The 20th century was a time notable for the expansion of civil liberties worldwide.
In Africa and Asia, the colonial powers of Europe relinquished much of their hold on their overseas empires. Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe. In nations with substantial racial minorities, systems of legal separation such as the segregation regime of the American South and South African Apartheid were dismantled.
The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st saw an explosion in discussion of human rights: expansion of the franchise, protection against ethnic cleansing and dismantling legal barriers to economic and political opportunity.
Yet it seems clear to me that the current discourse around civil rights, especially in technologically advanced nations, is due to be shaken up by a powerful disrupting force. That disrupting force? Advanced surveillance technology and its potential to turn stable Western democracies into regimes with no regard for their citizens’ privacy or basic freedoms.
The People’s Republic of China is already a clear example of the power that even contemporary technology has to curtail freedoms of expression, which in turn lead to self-censorship and a perpetuation of the regime. Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China has expanded surveillance measures, marking categories of people like drug addicts, religious believers and minority ethnic groups, petitioners and those deemed subversive to the regime (read, protesters and rights activists) as “key individuals” to be singled out by Chinese internal security services.
Most troubling has been China’s use of these databases to persecute ethnic minorities and religious groups. Since at least the 1970s, the Chinese government has been attempting a cultural genocide against the Uighers, a majority-Muslim ethnic group in Xinjiang province. The government has restricted the Uigher birthrate, encouraged migration of Han Chinese to the region to displace them, and placed many Uighers (men especially) in reeducation camps. In the 21st century, surveillance technology has allowed Beijing to redouble its efforts to stamp out Uigher culture, religion and ethnic identity with alarming efficiency.
According to recent reporting by The New York Times in May, a wide array of surveillance technologies interacting with networks of informants are being used in concert to not only collect information on the minority ethnic groups in Xinjiang, but it is also being used to create predictive policing models that instruct internal security forces where to place their agents to maximize their effectiveness. All tools of oppression, one might add, directed solely at Muslim ethnic minorities and largely ignoring Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang.
And as an explicitly atheist party, the Chinese Communist Party views the right to religious freedom as a dangerous privilege to be given out sparingly and only to religious groups that compromise their faith’s tenants to kowtow to Beijing. Falun Gong, a Buddhist spiritualist movement founded in 1992, was, and continues to be, persecuted by the Chinese government to such an absurd degree that in 2006 it was alleged (although never definitively proven) that Falun Gong prisoners of conscience were having their organs forcibly harvested by Chinese authorities.
Both of the crackdowns were aided and abetted by an extensive surveillance and database network.
What is frightening is not the repression by the Chinese government so much as the implications it has for us in the United States and Europe. It is not yet clear how deep the capabilities of our own governments lie in the field of mass surveillance, but if the 2013 Snowden leaks are anything to go by, they have the potential to be as extensive as the Chinese system.
In America, we already have DNA databases for criminal offenders used at the interstate level, and there have been proposals to expand federal databases to include registered gun owners and the mentally ill. It is also unclear to what extent information collected by the NSA in its program of surveillance for counter-terrorism purposes was or could be systematized and tied to an individual.
Furthermore, CCTV cameras have become an increasingly common sight in American cities. According to a local news station, WTOP in 2019, our nation’s capital installed another 140 surveillance cameras in high-crime areas, bringing their total up well past 200. Atlanta boasts over 7000 surveillance cameras.
You might well argue that such measures as the NSA reading certain emails flagged by an algorithm or a city putting up closed-circuit television cameras does not make a human rights violation, and you would be right. As is usually the case, the real problem lies not in the technology itself but how it’s used. That’s what makes 21st century surveillance technologies so dangerous.
Civil rights activists have already pointed out some of the harmful effects they have seen when whole neighborhoods, mostly poor and minority, are placed under the all-seeing eye of police surveillance. There is also no guarantee that governments here in the West, either at the national or local level, won’t use the technology to less benevolent ends. As a matter of fact, there is precedent for just this in US history.
In 1918, the US Congress passed an expansion of the Espionage Act making speech and expression that cast a negative light on the government, the Constitution or the war effort in Europe a federal offense, effectively criminalizing the hitherto vibrant anti-war movement. This is only one of several examples of the US government, throughout our history, suspending rights using wartime necessity as a justification. Another example would be Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in 1863.
Now imagine a similar US government, but with the full power of the modern surveillance state behind them. It may be that the level of control new technology affords governments over the lives of their citizens is too tempting not to give in to.
Further exacerbating the issue, the rise of artificial intelligence would essentially supercharge any existing spying system by allowing governments to identify subversive elements of the population with far greater accuracy and efficiency, based on only a few parameters. This is already the application that many Chinese developers have in mind for their software.
Combine this with the unparalleled access that private companies like Facebook and Google have to the personal data of millions of Americans (companies that, it is worth adding, have shown willingness to bow to oppressive governments like Beijing as long as their pockets are full) and you have a recipe for a belated 1984 indeed.
That’s why this week, as we celebrate civil rights here at UTM and the past achievements of those who fought and continue to fight to end racial and social injustice in America, it might also be worth shifting part of our focus to the future and to the threats that civil liberties might face in the coming decades.
Photo Credit / Associated Press
