The Weekly Weird #15
AI goes to the polls, global freedom gets taken to the woodshed, China follows your followers, UK government wants "mass, algorithmic, suspicionless surveillance"
Hello fellow denizens of the dystopian deep, and welcome back to your weekly walk through the haunted forest of happenings!
First off, don’t forget to check out Episode 108 if you haven’t already; the Argentinian digital rights expert Beatriz Busaniche talks me through the surveillance and civil liberties situation in Argentina, and it’s a banger. She led the push to get electronic voting banned, and more besides - a formidable guest and a great source of understanding in the unfortunately global battle over what’s left of privacy and individual rights.
Without tarrying further, let’s get stuck into what’s gone on this week…
AI Goes To The Polls
If you’re like me, you probably have an opinion. You might even have more than one. You might also occasionally see a poll describing what [insert group name here] thinks of [issue du jour], as if a relatively narrow sample size could adequately sum up what a general populace believes.
Well, AI has managed to creep into the opinion business, as Will Johnson writes at RealClear Wire in Now the Robots Are Coming for Your Opinions:
Our own testing has found that while broad public opinion research (political horse-race surveys are the best example) remains largely unaffected with a 2-3% fraud rate, business-to-business market research has rates [of fraud involving bots] which can range from 30-50%.
The bot-barbarians are at the gates. How do we keep them out? Bots have apparently now overtaken humans in their capacity to complete CAPTCHA puzzles, previously believed to be a firewall for filtering out our automated assailants. That explains why CAPTCHA puzzles have become more complex and often involve multiple steps requiring spatial awareness, and why cybercrime cost the UK economy an estimated £27 billion in 2022.
As an aside, Johnson answered a question I didn’t even know I had, namely that CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing [test to tell] Computers and Humans Apart. Who knew?
Johnson is the CEO of The Harris Poll, so if he’s sounding the alarm over bot interference in opinion polling, I’m listening. How long before they creep into politics as well? We’re very swiftly migrating from “don’t believe digital media online” to “don’t believe anything you see or hear anywhere,” all thanks to the innovation that seems to be defining our current portion of the 21st century.
Meanwhile, in definitely unconnected news…
Global Freedom Gets Taken To The Woodshed
Freedom House have released their Freedom in the World 2024 report, and it’s rainbows and moonbeams all the way.
Just kidding.
The report begins with the kind of punch-pulling you’d expect, understating the case to avoid catastrophising:
Global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023.
Cool. What’s the bad news?
Freedom House breaks out the bummers with a rundown on everything that sucked over the past year, including an underexposed issue worth mentioning…
Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory that has long received its own assessment in this report, suffered the year’s largest recorded decline in freedom and moved from Partly Free to Not Free after a blockade and military offensive by the Azerbaijani regime led to the capitulation of its separatist government and the de facto expulsion of its ethnic Armenian population.
Maybe that just hits me because I visited Nagorno-Karabakh in 2008 and therefore feel connected somehow to “the forced displacement of over 120,000 Armenians [which] many foreign observers described as a case of ethnic cleansing.”
I also went to the bombed-out border city of Agdam while I was in the region, accompanied by a reluctant taxi driver who couldn’t wait to get out of there and also saved me from a minefield I accidentally wandered into when I needed a ‘pit stop.’ It was an utterly destroyed ruin, where even the copper pipes and wires had been dug up and stripped, leaving gouged trenches on either side of the roads that bifurcated the rubble. I’m not taking sides or downplaying previous horrors. War is hideous, and showcases (or at least permits) probably the worst of the grand spectrum of human behaviours and impulses.
Beijing continued to clamp down on the few freedoms available to residents of Hong Kong and Tibet, while the Russian regime advanced its efforts to repress vulnerable populations in Crimea and enlist local inhabitants in its war of aggression.
It might be worth (if you haven’t already) checking out Episode 107 with Sergei Loznitsa, where we discuss the trial and imprisonment of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian activist and filmmaker who received a 25-year sentence for the crime of referring to Putin’s invasion, occupation, and ongoing bombardment of Ukraine as a ‘war’ rather than a ‘special military operation.’ Regardless of anyone’s feelings or theories about the possible contributing factors to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and bomb it to teeny tiny pieces, sending someone to prison for using any word, especially an apt one in a contextually accurate and reasonable way, is objectively, categorically, and absolutely bullshit. Whenever you see or hear someone use the distasteful euphemistic phrase ‘special military operation’ to describe what’s happening in Ukraine, try to remember that there is a fellow human being serving 25 years in prison for calling it what it actually is: a war.
