Due to last events in Belgium, the terrorist bomb attacks in Zaventem and Brussels, I couldn’t but remember the article from Bloomberg Businessweek talking about pre-crime: ‘China Tries Its Hand at Pre-Crime’. They refer us to the film Minority Report, with Tom Cruise, that takes place in a future society where three mutants foresee all crime before it occurs. Plugged into a great machine, these “precogs” are at the base of a police unit (Pre-Crime unit) that arrests murderers before they commit their crimes.
China Electronics Technology company won recently the contract for constructing the ‘United information environment’ as they call it, an ‘antiterrorism’ platform as declared by the Chinese government:
The Communist Party has directed [them] to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur.
This may seem a little too much to ask, if you think about it you may need every daily detail to be able to predict terrorist behaviour, but in a country like China where the state has control over their citizens since many decades, where they have no privacy limits to respect and a good network of informants…
A draft cybersecurity law unveiled in July grants the government almost unbridled access to user data in the name of national security. “If neither legal restrictions nor unfettered political debate about Big Brother surveillance is a factor for a regime, then there are many different sorts of data that could be collated and cross-referenced to help identify possible terrorists or subversives,” says Paul Pillar, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.
See how now there is also a new target: subversives. the article continues:
China was a surveillance state long before Edward Snowden clued Americans in to the extent of domestic spying. Since the Mao era, the government has kept a secret file, called a dang’an, on almost everyone. Dang’an contain school reports, health records, work permits, personality assessments, and other information that might be considered confidential and private in other countries. The contents of the dang’an can determine whether a citizen is eligible for a promotion or can secure a coveted urban residency permit. The government revealed last year that it was also building a nationwide database that would score citizens on their trustworthiness.
Wait a second, who’s defining what is ‘trustworthiness’, and what if you’re not?
New antiterror laws that went into effect on Jan. 1 allow authorities to gain access to bank accounts, telecommunications, and a national network of surveillance cameras called Skynet. Companies including Baidu, China’s leading search engine; Tencent, operator of the popular social messaging app WeChat; and Sina, which controls the Weibo microblogging site, already cooperate with official requests for information, according to a report from the U.S. Congressional Research Service. A Baidu spokesman says the company wasn’t involved in the new antiterror initiative.
So Skynet is here now (remember Terminator Genisys?). Even if right after a horrendous crime you can be tempted to be happy that this ‘pre-crime’ initiative is being constructed, there are way too many negative aspects still to consider before having such a tool. Like in which hands will it be, who’s defining what is a crime, what about your free will of changing your mind, to mention some. Let’s begin thinking how to tackle them.
