The Future of Surveillance: 500,000 AI Facial Scans Per Month in China

An abandoned panopticon prison in Cuba (source). Being publicly observed, or the knowledge that they may be being observed at any one time, keeps prisoners under control.

by Thomas Neuburger

All regimes with an overriding need to control their populations — including the U.S. and China — depend on public surveillance as a key element in their control mechanism. "Public surveillance" has two senses, and both of them apply.

"Public surveillance" means surveillance of the public, of course, but it also means publicly-acknowledged surveillance of the public. That is, the observed know they are being observed, or they might be being observed, whether or not they see the observer. The act of acknowledged observing is itself the instrument of control. (The state police, the Stasi, of East Germany accomplished this with an extensive network of citizen-spies. Everyone knew their neighbors were observing them; no one knew when a neighbor would betray them to the state.)

As Ed Walker observed some years ago: "In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes about the way discipline is enforced. He uses the image of the Panopticon, a prison invented by Jeremy Bentham. ... The prison cells are arranged in a circle, and a guard tower stands in the center. Bentham suggested that the guards should be shielded from the view of the prisoners, so they wouldn’t know when they were being observed, but would know that they might be observed at any moment. He also suggested that it didn’t matter who was looking at the prisoners, as long as someone was looking."

I would add that if the observation tower is shielded by a one-way mirror, it doesn't even matter if the tower is populated, so long as prisoners think it could be.

Surveillance of citizens is rampant in China, of course, but also in the West. It's impossible to watch any British mystery or police drama, for example, without some propagandistic reference to evidence from CCTV footage, as though mass surveillance were not only not unusual, but a benefit to society.

And it's hard not to imagine that every word spoken into a U.S. telephone, typed into a U.S. email message, or sent via Skype or any other U.S.-based electronic services is not either observed or collected for later observation by the modern NSA — the eyes and ears of the U.S. security state — whose motto, after all, is "Collect it all."

There's no question that close observation of U.S. citizens is great and that it will increase. The only question is how it will increase and how quickly.

What's the future of U.S. security surveillance? For that, we look to China. Via Paul Mozur writing at SFGate:

One month, 500,000 face scans: How China is using AI to profile a minority

The Chinese government has drawn wide international condemnation for its harsh crackdown on ethnic Muslims in its western region, including holding as many as 1 million of them in detention camps.

Now, documents and interviews show that authorities are also using a vast, secret system of advanced facial recognition technology to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said.

The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and goings for search and review. The practice makes China a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism.

The technology and its use to keep tabs on China’s 11 million Uighurs were described by five people with direct knowledge of the systems, who requested anonymity because they feared retribution. The New York Times also reviewed databases used by the police, government procurement documents and advertising materials distributed by the companies that make the systems.

Lest you think this is just a story about the use of AI (artificial intelligence) to perpetuate the evils of racial bias, think again.

Close and aggressive policing in the U.S. is not just for black neighborhoods, even though that's where it most often occurs. Here's what happens to white people, for example, when they too cross the line drawn by the state:

Agents of the national security state pepper-spraying the faces of submissive Occupy protesters at UC Davis

As this technology becomes more refined, it can be used to identify anyone anywhere they can be observed, and each observation will then be added to the ever-growing database file kept on that person. To what purpose? Any purpose the U.S. national security state wishes to put it to.

The future of mass surveillance may be in China, but it won't stay there for long.