Luckily, Africa is a stand-out exception to the buzzkill vibes affecting freedom worldwide.
Psyche.
Coups continued to obliterate democratic institutions and strip away people’s right to choose their leaders. In July [2023], Niger became the sixth country in the Sahel region of Africa—after Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, and Sudan—to experience a coup since 2020.
Burkina Faso managed to have two coups in 2022, which is…sorry, I’m trying to hold it but I can’t resist…quite a coup.
One of the major causes of the receding of freedom around the world has apparently been…elections. Or rather, the abuse, violence, and dishonesty that arises when people finagle or refuse to accept the results of elections.
The manipulation of elections was one of the leading causes of the global decline in freedom in 2023, driving down scores in 26 countries. Not only was electoral manipulation widespread, but it also took on a wide array of forms. Among the most shocking were efforts to overturn the outcome of an election after the fact. This happened in Guatemala, Thailand, and Zimbabwe, where attempts were made to keep winning candidates and parties from assuming office. Long-established forms of electoral manipulation that create an uneven playing field for the opposition also remained a serious threat to democracy, affecting elections in Cambodia, Poland, and Turkey. The electoral process in other countries, such as Ecuador, Nigeria, and Taiwan, was disrupted by violence, diminished by voter apathy, or threatened with interference by foreign dictatorships.
Close to 50% of the global population will be voting in an election in 2024, so the forecast may be even more trouble ahead. Among the nations competing in the 2024 “How badly can we mismanage an election?” sweepstakes is Pakistan, a country long viewed as superficially democratic but fundamentally a military dictatorship, with nuclear weapons and a population in excess of 240 million.
I followed Pakistan’s election news on X as it trickled in during the voting, and there were plenty of allegations of candidates being arrested and vote counts miraculously changing at the drop of a pakol. With the former Prime Minister Imran Khan in prison but his party still vying for seats in the national legislative body, tempers were running high. After a lot of mud slung every which way, the results were…dunno?
From the Daily Sabah:
[The] national elections were overshadowed by telecommunication and internet bans and allegations of manipulation that were exacerbated by a delay in announcing partial results.
Allegations and internet/telecom issues don’t mean the elections were rigged though, right?
From The Guardian:
A senior official in Pakistan has admitted to election rigging amid protests breaking out across the country over claims that its general election results were unfair.
Oh. And it gets worse. As per The Guardian:
Commissioner Rawalpindi Liaqat Ali Chatta told reporters that authorities in Rawalpindi, Punjab province, changed the results of independent candidates – referring to candidates backed by the former prime minister Imran Khan’s party – who were leading with a margin of more than 70,000 votes.
Chatta said there was so much “pressure” on him that he contemplated suicide, but that he then decided to make a public confession.
As per France24, Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) chanted “Vote-thief” as the newly elected members entered the national assembly, and the leader of the party (since Khan is in prison) put it plainly:
“Yes, the election has been rigged,” said Gohar Ali Khan, the current head of PTI.
The Daily Sabah argues that many parties in Pakistan have played dirty in the past, making the present conflict over this election more a case of “it’s rigging when we lose” than “rigging is bad.”
It is not the first time that election results reflect massive rigging or the masses' mandate being stolen and later compromised for the sake of good for the country. A pile of evidence shows that in the past, today's parties in power including the PPP, PTI and PMLN all were engaged in and endorsed rigging.
The author, Irfan Raja, references Orwell (albeit in contorted fashion) in his conclusion:
To sum up the matter, let’s borrow George Orwell’s famous phrase “doublespeak,” which perfectly fits into Pakistan’s general elections scenario. The 2018 election was "good" and the 2024 election was "bad" because the former election helped endorse “Project Imran Khan,” while the recent one is exploited to systematically purge Khan's return to power.
The global picture, according to Freedom House, hasn’t been getting prettier.
