This is the command center of Smart Aqkol, a pilot study in digitized urban infrastructure for Kazakhstan. When I visited, Andrey Kirpichnikov, the deputy director of Smart Aqkol, welcomed me inside. Donning a black Fila tracksuit and sneakers, the middle-aged Aqkol native scanned his face at a console that bore the logo for Hikvision, the Chinese surveillance camera manufacturer. A turnstyle gave a green glow of approval and opened, allowing us to walk through. 

“All of our staff can access the building using their unique face IDs,” Kirpichnikov told me.

He led me into a room with a large monitor displaying a schematic of the village. The data inputs and connected elements that make up Smart Aqkol draw on everything from solar panels and gas meters to GPS trackers on public service vehicles and surveillance cameras, he explained. Analysts at the command center report their findings to the mayor’s office, highlighting data on energy use, school attendance rates and evidence for police investigations. 

“I see a huge future in what we’re doing here,” Kirpichnikov told me, gesturing at a heat map of the village on the big screen. “Our analytics keep improving and they are only going to get better as we expand the number of sensory inputs.”

“We’re trying to make life better, more efficient and safer,” he explained. “Who would be opposed to such a project?”

Smart Aqkol presents an experimental vision of Kazakhstan’s economic prospects and its technocratic leadership’s governing ambitions. In January 2019, when then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev spoke at the project’s launch, he waxed about a future in which public officials could use networked municipal systems to run Kazakhstan “like a company.” The smart city model is appealing for leaders of the oil-rich nation, which has struggled to modernize its economy and shed its reputation for rampant government corruption. But analysts I spoke with say it also marks a turn toward Chinese-style public surveillance systems. Amid the war in Ukraine, Kazakhstan’s engagement with China has deepened as a way to hedge against dependence on Russia, its former colonial patron.

Kazakhstan’s smart city initiatives aren’t starting from a digital zero. The country has made strides in digitizing public services, and now ranks second among countries of the former Soviet Union in the United Nations’ e-governance development index. (Estonia is number one.) The capital Astana also has established itself as a regional hub for fintech innovation. 

And it’s not only government officials who want these systems. “There is a lot of domestic demand, not just from the state but also from Kazakhstan’s middle class,” said Erica Marat, a professor at the U.S. National Defense University. There’s an allure about smart city systems, which in China and other Asian cities are thought to have improved living standards and reduced crime.

They also hold some promise of increasing transparency around the work of public officials. “The government hopes that digital platforms can overcome cases of petty corruption,” said Oyuna Baldakova, a technology researcher at King’s College London. This would be a welcome shift for Kazakhstan, which currently ranks 101st out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

But the pilot in Aqkol doesn’t quite align with these grander ambitions, at least not yet. Back at the command center, Kirpichnikov described how Aqkol saw a drop in violent crime and alcohol-related offenses after the system’s debut. But in a town of this size, where crime rates rarely exceed single digits, these kinds of shifts don’t say a whole lot. 

As if to better prove the point, the team showed me videos of crime dramatizations that they recorded using the Smart Aqkol surveillance camera system. In the first video, one man lifted another off the ground in what was meant to mimic a violent assault, but looked much more like the iconic scene where Patrick Swayze lifts Jennifer Grey overhead at the end of “Dirty Dancing.” Another featured a man brandishing a Kalashnikov in one hand, while using the other to hold his cellphone to his ear. In each case, brightly colored circles and arrows appeared on the screen, highlighting “evidence” of wrongdoing that the cameras captured, like the lift and the Kalashnikov.

Kirpichnikov then led me into Smart Aqkol’s “situation room,” where 14 analysts sat facing a giant LED screen while they tracked various signals around town. Contrary to the high-stakes energy that one might expect in a smart city situation room, the atmosphere here felt more like that of a local pub, with the analysts trading gossip about neighbors as they watched them walk by on monitors for street-level cameras.

