise in metadata, whether it be email, location identification, web tracking, or other activities.

The motives of European democracies to adopt systems of governance from AI (migration control, tracking terrorist threats) may, of course, be fundamentally different from the reasons for implementing systems in Egypt or Kazakhstan (tracking dissidents, suppressing opposition movements, etc.), but the tools themselves remain remarkably similar. The difference in interpretation and evaluation of these actions is based on the assumption that democratic governance is "good" and undemocratic governance is "bad."