Human and Technological Surveillance in China and America

​A report by The New York Time’s Vivian Wang in Beijing and one by Tech Policy’s Marwa Sayed in New York describes the twin strategies for surveilling a nation’s population, in the United States as well as in China.
 
Wang chronicles the move by China’s dictator, Xi Jinping, to round out the pervasive social media and facial recognition surveillance capability of the state by bringing back Mao-era human snitching. Wang writes that Xi wants local surveillance that is “more visible, more invasive, always on the lookout for real or perceived threats. Officers patrol apartment buildings listening for feuding neighbors. Officials recruit retirees playing chess outdoors as extra eyes and ears. In the workplace, employers are required to appoint ‘safety consultants’ who report regularly to the police.”
 
Xi, Wang reports, explicitly links this new emphasis on human domestic surveillance to the era when “the party encouraged residents to ‘re-educate’ purported political enemies, through so-called struggle sessions where people were publicly insulted and humiliated …” Creating a society of snitches supports the vast network of social media surveillance, in which every “improper” message or text can be reviewed and flagged by AI. Chinese citizens are already followed everywhere by location beacons and a national network of surveillance cameras and facial recognition technology.
 
Marwa Sayed writes about the strategy of technology surveillance contained in several bills in New York State. One bill in the state legislature would force the owners of driver-for-hire vehicles to install rear-facing cameras in their cars, presumably capturing private conversations by passengers. Another state bill would mandate surveillance cameras at racetracks to monitor human and equine traffic, watching over people in their leisure time. “Legislators seem to have decided that the cure to what ails us is a veritable panopticon of cameras that spares no one and reaches further and further into our private lives,” Sayed writes.
 
She notes another measure before the New York City Council that would require the Department of Sanitation to install surveillance cameras to counter the insidious threat of people putting household trash into public litter baskets. Sayed writes:
 
“As the ubiquity of cameras grows, so do the harms. Research shows that surveillance and the feeling it creates of constantly being watched leads to anxiety and paranoia. People may start to feel there is no point to personal privacy because you’ll be watched wherever you go. It makes us wary about taking risks and dampens our ability to interact with one another as social creatures.”
 
Without quite meaning to, federal, state, and local authorities are merging the elements of a national surveillance system. This system draws on agencies’ purchases of our sensitive, personal information from data brokers, as well as increasingly integrated camera, facial recognition, and other surveillance networks.
 
And don’t think that organized human snitching can’t come to these shores either.
 
During World War One, the federal government authorized approved citizens to join neighborhood watch groups with badges inscribed with the words, “American Protection League – Secret Service.” At a time when Americans were sent to prison for opposing the war, the American Protection League kept tabs on neighbors, always on the watch out for anyone who seemed insufficiently enthusiastic about the war. Americans could be reported to the Department of Justice for listening to Beethoven on their phonographs or checking out books about German culture from the library. 
 
Today, large numbers of FBI and other government employees secretly “suggest” that social media companies remove posts that contain “disinformation.” They monitor social media to track posts of people, whether targeted by the FBI as traditional Catholics or observant Muslims, for signs of extremism. As world tension grows between the United States and China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, something like the American Protection League might be resurrected soon in response to a foreign policy crisis. Its digital ghost is already watching us.