According to Freedom in the World data, 35 countries currently earn the worst possible scores on the indicators for free and fair executive and legislative elections. This tally is up from 21 countries in 2005, when the global decline in freedom began. Over the last 18 years, countries have followed two main pathways to such abysmal scores: rigged elections and military coups.
Elections aren’t the only issue, of course. There’s plenty of suffering to go round, especially when it comes to the forced re-ordering of societies to undermine the existing culture and impose the rule of a dominant nation.
In Tibet, the CCP aggressively defends its monopoly on political power, and any expression of support for self-determination is severely punished. For decades, Beijing has encouraged the settlement of Han Chinese and forced hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tibetans into reeducation, resettlement, or employment programs that are rife with political indoctrination, effectively attempting to Sinicize the region and erase Tibetan identity. As a result, Tibet is one of the least free places in the world, with an aggregate score that is even lower than China’s. During 2023, approximately one million Tibetan children were separated from their families and put into state-run boarding schools where official versions of Han Chinese culture and language are forcibly inculcated.
If that last sentence sounds eerily similar to the forced separation carried out against Native American families in the United States, and the official “breeding out the colour” kidnappings of Aboriginal children in Australia, that’s because it is the same thing, except China is doing it to around one million Tibetan children, right now, in the age of social media outrage and the internet, and the most common response from the otherwise-very-up-in-arms human rights community is…crickets.
I’ve been trying to find someone who is experienced, qualified, reasonably objective, and willing to go on the record about what’s happening in China, but it is surprisingly difficult.
Maybe that’s because…
China Follows Your Followers
Chinese bloggers-in-exile (let that phrase sink in for a moment) have reported that the Communist state’s police have been investigating their social media followers.
Former state broadcaster CCTV journalist Wang Zhi’an and artist-turned-dissident Li Ying, both Chinese citizens known for posting uncensored Chinese news, said in separate posts Sunday that police were interrogating people who followed them on social media, and urged followers to take precautions such as unfollowing their accounts, changing their usernames, avoiding Chinese-made phones and preparing to be questioned.
Let me know if you find a phone that definitely wasn’t, at some stage of its genesis, made in China. Seriously. I want to know.
Li Ying, who reaches people about what China’s internal functioning is really like by telling them about it on social media, has been forced to tell people not to follow him on social media:
“Currently, the public security bureau is checking my 1.6 million followers and people in the comments, one by one.”
This comes on the heels of a policy shift in China from October last year, when social media platforms were told that independent media accounts (referred to as “self-media”) with more than 500,000 followers could no longer be run anonymously and should be required to show “real-name information.”
As per Reuters:
"Self-media" includes news and information not necessarily approved by the government, a genre of online content regulators have cracked down on in recent years to "purify" China's cyberspace.
State media representatives and other cheerleaders for Der Staat called the move “necessary in order to force influential accounts to use more responsible speech.” In the context of China’s total intolerance for meaningful dissent, where “picking quarrels” is a crime, “responsible” is code for “compliant".”
NBC News has more:
Rights groups say that of all authoritarian governments, China is one of the most aggressive in pursuing dissidents abroad, often by threatening and harassing their relatives back home, and sometimes using sophisticated technology to track critics online.
The story includes the experience of a Chinese woman working on the East Coast who posted a petition on line, anonymously, and then found herself being questioned by police in China who had tracked her down through her father, who still lived there.
“After the interrogation, they told my parents to warn me not to mention this to anyone, and to tell me that protests and petitions are useless: ‘The West won’t listen to you.’”
Another Chinese citizen in the US, who had posted videos online that were critical of the CCP, was contacted on WeChat by a Chinese police officer who demanded his personal YouTube and Twitter accounts. When he refused, he was told that “even if you’re in the United States, it’s your responsibility as a Chinese citizen to maintain our country’s good image.”
The snitch culture cultivated in China, as in all repressive regimes, has been cropping up outside its borders.
As per NBC News:
In January, a U.S. federal jury found a Chinese music student guilty of cyberstalking and other charges after he harassed a pro-democracy activist posting fliers at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, including claiming that he had reported her to a Chinese public security agency.
The struggle is real for Chinese citizens who aren’t fully on board with Beijing, and especially Uyghurs, who even overseas are victimised by the long arm of China’s security apparatus.