Kirpichnikov explained that residents can connect their gas meters to their bank accounts and set up automatic gas payments. This aspect of Smart Aqkol has been a boon for the village. Residents I spoke with praised the new payment system — for decades, the only option was to stand in line to pay for their bills, an exercise that could easily take half a day’s time.

And there was more. To highlight the benefits of Smart Aqkol’s analytics work, Kirpichnikov told me about recent finding: “We were able to determine that school attendance is lower among children from poorly insulated households.” He pointed to a gradation of purple squares showing variance in heating levels across the village. “We could improve school grades, health and the living standards of residents just by updating our old heating systems,” he said.

Kirpichnikov might be right, but step away from the clean digital interface and any Aqkol resident could tell you that poor insulation is a serious problem in the apartment blocks where most people live, especially in winter when temperatures dip below freezing most nights. Broken windows covered with only a thin sheet of cellophane are a common sight. 

Walking around Aqkol, I was struck by the absence of paved roads and infrastructure beyond the village’s main street. Some street lamps work, but others don’t. And the public Wi-Fi that the village prides itself on offering only appeared to function near government buildings.

The village also has two so-called warm bus shelters — enclosed spaces with heat lamps to shelter waiting passengers during the harsh Kazakh winters. The stops are supposed to have Wi-Fi, charging ports for phones and single-channel TVs. When I passed by one of the shelters, I met an elderly Aqkol resident named Vera. “All of these things are gone,” she told me, waving her hand at evidence of vandalism. “Now all that’s left is the camera at the back.”

“I don’t know why we need all this nonsense here when we barely have roads and running water,” she added with a sigh. “Technology doesn’t make better people.”

Vera isn’t alone in her critique. Smart Aqkol has brought the village an elaborate overlay of digitization, but it’s plain to see that Aqkol still lags far behind modern Kazakh cities like Astana and Almaty when it comes to basic infrastructure. A local resident named Lyubov Gnativa runs a YouTube channel where she talks about Aqkol’s lack of public services and officials’ failures to address these needs. The local government has filed police reports against Gnativa over the years, accusing her of misleading the public.

And a recent documentary made by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — titled “I Love My Town, But There’s Nothing Smart About It” — corroborates many of Gnativa’s observations and includes interviews with with dozens of locals drawing attention to water issues and the lack of insulation in many of the village’s homes.

But some residents say they are grateful for how the system has contributed to public safety. Surveillance cameras now monitor the village’s main thoroughfare from lampposts, as well as inside public schools, hospitals and municipal buildings.

“These cameras change the way people behave and I think that’s a good thing,” said Kirpichnikov. He told a story about a local woman who was recently harassed on a public bench, noting that this kind of interaction would often escalate in the past. “The woman pointed at the camera and the man looked up, got scared and began to walk away.”

A middle-aged schoolteacher named Irina told me she feels much safer since the project was implemented in 2019. “I have to walk through a public park at night and it can be intimidating because a lot of young men gather there,” she said. “After the cameras were installed they never troubled me again."

The Smart Aqkol project was the result of a deal between Kazakhtelecom, Kazakhstan’s national telecommunications company; the Eurasian Resources Group, a state-backed mining company; and Tengri Lab, a tech startup based in Astana. But the hardware came through an agreement under China’s Digital Silk Road initiative, which seeks to wire the world in a way that tends to reflect China’s priorities when it comes to public infrastructure and social control. Smart Aqkol uses surveillance cameras made by Chinese firms Dahua and Hikvision, which in China have been used — and touted, even — for their ability to track “suspicious” people and groups. Both companies are sanctioned by the U.S. due to their involvement in surveilling and aiding in the repression of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in western China.

Critics are wary of these kinds of systems in Kazakhstan, where skepticism of China’s intentions in Central Asia has been growing. The country is home to a large Uyghur diaspora of more than 300,000 people, many of whom have deep ties to Xinjiang, where both ethnic Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs have been systematically targeted and placed in “re-education” camps. Protests across Kazakhstan in response to China’s mass internment campaign have forced the government to negotiate the release of thousands of ethnic Kazakhs from China, but state authorities have walked this line carefully, in an effort to continue expanding economic ties with Beijing.

