The Weekly Weird #12

The wrong in Hong Kong, the pain in Bahrain, death camp day tripping, robo no-no, and deepfake-a-go-go

My, how time flies!

The week is once more behind us and we return to ponder the worryingly-widespread weltanschaung of centralising, totalising, technologising, propagandising trajectories at play in the fields of the world.

Welcome as always to our newest subscribers who have just joined.

We’ve got a Valentine’s Special podcast episode called AI Found Me A Wife out today, in which we meet a charming Russian couple who found each other with the help of AI.

The next episode of the podcast proper drops this Sunday, 18 February, so look out for that as well.

In last week’s Weird, I mentioned that I was working on a piece that was being held back because I was waiting for responses from some of the parties. Red Card or Red Flag? is now up, looking at the recent football fan ban in the UK, the advocacy around it, the underlying facts, and the implications for free speech.

Okay, housekeeping over!

First up this week, Biometric Update has the latest on the deployment of facial recognition in Hong Kong and Bahrain, both of course stellar examples of free societies where authorities can be trusted, laws are fair, and the use of the tech in question will be totally trustworthy and fine.

Just kidding.

The Wrong in Hong Kong

Hong Kong, as you may or may not recall, was a hotbed of protest in 2019 and early 2020, with citizens demanding electoral reform and more transparent policing. The pandemic interrupted the movement’s momentum and, in 2020, Beijing rammed through a National Security Law aimed at stifling dissent, leading to a rather unpleasant situation for opinion-havers and freedom-lovers in the unique city-state:

Since then, authorities have arrested dozens of pro-democracy activists, lawmakers, and journalists; curbed voting rights; and limited freedoms of the press and speech.

Hong Kong is now looking to introduce its own National Security Law to augment the one imposed by Beijing. When Britain ceded control of the territory to China in 1997, the Chinese government promised there would be a “one country, two systems” approach for fifty years, in which time Hong Kong would presumably transition organically from a global finance hub and holiday destination to whatever the Communist Party wants it to be. From the article linked to above:

Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, calls for the city to enact a national security law, but it’s been delayed for decades because of widespread public opposition based on fears it would erode civil liberties.

At the end of January, the city’s government “released a 110-page document…outlining its plans for the legislation,” and the ‘fears’ of Hong Kongers turned out to be more than justified.

The new law could expand the government’s ability to prosecute residents for offenses like collaborating with foreign forces to influence legislation or “publish misleading statements,” and to close down civil society organizations. Some of its provisions threaten criminal prosecutions for acts committed anywhere in the world.

Having been driven out of Hong Kong for fear of politically-motivated prosecution, exiled activists may very well find themselves pursued in what they had hoped were safe haven countries.

The government suggested it may use the new law to cancel the passports of fugitives overseas, citing a similar U.S. law.

Such laws could affect the many activists who went into exile fearing arrest. The Hong Kong police have offered bounties of 1 million Hong Kong dollars ($128,000) on at least 13 activists abroad, including former lawmakers Nathan Law and Ted Hui, whom they accuse of colluding with external forces to impose sanctions on Hong Kong and China.

It is against this backdrop that the South China Morning Post reported on Hong Kong’s increased number of surveillance cameras and rollout of facial recognition technology.

[The] government will install 615 CCTV cameras in the city by next month, the first phase of a plan to put up 2,000 surveillance cameras by the end of the year.

The Commissioner of Police Raymond Siu Chak-Yee would not rule out the use of facial recognition technology, and in trying to allay the concerns of residents, may have achieved precisely the opposite with his comments:

Citizens do not have to worry. The police will make use of these technologies to combat crimes, but we will do so lawfully.

Hong Kongers busy not worrying may have missed the sting in the tail of the Commissioner’s quoted remarks to the SCMP:

This is only the first phase…We believe, in the future, there will be more than 2,000 cameras.

“Relax, this is only the beginning,” is not the most reassuring thing to hear from an apologist for intrusive government technology installed as an extension of arguably the most extensive surveillance state in the world today.

