As Chinese authorities seek
cradle-to-grave surveillance in the world’s largest market for surveillance camera
technology, AI algorithms take over where cameras cannot film faces.
A competitive arm’s race has been
set off among Chinese companies. Similar to the “Sputnik shock” that set off
the 1960s space race, this one seeks to generate the best surveillance technologies
to meet the growing demand of police authorities in the country. Companies
recently began to use software that recognizes people no longer by their face –
which may be too easily fooled – but solely based on their body shape and gait.
Algorithms are used whenever cameras cannot record faces. Gait recognition
software is already being used by police on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, but also, and potentially
giving rise to more concern, for population control of Uighurs in the Western
province of Xinjiang.
Virtually all surveillance products in use are made by Chinese companies
in China. Foreign companies hardly play any role in monitoring the Chinese
population as it has long exceeded a billion. In terms of gait recognition,
startup Watrix has made a name for itself. CEO Huang
Yongzhen said his system can identify
people up to 50 meters away, even with their backs
to the camera or with their face covered. Current European legislation banning
facial or full-body veiling may be approaching obsolescence. Of course, the ancient
trope of all Big Brothers in history surfaces
again: “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.”[1]
Right – East Germany’s Ministry of State Security was built entirely on that sound
principle. Similarly, China is less concerned with protecting citizens – and
indeed surveillance can be shown to have potential benefits to that end – than
it is with protecting the governing elite’s monopoly on power. Of course, human
assets are becoming rapidly superfluous with surveillance technology based on
pattern recognition, even though the computing power needed for gait
recognition is far
greater that what is required for face
recognition, since it requires not one but a multitude of pictures to identify
an unmistakable pattern. But watertight
surveillance is essential to China’s massive
experiment with ranking and monitoring citizens for purposes of social
credits and demerits (very much worth a
separate in-depth look – another day). The other pillar,
of particular significance in China, is “trust your government.” Well… If Western
societies that can freely elect and remove their governments cannot bring
themselves to trust them, how trustworthy can be the Communist Party of China,
an unelected monopoly that cannot be removed from power by lawful means and
knows no term limits?
The increasingly sophisticated
surveillance techniques have led human rights advocates to fear that Chinese
people have very little privacy left. Robots resembling Star
Wars’ "R2-D2" come equipped with
dozens of sensors and cameras as well as red glowing "ears" and can
identify individuals within
a large crowd. Specialized police
goggles can scan passersby and compare a person’s
profile directly with a large database of fugitive suspects.
Of course, it is far from reasonable
or even justifiable to view gait
recognition as a “Chinese issue” that raises
concern for individual liberties and human rights. The U.K., Japan, Israel and
the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency have worked on gait recognition
software since
more than a decade and certainly not
without results, even if results have not been
commercialized as they were by Watrix.
The Watrix software isolates an individual’s silhouette from video
footage and analyzes its movement. Then it creates a model of individual gait. At
this time, the algorithm is not capable of making positive identification of
individuals in real time yet. It requires uploading of footage for purposes of
analysis that can condense searching through an hour of surveillance footage to
about ten minutes. However, no special cameras are required and footage from ordinary
CCTV surveillance cams suffices to produce 94% accuracy.
Purported uses of biometric recognition outside of social
control purposes to maintain social stability and to manage society include the
ability to spot people in distress, such as elderly individuals after a fall.
But the closer one looks at claims that this technology can make life safer and
more convenient, the more findings are reduced to fool-proof identification
that cannot be derailed by limping, walking with splayed feet or hunching over
because more extensive footage will invariably analyze all features of an
entire body beyond commonly perceived visual traits. It would appear that gait
is at least as unique to an individual as fingerprints or cornea patterns
but features fewer abilities to escape detection. It is clear that Big Brother
feeds on Big Data, and that the real danger lay in data preservation and
storage, a fact that far exceeds legitimate purposes of near-real-time safety
surveillance, such as monitoring a public space for elderly people after a
fall.
Rewarding or punishing individuals for behavioral traits is hardly new
and hardly a Chinese discovery. The key distinction is between criminal law –
which, for good reason, has substantial barriers to system activation, such as
burden of proof and presumption of innocence – and merely non-criminal if
socially arguably less desirable choices. It is by that standard that China’s
social credit ranking is likely to descend into an Orwellian dynamic.
[1] Daniel J. Solove, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security (2011).
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