Although Kazakhstan requires people to get state permission if they want to hold a protest — and permission is regularly denied — demonstrations nevertheless have become increasingly common in Kazakhstan since 2018. With Chinese-made surveillance tech in hand, it’s become easier than ever for Kazakh authorities to pinpoint unauthorized concentrations of people. Hikvision announced in December 2022 that its software is used by Chinese police to set up “alarms” that are triggered when cameras detect “unlawful gatherings” in public spaces. The company also has claimed that its cameras can detect ethnic minorities based on their unique facial features.

Marat of U.S. National Defense University noted the broader challenges posed by surveillance tech. “We saw during the Covid-19 pandemic how quickly such tech can be adapted to other purposes such as enforcing lockdowns and tracing people’s whereabouts.”

“Such technology could easily be used against protest leaders too,” she added.

In January 2022, instability triggered by rising energy prices resulted in the government issuing “shoot to kill” orders against protesters — more than 200 people were killed in the ensuing clashes. The human rights news and advocacy outlet Bitter Winter wrote at the time that China had sent a video analytics team to Kazakhstan to use cameras it had supplied to identify and arrest protesters. Anonymous sources in their report alleged that the facial profiles of slain protesters were later compared with the facial data of individuals who appeared in surveillance video footage of riots, in an effort to justify government killings of “terrorists.”

With security forming a central promise of the smart city model, broad public surveillance is all but guaranteed. The head of Tengri Lab, the company leading the development of Smart Aqkol, has said in past interviews that school security was a key motivation behind the company’s decision to spearhead the use of artificial intelligence-powered cameras.

“After the high-profile incident in Kerch, we added the ability to automatically detect weapons,” he said, referencing a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea that left more than 20 people dead in October 2018. In that same speech he made an additional claim: “All video cameras in the city automatically detect massive clusters of people,” a veiled reference to the potential for this technology to be used against protesters.

Soon, there will be more smart city systems across Kazakhstan. Smart Aqkol and Kazakhtelecom have signed memorandums of understanding with Almaty, home to almost 2 million people, and Karaganda, with half a million, to develop similar systems. “The mayor of Karaganda was impressed by our technology and capabilities, but he was mainly interested in the surveillance cameras,” Kirpichnikov told me.

As to the question of whether these systems share data with Chinese officials, “we simply don’t have a clear answer on who has the data and how it is used,” Marat told me. “We can’t say definitively whether China has access but we know its companies are extremely dependent on the Chinese state.”

When I reached out to Tengri Lab to ask whether there are concerns regarding the safety of private data connected to the project, the company declined to comment.

What does all this mean for Aqkol? The village is so small that the faces captured on camera are rarely those of strangers. The analysts told me they recognize most of the town’s 13,000 inhabitants between them. I asked whether this makes people uncomfortable, knowing their neighbors are watching them at all times.

Danir, a born-and-raised Aqkol analyst in the situation room, told me he doesn’t believe the platform will be abused. “All my friends and family know I am watching from this room and keeping them safe,” he said. “I don’t think anybody feels threatened — we are their friends, their neighbors.”

“People fear what they don’t understand and people complain about the cameras until they need them,” said Kirpichnikov. “There was a woman once who spoke publicly against the project but after we returned her lost handbag — after we spotted it on a camera — she started to see the benefits of what we are building here.”

After a few years with the system up and running, “it’s normal,” said Danir with a shrug. “Nobody has complained to me.”

For regular people, it doesn’t mean a whole lot. And that may be OK, at least for now. As Irina, the young school teacher whom I met on the village’s main thoroughfare, put it: “I don’t really know what a smart city is, but I like living here. They say we’re safer and my bills are lower than they used to be, and I’m happy.”

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The post The smart city where everybody knows your name appeared first on Coda Story.