The Pain In Bahrain

Meanwhile, in Bahrain, as per Zawya:

State-of-the-art facial recognition technology, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), could be introduced in Bahrain to crack down on criminals and further boost security. The Southern Municipal Council has unanimously approved a proposal to launch the system as they believe it would be a game-changer by helping identify offenders without the need for an investigation or direct police intervention.

Perhaps doing away with investigations or ‘direct police intervention’ will allow the government of Bahrain to just skip straight to executing people. After all, only two years ago, they were accused by Human Rights Watch of “[convicting and sentencing] defendants to death following manifestly unfair trials, based solely or primarily on confessions allegedly coerced through torture and ill-treatment.”

According to Bahrain’s Institute for Rights and Democracy:

Crimes that warrant the death penalty include treason, terrorism, apostasy and drug trafficking. The absence of a precise definition of terrorism has allowed the Bahraini government to exploit its legal system so as to criminalise acts of opposition, free expression and assembly. The death penalty is conducted via firing squads.

Article 112 of the Bahraini Penal Code states:

Capital punishment shall be inflicted upon any person who deliberately commits an act having the consequence of affecting the country’s independence, unity or territorial integrity.

In 2021, the Independent reported that Bahrain had seen a 600% rise in death sentences in the previous decade:

100 per cent of the men executed on terrorism charges in Bahrain since 2011 alleged torture…26 men currently facing imminent execution are on death row as a result of unsafe capital convictions and death sentences, including those who are believed to have been tortured into confessing.

According to SelfScholar, a Middle East law blog¹:

In June 2010 the Council of Representatives and Shura Council passed an amendment to Article 310, criminalizing the practice of “witchcraft, sorcery, and divination.”

Article 1 of the Bahraini Press Code gives a textbook example of the lethal legal weight of a well-placed proviso:

Every person has the right to express his opinion and publish it by word of mouth, in writing or otherwise under the rules and conditions laid down by law, provided that the foundations of Islamic doctrine and the unity of the people are not infringed, and schism or sectarianism are not aroused.

Back to Southern Municipal Council Chairman Abdulla Abdullatif to tie this all back to Bahrain’s goal of implementing a world-beating facial recognition surveillance system (emphasis mine):

We are not looking for cheap providers; we want a system that’s responsible and at the same time effective, something that is similar to the technology highlighted in the popular American television series Person of Interest a few years ago…

Remember Person of Interest?

“You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day.”

Oh, that’s what you’re going for. Why didn’t you say so? For a minute there it sounded like you wanted to do something creepy and horrible. My bad.

Speaking of creepy and horrible…

Death Camp Day Tripping

In what hopefully is just an unintentionally tasteless social media post by a Gen-Z intern with a weak grasp of history, the British travel company Travelpedia has been getting some stick for an online advert they hadn’t properly thought through:

Nothing shows respect for the millions of people murdered and incinerated during the Holocaust like an exclamation mark and a Polish flag emoji. Tip top. The 31 thumbs-up and crying-face emojis from viewers of the sponsored post don’t acquit them admirably either.

Get Your Guide offers a “skip the line” ticket to Auschwitz, which seems a little on the nose considering where the line originally led.

Editor’s Note: Make sure to ‘Add to Wishlist’.

Every once in a while, the awful power of the internet to reduce the importance and emotional resonance of everything simply by relentlessly juxtapositioning things beside one another in a ceaseless shuffling of commercial offerings really cuts through, doesn’t it?

Until today, I was also blissfully unaware that the “concentration camp selfie” is a thing, as is publishing an article decrying it every few years. I won’t share any of them here, but if you feel the urge to see for yourself, just do an image search for “Auschwitz selfie”.

When I visited Auschwitz in 2008, I was astounded to see graffiti scratched into the underside of bunks and some of the walls, banal protestations of love, “[Insert Name] Was Here”, things I hadn’t thought would occur to people to do in that setting. The graffiti dated all the way back to when the camp first opened as a museum. This type of thing is not new, even if the technology for sharing it widely and replicating it might be.

Robo No-No

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the august body that ensures only the finest and factiest information is allowed to seep through America’s airwaves like a fart in a bathtub, has drawn a line in the sand and declared AI-generated voices in robo-calls illegal, to the disappointment of the nation’s shills, chancers, granny-defrauders, and political campaigners. But I repeat myself.²

From the FCC’s press release:

…this action now makes the act of using AI to generate the voice in these robocalls itself illegal, expanding the legal avenues through which state law enforcement agencies can hold these perpetrators accountable under the law.