A student named Kyle Ma interviewed by NBC News gives an eloquent description of his situation that would make George Orwell or Arthur Koestler proud:
“The fear is like a parasite that creeps into my mind, my blood, my bones to make me feel crippled, disempowered and unable to speak my political opinion…Only after I became a public dissident, and now I fight, I feel I’m free from this fear.”
Speaking of the horrible creeping feeling that you’re being watched…
UK Government Wants "mass, algorithmic, suspicionless surveillance"
A story that has been developing since November 2023 is the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill making its way through Parliament in the UK.
Billed as a bill that will cut the bill to taxpayers by double-checking how benefit claimants pay their bills, critics have been quick to point out that the vague definition of who falls under the newly scoped-in government oversight and how the checks are carried out could affect pretty much anyone in the UK.
It turns out, thanks to the sterling work of organisations like Big Brother Watch, that the problems run much deeper than just letting the government thumb through everyone’s bank accounts like a raccoon getting into your trash. The Bill is jam-packed with dystopian goodies for the discerning nascent surveillance state.
From Tech Monitor:
Currently, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) can only undertake fraud checks on a claimant on an individual basis, where there is already a suspicion of fraud, but the new proposals would “allow regular checks to be carried out on the bank accounts held by benefit claimants to spot increases in their savings which push them over the benefit eligibility threshold, or when people [spend] more time overseas than the benefit rules allow for.”
Viscount Camrose, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, addressed the House of Lords to explain why the increased powers for the DWP would be doubleplus-good.
It will allow the DWP to protect taxpayers’ money from falling into the hands of fraudsters, as part of the DWP’s biggest reform to fraud legislation in 20 years. We know that, over this last year, overpayments to capital fraud and error in universal credit alone were almost £900 million.
The dedication of the UK government to making meaningful savings really brings a tear to the eye. If they fix the £900 million overpayment problem with universal credit, it might cover 10% of the loss they incurred by wasting £9 billion on personal protective equipment (PPE) during the pandemic. Maybe we should be surveilling their bank accounts…
From the UK Parliament’s Public Action Committee:
The Department for Health & Social Care (DHSC) lost 75% of the £12 billion it spent on personal protective equipment (PPE) in the first year of the pandemic to inflated prices and kit that did not meet requirements – including fully £4 billion of PPE that will not be used in the NHS and needs to be disposed of.
How do they plan to dispose of the offending pile of waste? They’re literally going to burn it, to “generate power.”
[T]he Department says it plans to burn significant volumes of it to generate power
I don’t know about you, but if they’re going to waste £4 billion so flagrantly, I would much rather watch them just pile up fat stacks of cash and set fire to them instead. At least it would have a certain poetic beauty to it, instead of the dull metallic clang of failed bureaucracy.
So the government, fiscally disciplined and reliable as it is, needs to have new surveillance capabilities over bank accounts to help them save the money they currently waste by being bad at their job, because we can trust them with the increased authority since they will be good at their job once they have more power?
Seems legit.
Big Brother Watch gives a fair breakdown of the new power the Bill hands over to the DWP:
[T]his new power would allow the DWP to access the personal data of welfare recipients by requiring the third party served with a notice – such as a bank or building society - to conduct mass monitoring without suspicion of fraudulent activity. Section 3(a) states that this includes anyone “linked” to the receipt of a benefit - which could include ex-partners, co-habitants, children, or even landlords. Although Section 2(6) seems to imply that ‘linked’ means the same person only, this is badly worded and unclear which not only is bad lawmaking, but dangerous in such a high-risk context.
Finding a benefit claimant amongst existing account holders at a bank would pose its own merry hell for data privacy (emphasis mine):
Once issued, an account information notice requires the receiver to give the Secretary of State the names of the holders of accounts (cl.2(1)(b)). In order to do this, the bank will have to process the data of all bank account holders and run automated surveillance scanning for benefits recipients. Further, the impact assessment states that an account information notice requires “other specified information relating to the holders of those accounts” and other connected information “as may be specified”. This vague definition would allow for an incredibly broad scope of information to be requested – something the DWP itself has acknowledged itself - and stands in contrast to the DWP's claim that they will adhere to the GDPR principle of data minimisation.
What the Bill seeks to establish in law, according to Big Brother Watch, is “mass, algorithmic, suspicionless surveillance and reporting of [bank] account holders on behalf of the state.”