Writer Brett Scott has been covering how the banks are working towards a cashless world and what’s in it for them. His 2022 book, Cloudmoney, chronicles “cash, cards, cryptocurrency — and the war for our wallets.” He’s skeptical about the idea that the world is heading, irrevocably, for a future where cash doesn’t exist, where we can pay for everything with the swipe of a smartwatch or the blink of an eye.

Scott argues that a cashless society would sound the death knell for small businesses, and wipe out any remaining privacy we have, paving the way for a fully-fledged surveillance system. He’s campaigning for us to hold on to cash —- old, slow, and dirty as it may seem — if we want to hold onto our freedom.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Was there a moment in your personal life where you were suddenly switched on to the implications of a cashless future?

I've had a high degree of tech skepticism since I was very young. I was always suspicious of being told that I had to endlessly update. I was then working in finance and I also had a background in economic anthropology. I noticed a lot of the conversation around cashless societies was deeply inaccurate. People had internalized this idea that digital money was an upgrade to cash. They say things like — “my grandmother still likes cash, but she’ll eventually have to get with the times.” But really, they’re two systems that work in parallel. 

Are you saying people shouldn’t use digital money?

I’m not saying that. I’m saying that if you didn’t have another option, the digital payments system would become very oppressive. Think of it like Uber versus bicycles. So we might like the Uber system and find it convenient, but we don't want our entire transport under the control of Uber, right? Uber can be a positive thing — so long as you have the choice to not use it. Bikes can’t take you on long trips, they’re more localized. But they have their advantages. You can get around when there are traffic jams, you have autonomy over a bike, you control it yourself — and you can’t be tracked while riding them. 

Have you been following what Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been doing recently? She’s had quite a lot of backlash for saying cash is still king. 

Well, she's actually — bizarrely enough — the only politician that I know right now who is channeling a pretty left-wing take on money. And she’s absolutely right in the sense that all digital money is private. Cash is a public form of money issued by central banks or state entities. Whereas anything you see in a bank account is privately issued by the bank. Think of bank deposits like digital casino chips. And I've almost never seen a politician that actually understands that. So when Meloni says that the “cashless society is like the privatization of payments,” it's absolutely true.

But she has had a lot of criticism. People are claiming she’s helping uphold Italy’s black market and all the criminality and tax evasion that goes with it.

If you want to create a hygienic society and destroy all forms of black market deviance, whether it's criminal or not, you’ll end up with corporate domination. Let's say you try to crush all forms of shitty behavior by forcing everybody to use the banking sector. Well, now you’ve created a whole bunch of new problems. You've created serious resilience problems in the economy. You’ve created credible new vectors for inequality. Your banking elites, your tech elite, suddenly now control everything: all access to economic interaction in your society. If you suddenly defer control of the entire system to an oligopoly of private sector players, that gives them enormous power. You have to maintain the cash system if you want to create counter-power to that.

Now all those players and a bunch of other people are going to argue that the cash system is allowing various forms of black market crime to exist. But the fact is, the cash economy has always been associated historically with the most marginal people in society. And a cashless society probably wouldn’t actually solve the problem of crime — it’s well known that the banking center is extensively used for crime all the time. 

What does a cashless society mean for the surveillance industry?

A cashless world leaves these huge data trails. There are well-known examples of intelligence agencies spying on payment networks. Right now, the worst excesses of that type of surveillance are dampened because there is an alternative, right?

You mean there’s currently a way to fly under the radar by using cash. 

Right. The thing about the cash system is that you can't steer people's behavior. Once it's out of the system, cash becomes far more localized and has a much more organic way that it moves around. But let's say there's a total implosion in the cash system, and it's allowed to happen. Maybe the world wouldn't necessarily immediately become some giant surveillance state –– but the potential for that outcome becomes much much greater. A cashless world has crazy potential for surveillance. And crazy potential for censorship.

What does a cashless society have to do with censorship?

It's about the ability to control people through their behavior. People’s activities can be monitored — but they can also be blocked by simply freezing their accounts. Think about the crazy levels of trauma faced by someone who can't get access to the banking sector in a society that won't take cash. Think about the crazy levels of economic terror that a person would face if they got excluded from the payment system in a cashless society. Right now we have a buffer against us if we get locked out of the banking sector, like if our cards are lost or stolen. We always have cash as a backup. 