NBC wrote about the ban plan before the Man took a stand:

The announcement comes on the heels of a fake message, created with AI to mimic the voice of President Joe Biden, that told New Hampshire residents not to vote in the state’s primary election.

Ah, the federal government got religion about AI fraud when it was used to undermine the leader of the federal government in an election year. Got it.

In support of the ban. Kathy Stokes, the director of fraud prevention at AARP, delivered a Michelin-starred example of understatement in summing up the situation in the United States:

We’ve deprioritized fraud as a crime in this country…

You don’t say.

Meanwhile, it’s not just AI-generated audio that’s enriching scammers and embarrassing people with university degrees…

Deepfake-A-Go-Go

Back to Hong Kong now for a poetic full-circle end to our time together this week.

From CNN:

A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call…

Re-read the amount they convinced him to send them. I’ll wait.

The now-presumably-unemployed finance worker in Hong Kong was lured onto a multi-person video conference call in which “it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake.”

From Ars Technica:

This incident marks the first of its kind in Hong Kong involving a large sum and the use of deepfake technology to simulate a multi-person video conference where all participants (except the victim) were fabricated images of real individuals. The scammers were able to convincingly replicate the appearances and voices of targeted individuals using publicly available video and audio footage.

There’s more from CNN:

The case is one of several recent episodes in which fraudsters are believed to have used deepfake technology to modify publicly available video and other footage to cheat people out of money.

…eight stolen Hong Kong identity cards – all of which had been reported as lost by their owners – were used to make 90 loan applications and 54 bank account registrations between July and September last year.

The kicker, when considered alongside our first story in this week’s Weird:

On at least 20 occasions, AI deepfakes had been used to trick facial recognition programs by imitating the people pictured on the identity cards, according to police.

So the police in Hong Kong want to roll out facial recognition and thousands of surveillance cameras, while knowing that facial recognition technology can be fooled by AI deepfakes created from publicly available videos, images, and stolen identity cards? Cool.

You can change a password, but your face? That requires a bit more effort.

All that sensitive information has to go somewhere, and when it’s a government or law enforcement database, one has to wonder about the track record the authorities have of protecting information and discouraging clumsiness in its handling.

Take the UK, for example…

27 June 2021 - Classified Ministry of Defence documents found at bus stop

The documents, almost 50 pages in all, were found in a soggy heap behind a bus stop in Kent…

7 September 2022 - Civil servant who left top secret documents at bus stop handed Nato nuclear role

A senior civil servant who left dozens of top secret documents at a bus stop in Kent last year has been appointed to Nato to help develop the alliance’s nuclear plans.

We’re cresting into a new realm of the bizarre as AI enables a level of duplicity and fakery we’ve never had to deal with before on a global scale.

I once got an email years ago that started with the line “I am David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.” It was pretty easy to drag that across into the Junk folder, but if it had been a video call from the CamBot himself, sitting at his desk in 10 Downing Street, charming me with his wrinkle-free face and promising me untold riches, I might have thought twice before hanging up.

This all makes me think of Sandra Bullock trying to prove her identity in the 1995 film The Net, only to discover she’s been put through to…herself?

If AI can mimic your face, your voice, your writing style, access your contacts, and read your emails, while the government is insisting that you switch to digital ID, facial recognition, and digital payments, how long will it be before we need two-factor authentication just to text home to find out what groceries to pick up after work?

Oh, wait…

According to the police in Hong Kong, as per Ars Technica:

Another potential solution to deepfake scams in corporate environments is to equip every employee with an encrypted key pair, establishing trust by signing public keys at in-person meetings. Later, in remote communications, those signed keys could be used to authenticate parties within the meeting.

The future is here! Are you not entertained?

Outro, naturally, provided by Dead Kennedys with a pretty little ditty called Holiday in Cambodia.

Stay sane, friends.

1. Sadly not written by Bob Loblaw.

2. Credit for the original version of this joke goes to Mark Twain.