Where Are The TechnoDemocracies?
The Chinese government's intention to use social technology for control and governance has become increasingly clear. As these technologies have matured and abuses by Chinese President Xi Jinping's government have increased, the United States has vowed to stem the rise of "techno-authoritarianism." The United States has presented its technology - and that of its allies - as a democratic alternative. But is it really true?
Infamous on the web is the Chinese government's Great Firewall, which prevents people in the country from accessing hundreds of thousands of websites outside of China. Using a mix of coercion and incentives, authorities are forcing major Chinese internet companies to censor online speech ever more effectively, using a mix of human and artificial intelligence. Internet users cannot compete with this one-way arms race to "scale" the firewall or publish sensitive information through creative means, such as the use of names or graphics.
Offline and in physical spaces, China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS) has built an overlapping, multi-layered architecture of nationwide mass surveillance over the past two decades, creating an ever-tightening network around people. The government issues all citizens with a national identity card and requires people to use the number to access many public and private services. This "real name registration" requirement allows the police to collect and compile large databases of personal profiles linked to a person's ID. At the same time, the government has blanketed the country with closed circuit surveillance (CCTV) cameras. Authorities bought artificial intelligence technology from private companies, some with ties to the state and the military, to help them automatically analyze useful information from public surveillance footage.
The Chinese authorities' mass surveillance systems do not try to distinguish people from the crowd. They aim to transform "unstructured information" into "structured information" and transform a chaotic field of view into something like a text file that can be automatically parsed and searched. In the field of vision, AI extracts information such as the size and direction of the crowd, the color and type of objects present, even if people have pimples or raised eyebrows, from live or archived footage. As a result, searching for these properties ("where is the red umbrella") can be done easily and in real time.
While the Chinese police certainly rely heavily on visual surveillance in the form of CCTV networks, their surveillance systems include other technologies. These include IMSI capture devices that track and locate all switched-on and networked mobile phones in a specific area, automatically locating unique identifiers such as IMEI numbers and MAC addresses on people's phones and other connected devices. The surveillance includes voice samples, DNA, iris scanning and even people around to create a multimodal portrait.
You can get away with using a 3D-printed mask to avoid facial recognition, for example, but multimodal surveillance aims to be ubiquitous, omnipresent, comprehensive, and near-essential. Police also use analytics to find connections and find anomalies. In Xinjiang, for example, where the government has launched a crackdown on Uyghurs, a big data system known as the Platform for Joint Integrated Operations identifies behavior that authorities consider suspicious, such as when phones suddenly turn off, and warns those people about agents can track them to see question.let, arbitrary arrest and court proceedings.
Many of these surveillance technologies are not unique to China. But the depth, breadth, and severity of the Chinese government's mass surveillance of its citizens may be unmatched in modern history. This mass surveillance is unchallenged in China because there are few significant checks on government forces and the MPS is particularly unaccountable.
Other government tools, including the central bank's digital currency that allows authorities to monitor and control people's financial transactions, are not part of the MPS surveillance architecture. But they bear the stamp of the Chinese government's technological authoritarianism: a top-down form of governance that controls people and greatly influences their behavior by setting limits on what is acceptable and what is not.
The emerging and expanding Chinese "technology" also includes other functional and cost-effective technologies. Huawei's 5G devices have reportedly been approved by dozens of countries. Beijing's Beidou navigation system, on the other hand, has prevailed over the US version of GPS in more than 160 countries. TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has gone global. Alibaba is making its way into Southeast Asia, and Tencent's WeChat is keeping the Chinese diaspora alive.
Most of these are private companies based in China, but all are vulnerable to varying degrees of pressure, censorship and surveillance by the Chinese government. Technological systems and their impact on society are very difficult to study anywhere, as many of these systems are black boxes and trade secrets are closely guarded by companies. However, given the lack of rule of law and a free press in China, it is extremely difficult to obtain information from these companies or hold them accountable for abuses.
China's technosphere rests on the foundations of a surprisingly innovative model of governance: a technocratic country ruled by strongmen who effectively instill the illusion of modernity and progress in the people. On the contrary, democracies, with competitive elections, free media and independent judiciary, seem slow, chaotic, selfish and out of step with the challenges of our time. The technological difficulty of this governance model contributes to the Chinese Communist Party's overall effort to make democracy obsolete.
However, it is important not to overestimate the capabilities of the Chinese technosphere. Chinese police mass surveillance ambitions are often hampered by problems such as data integration between information silos. But as the broad outlines of Chinese techno-authoritarianism become clearer, how have democracies, particularly the United States, responded?
The US government sees the Chinese government as its main competitor and has presented this competition, including technology, as a value competition. For example, former President Donald Trump's Clean Network has tried to encourage other governments and network operators to work with companies that meet different standards, primarily because they are in countries with democracies and the rule of law, but also because they are. which transparent ownership structures do, keeping Chinese companies off American telecommunications networks. Chinese tech companies have also restricted access to US technology, finance and markets, citing human rights concerns. In turn, the Biden administration created the US-EU Trade and Technology Council "to promote new technologies based on shared democratic values, including respect for human rights."