What do you think will happen if no one starts to engage with the arguments against a cashless society?

I don’t think most people want a cashless society. If you ask people if they like digital payments, most people will say yes. But if you ask them if they want cash to be taken away from them most people will say no. People don't like having options removed from them. But many people aren’t able to articulate this, say, in the bougie coffee shop that only accepts digital payments. Many people feel a bit weirded out by the fact that they can't use cash — but often, they don't have an argument. They can't articulate it. And they have no ideological support from the political class and the business class. So they'll just think “oh, well, I guess I'm a bit old school or something.”

So how does a cashless society take shape?

It’s kind of a feedback loop. The bank stops taking cash, meaning small businesses can't deposit cash, which means they're less likely to accept cash. So then access to cash goes down. ATMs start closing. And so on. In order to stop this feedback loop, you have to actually act against it — and start putting in access to cash laws, like what Meloni is doing. And you also have to actually build a cultural movement that says it's totally okay to demand a non-automated form of payment. It has to go against this narrative that we all want a cashless world because it’s so convenient because it's cleaner, because it's faster, and so on. Because the reality is, for all this so-called convenience, people are more burnt out than they’ve ever been before. We have less time than we’ve ever had before. We’re more confused and disorientated than we’ve ever been. And this is what happens in an accelerating capitalist system. And if you don't sync up, you get thrown off the edge.

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The post In a cashless society, banking and tech elites control everything appeared first on Coda Story.

However, the technology behind them can have serious implications for our privacy and civil rights. In 2016, San Diego rolled out street lights equipped with surveillance cameras to monitor traffic, but police have since used their footage during investigations. In the spring of 2020, they were even turned on Black Lives Matter protests. The city council is now considering new regulations to govern their use. 

In 2017, Dr. Ann Cavoukian agreed to work as an advisor on a now-abandoned project, in which Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs planned to equip Toronto’s waterfront with robots to move waste to disposal facilities, heated pavements to melt snow and myriad ways to collect data in preparation for the use of autonomous vehicles. She resigned in 2018 over concerns that other companies associated with the project could not guarantee privacy.

Cavoukian, who also served as Canada’s information and privacy commissioner from 1997 to 2014, went on to create “privacy by design,” a framework for embedding safeguards in smart city technology at the point of development. She sat down with Coda Story to talk about how we can create modern urban environments with privacy baked into them. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Coda Story: What is privacy by design? 

Dr. Ann Cavoukian: We can develop smart cities that will do amazing things and preserve our privacy. It shouldn’t be the zero-sum model of either or, which so many people lead with. They say, “Well, you want a smart city, you’ve got to give up privacy.” The hell you do. Privacy is the foundation of our freedom. You don't give that up for a smart city or smart tech. You do both. 

I was the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, in Canada, for many years. What I know from that time is that privacy laws do not apply if there's no personally identifiable data. We make it a win-win. That's what the concept of privacy by design, which I created, is all about. Make it a win-win. Data utility and total privacy. We can do both.

What does privacy by design look like in the context of a smart city?

A while back, I was retained by Sidewalk Labs, when they were going to build SmartCity Toronto. That fell apart, and I can explain why. I looked at all the technologies that would be on 24/7. I said, “OK, there's going to be data collected all the time. We're going to have to de-identify it at source.” By that, I meant all data, no matter what it is, the minute it's picked up, scrub it of any possible personal identifiers. You still have very valuable data that can be used for a variety of purposes in the smart city context that will not have privacy risks, because all associated Identifiers will have been removed. 

You headed up that project, but you resigned. What went wrong?  

When I started working with Sidewalk Labs, they were all committed to embedding privacy and de-identifying data at source. But, then, they got some criticism. They had a board meeting with all the companies involved, and they said, “Look, we will ask the companies involved in the IT to de-identify data, but we can't make them do it.” The minute they said that, I had to leave, because you're not going to leave it up to companies to decide that on their own. 

