state of surveilance
intro
during my travel to china, i have seen many concerning aspects of the country's development.
i will try to vent my concerns in the simplest way i can, and hope my thoughts can be understood by general audience.
my observations
imagine living in a country where:
- internet
- when connecting to free wifi, either passport or phone number is required as a proof of id for access
- getting a new sim card also requires id or passport
- smartphone app store with only state approved apps
- state approved smartphone os
- state firewall
- everyone is on the same instant messenger
- living
- home apartment elevator require facial recognition
- smart tvs with paid subscriptions (state approved programmes only)
- fake ai foot analysis tools in shoe stores
- baby camera with fake ai built-in
- all surfaces are potential placements for physical ads, e.g. apartment entrance gate, parking lots, car windows, dinning tables, etc.
- private companies, apartment community, public squires installed murals thanking their government's policies and state officials' guidance
- restaurants entrance speakers broadcasting political songs from the old days
- transportation
- cars with inside cabin camera and microphone for speech detection, etc. basically the entire kitchen sink and more from mozilla foundation's report
- entering the country requires 10 fingerprints
- road checkpoints scan for drivers & passengers sitting positions, license plates every few km. (for technical details, it uses a combination of infared light to bypass window tints to scan for headcount & sitting arrangement and flashlight camera to capture license plates)
of couse, none of the above directly affect anyone who are willing to conform. especially to those who have done nothing wrong in life and believe to have nothing to hide. unfortunately, to the thoughtful few, these state sponsored "features" become clear when coupling with a human ranking system, or a social credit system.
sympton
the main reason for state surveilance is being able to analyze and use collected data on demand.
for example, in china, middle school is a 3-year long education programme. many parents would choose a school for their kids either based on location and school's credibility. when a school receives enrollments, it can either accept or reject.
in case of a rejection, there are many factors that come into play. most school officials have connections the communist party and have apis to reach for applicants' background and family's background in addition to applicants' academic records.
a child's social credit is largely based on academic records, while it's offset by a combination of other factors, such as family's financial background, credit history, political association, etc. these factors are often a moving targets as time goes by. and in summary, that would be my naive assumption of the a use case.
a more realistic use case will be trying to get kids to be admitted to a popular school with limited capacity. let's assume schools are always limited in capacity or at least that is what being advertised generally. to the school admission, deciding whether or not to admit a new student has very little to do with a student's academic records. it's all down to money under the table at the end of the day. and the same idea goes with:
- trade opportunity
- job & promotion opportunity
- education opportunity
- medical treatments availability
- buying a car
- renting an apartment
- freedom to travel
- freedom to marriage
since such human ranking system is software ochestrated in its opague form without a frontend ui (or app) to most people, so it could be a little difficult to imagine the scale of operation for none technical folks. sometimes it is misundertood as a consipacy theory. 😐
if i recall a comment from one of my family members that he thought the recent technical "improvements" happened in china for the past few years, especially technology related on social media and automated authentication. his opinion was general a positive one. i'd admit, to end users, shiny features such as cloud authenticated elevator can have the convenience appeal. and as a reuslt, it generally considered as a welcome change, as it streamline both digital and physical access control without user intervention (other than the initial setup phrase for submitting facial image data to apartment management), provided everything works as intended.
however, when he discovered a technical issue, his intuition was to blame the other person or the device that was being "incompatible" to his workflow or technical expectation.
for example, when f-droid store doesn't offer wechat for install (because it's an incompliant software), he concluded that it was a problem with the hardware itself. conversely, when ios app store doesn't offer xmpp client conversations, he blamed the conversations' app developers being incapable to develop app that works for apple's app store.
the above incidents are are trivial and certainly false conclusions from a technical users' standpoint. for non-technical users, finding truth requires 2 steps:
- admitting something that a person lack the knowledge of
- doing some research to understand the issue (requires time & patience)
alternatively, deriving a quick conclusion requires no effort nor the shame of ignorance, provided that there is a way to ask the "why". besides, finding technically correct answers from baidu is actually pretty difficult.
result
i think the danger of a surveilance state is the fact that its ability to corrode a person's observation and tamper the process of decision-making.
畜生！