Big Brother is watching
ENGLISH author George Orwell wrote of an oppressive, authoritarian society where citizens are under constant surveillance in his disturbing 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The citizens of Orwell’s Oceania are watched at home and at work via two-way telescreens that observe and listen. Public spaces are laced with hidden microphones and cameras. Letters written by citizens are read by government before being delivered.
It is extraordinary to think Orwell imagined this five decades before computers and the internet became our daily reality. Now we know, and apparently accept, that the telescreens of our phones, laptops, tablets and PCs can, and do, collect our private thoughts and deeds.
In 2013, former US Central Intelligence Agency operative Edward Snowden leaked classified documents showing the US Government’s National Security Agency and Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance, which includes Australia, conducts covert global surveillance with the help of multinational telcos and governments.
Among Snowden’s revelations was that the NSA uses XKeyscore to collect anything done anywhere at any time on the internet, whether you are a judge, journalist, cop, librarian, teacher, editor, producer, neighbouring country, business competitor, prime minister or teen gamer.
All online conversations, emails, texts, photos and contact lists are observable, and if you draw the attention of those doing the monitoring, they can, in a few keystrokes, dig into your credit history, finances, consumer purchases and internet browsing, and that of anyone you have contacted.
For exposing this Orwellian cyber-spying, Snowden was labelled everything from a whistleblower to a dissident, traitor, patriot and hero. He is wanted by the US Government and lives in exile in Russia.
Since his expose, it has been revealed that British company Cambridge Analytica harvested the Facebook data of 87 million Americans and about 300,000 Australians to use in modelling that helped sway the presidential election of Donald Trump and the shock Brexit vote.
The data enabled psychological profiling to target susceptible voters with personalised online content designed to play on their identified fears and anxieties.
INChina, the Skynet program uses artificial intelligence and face recognition to track people on public cameras. China has 170 million such cameras and plans to have 400 million installed by 2020.
Launched in 2005 and constantly updated, the surveillance system can identify a person in seconds and is used to shame jaywalkers by projecting an offender’s image and name on public screens.
Chinese citizens now happily use face recognition to plug into phone apps, access buildings, and to get toilet paper from public loos and money from ATMs.
China’s new Sharp Eyes program, announced just after Xi Jinping was this year given the presidency for as long as he wants, takes surveillance to a new level, with the appropriation of household televisions and phones.
New Chinese AI can identify faces in low light, on strange angles and account for ageing. A voice-recognition database is also being built.
This year Chinese officers began testing glasses with inbuilt face-recognition technology to allow police to simply look at a citizen to access their identity and to scan vehicle registrations.
This data is being linked to create a social credit system to rate the trustworthiness of a citizen with an index that accounts for whether a person has been caught being disobedient by jaywalking or whatever the Communist Party decides is inappropriate. The index will determine the level of privileges granted to an individual citizen.
A survey published by state media last year showed 80 per cent of Chinese polled were in favour of using AI cameras to name and shame petty criminals. Most people like to feel safe.
However, I suspect most Chinese are also smart enough to know that to express opposition to such measures would itself risk a demerit point on one’s index.
Chinese companies are working with Government to build a new national surveillance and data-sharing platform to use hi-tech developments such as the XDH-CF-5600 scanner or “mobile phone sleuth”, which can crack a smartphone password in seconds, rip personal data from apps, and harvest contact lists.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told Parliament in February of plans to share “facial images and related identity information via a set of identity-matching services, for a range of national security, law enforcement, community safety and related purposes, while maintaining robust privacy safeguards”.
Mr Dutton’s plan is to connect people’s driving licences, passports and citizenship documents in a bid to thwart identity fraud, organised crime and terrorism.
In Tasmania, too, there have been recent calls to use public cameras to identify dogwalkers who fail to pick up after their pets and to catch motorists who run red lights.
It all starts with something as innocuous and local as a dog’s poo, a toilet’s paper or a jaywalker but once Big Brother is invited in, he will be forever watching, even while you sleep.