So much smart city technology is built by private companies. How do we ensure that they are building privacy into their own tools? 

We can basically mandate that data must be de-identified at source. If there is a governing body or legislative body that can lay down the law and insist on that, then you will have a much better outcome. 

I can understand when de-identifying data will be effective. If you want to use a smart streetlight to know how many cars are driving through an intersection, you don’t need license plates. But, in circumstances where you need to identify someone, in order for the technology to serve its intended purpose, what do you do?

What you need to do is obtain the positive consent of the individuals involved, proactively. Privacy is all about personal control, relating to the use and disclosure of your personal information. If you have an individual's positive consent upfront, they know how you intend to use it and they consent to that, great. 

Is privacy by design a technological fix, a legislative fix or both?

I think it's primarily a technological fix. What you want to do is ensure that your measures to protect data are embedded in the tech that you're using as its default setting. You can't forget about it, because it's always there. That's what's critical. This doesn't rely on someone remembering to make the right policy or whatever. It has to be automatic. 

What prevents cities from rolling out technology with privacy by design?

It's early days. They're just beginning to address these issues. I think they will come to embrace privacy by design within a smart city, but we have to overcome the zero-sum mindset. Of course you have to focus on the tech, but not at the expense of privacy. You do both. That's the biggest hurdle that we have to overcome. We can do it, but it takes time. 

Where is this working? Where are you seeing smart cities rolled out without privacy by design?

All of the Smart Cities coming out in the east — Shanghai, Dubai — forget about privacy. That's not what we want to do. Look for models that do this properly. For example, the city of Mississauga, here in Ontario. They are just crafting a smart city and they are embedding privacy by design before anything begins. They’re wedded to de-identifying data at source, and I'm working with them to make this happen, so it is beginning.

The post ‘People say that if you want a smart city, you’ve got to give up privacy. The hell you do’ appeared first on Coda Story.

Kudos to Moscow for using algorithms to tackle its notorious traffic jams but it’s the implementation this year of facial recognition technology in 40% of the city’s 162,000 cameras that has privacy experts and protestors concerned. During a break in the conference, I called Alena Popova who leads the Ethics and Technology think tank in Moscow to talk to her about a lawsuit she filed against the municipal government after they used facial recognition to identify and fine her for a one-woman protest.

She was pretty unequivocal about what this technology in Moscow is leading to: “I’m certain we’re moving towards total surveillance,” Popova said. “In reality this is technology that is being used to hunt down political opponents.”

Needless to say the Moscow delegation wasn’t pleased when Isobel and I sent them the published story (you can read the piece here). Their spokesperson said that the piece was full of “cold war and political activism stereotypes” and that we could have written the article while “staying at home on the sofa in NY.”

On one hand I can understand his frustration. In a keynote address, Russia’s Federal Tax Commissioner presented impressive innovations in filing digital returns and the co-founder of a Russian education start-up stood out with her forward-thinking plans for integrating tech with schooling. Maybe 90% of the technology on display from Moscow had nothing to do with surveillance.

But as the Moscow government continues a global tour of its smart city technology they should find some better answers about data collection, privacy and the ethics behind facial recognition. The CEO of Moscow’s Agency of Innovations seemed baffled when I asked him whether the agency had anyone overseeing ethical concerns, answering that he didn’t think there was such a thing as a professional in the field of ethics. Whether it’s Mosocw, Beijing, New Delhi or London, it’s hard to get excited about electric scooter rollout or city-wide wifi when it coincides with the unchecked introduction of city-wide facial recognition systems.

Repeatedly at the three-day conference, entrepreneurs and researchers lumped together Russia with China. Author Jamie Metzl made it clear he thought Russian scientist’s move to produce genetically modified children was irresponsible. Other panelists did the same, prompting one journalist to ask a Moscow representative at a press lunch organized by the delegation how it felt to be a trope for going “too far.” Her reply: “We’re pioneers. We always have been.”