Furthermore, as with many data-hoovering exercises attempted or practiced by governments around the world, the gathering of potential evidence precedes the suspicion of a crime.
Such proposals do away with the long-standing democratic principle in Britain that state surveillance should follow suspicion rather than vice versa. It would be dangerous for everyone if the government reverses this presumption of innocence.
Even worse, by the DWP’s own admission, “the power is not limited to a specific type of data.”
As per Big Brother Watch:
This lack of limitation would allow for extensive information about a person to be collected. An individual's outgoings can reveal highly sensitive information about them - what someone buys and where they spend is personal enough, but can reveal other intimate details by proxy; such as sexuality. This is incredibly intrusive, and extraordinarily so with no cap on the type of data that the DWP will be able to access.
The new power also isn’t limited to financial services firms and institutions like banks and building societies. It could potentially be extended to small businesses that process certain types of payments, making the fines for non-compliance with “account notice requests” a serious burden, especially for a company without the resources to handle the government’s demands.
What will the DWP do with all this data? As far as they’re concerned, their answer is like Saddam Hussein in South Park’s movie:
Big Brother Watch again:
In its impact statement, the DWP says that it will ensure data will be “transferred, received and stored safely”. Such a claim stands in stark contrast to the Department's track record of data security – particularly, considering that it was recently reprimanded by the ICO for data leaks so serious that they were reported to risk the lives of survivors of domestic abuse.
The Bill also includes language that “introduces a new regime for digital verification services…[at a time] when the Government is both creating a digital identity system to allow access to state services in the form of One Login and cultivating a new digital identity market in the private sector through the DVS Trust Framework.”
Big Brother Watch is unequivocal on the nature of the digital identity plans the Government is pursuing more broadly and within the language of the Bill:
The Government's digital identity and verification plans, including the DVS provisions in this Bill, have the potential to give rise to excessive data sharing, privacy intrusion, and a digital identity environment that could be invasive, exclusionary and have discriminatory impacts.
The Bill also gives law enforcement more powers to hold biometric data, another eyebrow-raiser:
Giving police more power to hold biometric data may also raise concerns given that the government has abolished the post of Biometrics and Surveillance Camera Commissioner (BSCC), the independent watchdog which oversaw how this information is used in law enforcement.
I didn’t even know we had a Commissioner for that, and now we don’t again. It’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it with some of this stuff, I’m telling you.
From the Big Brother Watch report, “the general rule is indefinite retention with continuous pseudonymisation, except for a specific circumstance where nonpseudonymised retention is permitted for a fixed period.”
Mmm, indefinite retention. I can almost taste the database.
They go on:
This is a major change in the way that personal data can be handled – permitting storage of pseudonymised or non-pseudonymised data will facilitate a vast biometric database that can be traced back to individuals. While this does not apply to data linked to offences committed in the UK, it sets a concerning precedent for reshaping how law enforcement agencies hold data, i.e. in a traceable and identifiable way. It seems that there is nothing to stop a law enforcement agency from pseudonymising data just to reattach the identifying information, which they would be permitted to hold for 3 years.
Of course, those problems would only arise if Britain’s law enforcement abused their power, or took advantage of technicalities within the letter of the law in order to circumvent the spirit of the law.
Thankfully, the police in the UK are currently enjoying record levels of trust among the general public.
Sarcasm alert.
As per Sky News in June 2023, trust in the police is “hanging by a thread.” According to His Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary Andy Cooke:
There are clear and systemic failings throughout the police service in England and Wales and, thanks to a series of dreadful scandals, public trust in the police is hanging by a thread.
[…]
[S]ince 2016 we made a considerable number of recommendations to address police officers abusing their position with victims for sexual purpose…Not enough forces took meaningful action and that's why we are where we are.
This lack of action meant it had become too easy for the wrong people to join the police and the wrong people to stay in the police.
Now, there's only so many times we can say the same thing in different words. The time for talking has passed and it's now time for action.
So the UK government heard Mr Cooke and thought, the action that’s needed for a police force suffering structural issues related to the abuse of position and power…is a marked increase in their powers.
Cool.
That’s it for this week, everyone. Thank you for reading!
In keeping with our last story, our outro music must therefore be the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band with Cool Britannia.
Stay sane out there, friends.