Although these initiatives come from different sides of the growing political divide, they have something in common, namely their emphasis on values, with the words "democracy" and "human rights" sprinkled throughout these policy documents.
However, this US government narrative has at least three flaws. First, the stated motivation to promote certain values hides the realpolitik and protectionism behind some measures regarding Chinese technology. While TikTok, for example, poses a threat to privacy, sensitive data about almost everyone in the United States is also available on the commercial data brokerage market. That's because Congress has never passed a blanket national standard that significantly limits how most businesses collect, use, buy and sell personal information. If the Trump administration really cared about privacy, it would prioritize passing a federal privacy law in 2019 that appears to have bipartisan support.
Second, the narrative implies that technology built and developed in the United States or other democracies is inherently and automatically more rights-respecting. Nothing is further from the truth.
Democracy-based societies have been heavily involved in the construction of the Chinese government's surveillance state since its inception. North American companies reportedly helped build Beijing's surveillance architecture, including the Great Wall. US companies continued to provide "components, funding and know-how" to power China's surveillance infrastructure. Some of these companies are still listed as "clean" under Trump's "Clean Net" program because "they refused to do business with the CCP's state surveillance tools."
At the same time, US mass surveillance — the scope and extent of which was revealed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden — inspired colleagues in the Chinese military police surveillance complex. American surveillance of allies and partners such as the European Commission or the phones of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has left a permanent mark on the transatlantic sea. The idea that technology developed or produced by democracies (or even close allies) is necessarily or inherently safe or viable has not always been valid in Europe.
Nationally, mass surveillance and data collection in the United States have undermined media freedom, the public's right to know, the right to legal counsel, and Americans' ability to hold government accountable, documented by Human.Right Watch . Even in American cities, and especially in heavily patrolled communities of color, the growing use of facial recognition threatens people's right to walk the streets freely without government surveillance.
Furthermore, the business model on which some of the leading US technology companies rely is fundamentally incompatible with human rights. This model is based on an online advertising ecosystem that captures everything people say or do online, builds profiles, and uses that data to maximize attention and engagement across all platforms by selling targeted ads. The economics of these platforms rely on the ubiquitous tracking and profiling of users and invade people's privacy and fuel algorithms that encourage and amplify disruptive and sensationalist content.
After all, the very idea that the inclusion of "democratic values, including respect for human rights" can replace the safeguards and oversight necessary for the functioning of democracy smacks of techno-solubism and facilitates the functioning of technological systems.
The good versus evil narrative used by the US government obscures its role and that of Western societies, including their global affiliates, in undermining human rights and democracy. The privacy of individuals and civil society organizations in other countries is threatened not only by mass surveillance systems sold by Chinese companies, but also by various technology companies, many based on democracy, and by questionable business models and practices that they continue. .
The US can offer a real alternative to Chinese digital authoritarianism if it is willing to rethink and prioritize rights at home and abroad.
First, Congress must pass a strong federal privacy law that regulates the collection, analysis, and sharing of personal information by companies, including security and intelligence agencies. It should strengthen the protection of sensitive personal data, including biometric data, and consider banning law enforcement from using facial recognition. It should also regulate the use of data by advertisers and data brokers. In addition, the law should require human rights impact assessments for the global operations of US technology companies. Congress should also reform its national security surveillance laws, such as repealing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to end mass data collection.
The United States should work with like-minded governments to strengthen export control regimes both domestically and globally to ensure that they do not facilitate cross-border oppression. This work should particularly focus on investigating Chinese companies involved in the development and support of abusive systems. China's technology surveillance is big business, and more research is needed to examine how many actors there are, how they are connected, and most importantly, to what extent companies outside of China are involved in these abusive systems, especially in dual dealings. . . . - the use of technologies and the way to distinguish them.
And more research is needed to determine whether US restrictions are having their intended effect on Chinese tech companies or whether these companies have managed to evade and circumvent them. The United States should also prioritize and increase its work with like-minded governments in various technical standard-setting organizations, such as the International Telecommunication Union, in the area of human rights in technical standards, especially standards of internet governance.
But controlling the worst trends through regulation alone is not enough. The US government should devote resources to experimenting with bold proposals, such as technological systems that can have a positive impact on democracy. US non-profit organization New Public has called on governments to develop "digital public spaces" - online public spaces designed to maximize public goods so that people can "talk, share and connect without destroying those relationships ". . Taiwan's government partnered with a citizen hacker collective called g0v — collective member Audrey Tang later became the country's digital minister — to embed participatory decision-making in its government. Decision in Barcelona is another experiment of the platform for participatory democracy.
Indeed, the United States can become a leader by curbing its worst domestic technological impulses, preventing its technologies from falling into the wrong hands, and supporting the development of technologies that support democratic participation. It would be the real alternative to the digital authoritarianism of the Chinese government.