Speaking of Cold War stereotypes

A few weeks ago I wrote about the politicians and pundits who can't stop resurrecting unhelpful Cold War metaphors as they try to find the right words for the technology age. At this tech gathering, I jotted down a couple more helpful metaphors used by speakers on panels that I think helps demystify some of the conversation around technology and regulation. The main theme is that the tools for taming tech and moderating regulation already exist. We’re by no means at an impasse.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Digital Twin

“Do I own digital Olga? Who owns digital Olga?” asked Olga Mack during a panel digitizing civil administration. As CEO of an online contract management company, Parley Pro, Mack is 100% dependent on social networks, like LinkedIn, for her work, and like many of us, she’s a prisoner to their terms and conditions. Unlike with a bank or accounting service, she can’t pack up her records and leave if she’s unhappy with its services. Her profile on the platform is also so much more than bank details, so close to her “real” self that it becomes a digital copy of her habits, likes, and relationships. In other words, a true “digital twin.” “So who owns Olga?” If we think of the data social networks collect as a “digital twin” the question of legal rights and legal justice seems much more clear. Why can’t we pack up our data in a “digital suitcase” and take it elsewhere?

Standard-gauge railway

“I’m glad you brought up trains,” began Dr. Chrisopher Markou, from Cambridge, during a panel about government administration and tech. If you can dig back far enough into middle school history class you may remember talk of 19th century gauge wars. “The initial conditions of a technology can determine how that technology diffuses such that we still use the standard width of railroad track that was used back in the 1880s. How we establish the initial conditions for technology to develop, have knock on effects that are intergenerational,” Markou explained. 

The one that got away

It would be amiss to leave you without a few choice quotations from the conference’s headliner Kim Kardashian West, the real reason behind Coda’s deployment to the conference. I take my hat off to her work ethic and talent in business management, but you would think after basically being created by the media she’d have more curated answers to the questions from her interviewer, the author Magdalena Yesil:

Yesil: “The one business that you wish you could have done out there. The one that got away. Sometimes you look at a company and think that’s such a great idea...I wish I had done it.”
Kim: “I mean there’s so many. I mean inventing the computer, everything, I don’t know.”

To be fair, the other panelists also struggled: the founder of Giphy gave the postal service as an answer and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said the 2018 Armenian revolution (the conference this year was held in Yerevan, the Armenian capital).

Around the Web

Russia is far from the only country sparking concern over facial recognition systems. Buzzfeed reporter Pranav Dixit looks at India’s rollout of technology so advanced that “even plastic surgery may not be a dramatic enough remedy to avoid surveillance.”

The Verge reports on just how much Apple is bending to pressure from China by removing apps from its store that violate guidelines and “local laws.” In one schizophrenic case, Apple rejected a crowdsourced mapping app popular among Hong Kong protestors from its store, then approved the app and then re-rejected it again a few days ago. In a similar case also reported by the Verge, one of my favorite news outlets Quartz had their mobile app removed from the Chinese App Store following its ongoing coverage of the Honk Kong protests.

The post At a tech conference in Armenia, Moscow pushes its smart city solutions appeared first on Coda Story.

Earlier this week, Alena Popova, a prominent campaigner for women’s rights, filed a lawsuit arguing that Moscow’s use of city-wide surveillance technology is in violation of Russia’s privacy laws. Her lawsuit stems from a protest outside parliament in April 2018. Popova was subsequently fined $310 after a court ruled she had violated strict local laws related to public gatherings.

Popova’s suit was filed as the Moscow city government exhibited its smart city program at one of the tech industry’s largest international conferences, the World Congress on Information and Technology (WCIT), held in Yerevan, Armenia this week. 

The four-day conference hosted dozens of star speakers, including Kim Kardashian West, Alexis Ohanian, founder of Reddit, and Infosys founder Narayana Murthy. The Government of Moscow was a headline sponsor.

But while the Russian delegation presented its smart city technology to the conference’s international attendees as a crime-fighting tool, the same system is used in Moscow to identify and jail protestors, said Popova.

“In reality this is technology that is being used to hunt down political opponents, not criminals,” Popova said.

At Yerevan, the popular Moscow city pavilion was the centerpiece of the conference. A sweeping, uplit smoked glass structure covered with interactive screens showcasing Moscow’s latest technology.

Waiters served canapes and fresh fruit to passing delegates, while Alexey Parabuchev, CEO of Moscow’s Agency of Innovations, presided over the activity. He led us through a discreet glass door into a quieter, walled off enclosure. We asked if other “smart city” surveillance programs — such as those seen in China — had inspired Moscow.

“Smart cities are a tool,” said Parabuchev. “You could use this tool to oppress people. You could use this tool to make them happier, and to make their life more comfortable.”

Popova is full of praise for Parabuchev and his agency’s success in developing smart city solutions, which have transformed the Moscow’s parking, traffic, public transport and healthcare systems. But she says the facial recognition technology “operates outside of Russian law.”

Moscow wasn’t the only exhibitor advertising its smart city program at the WCIT. Taipei was also present; according to a government brochure, Taipei seeks to “open up the city as a living lab, through the constant injection of innovative energy.”

Protests and facial recognition

The use of facial recognition systems in Moscow has expanded in recent years. Moscow City Hall said it used facial recognition software on 1,500 CCTV cameras in 2017 in order to “provide security during mass protests”, and on a larger scale during the FIFA World Cup in 2018. Since then, the number of cameras, and the number of protestors, have swelled. By the end of this year, Moscow hopes to have 40% of its 162,000 cameras equipped with facial recognition.

In recent months, hundreds of thousands of Moscovites have jammed the city streets in weekly demonstrations — some of the largest in a decade. In the past, protests were sparked by the Kremlin’s politics, but this time residents rallied against the city government for barring opposition candidates from elections. Repeated waves of mass arrests followed, some enabled by facial recognition systems installed on city cameras.

Parabuchev says Moscow’s state-of-the-art technology is supported by residents, who can vote on projects using an app called Active Citizen. “Some of them think someone is trying to spy on them,” said Parabuchev. “It’s a question of communication,” he added.

Popova laughed at the idea that Active Citizen is an effective feedback loop for polling residents on surveillance issues. “It’s not direct democracy. It’s more like vertical democracy,” she said. “The questions aren’t posed by citizens but by the authorities. They’ll ask us questions like whether we prefer oak trees or birch trees planted in front of our houses.” 

At the conference in Yerevan, the Moscow delegation distributed pamphlets that showed off the technology’s success in tackling crime in the last five years: police said they discovered 1,727 offenses in the city through their surveillance networks in 2015.

“We installed cameras in public parks and public spaces and the result was that the whole percentage of crimes decreased,” said Parabuchev. 

A statement from the Moscow Agency of Innovations about Popova’s lawsuit also focused on the technology’s capacity to fight crime: “Using video analytics is necessary for ensuring the safety of our citizens,” said a spokesperson.

In a report earlier this year, one of Russia’s largest human rights groups, Agora, wrote that Russian authorities are “building up a system of total surveillance.”

In Yerevan, WCIT welcomed over 2,000 delegates from more than 70 countries, and devoted much of its program to discussing the tech industry’s broader ethical concerns. 

“As nice as it is to have these wonderful conferences, I think we have to be a little bit more frank about what we’re actually doing, where we’re going and — if there’s any machine learning experts in the crowd — what are we optimizing towards?” asked Dr. Christopher Markou, a lecturer on artificial intelligence from Cambridge University, in the opening panel session.

Parabuchev said Moscow’s Agency of Innovations doesn’t consult with any independent ethical bodies about the use of technology in their smart city solutions. “I don’t really think that there are professionals in the field of ethics,” he said. “I mean, what does it really mean? Somebody knows better what is more ethical or what is less ethical? I think that is how democracy works, you ask people and they decide. We’ve got those debates in the public space.”

Alongside its controversial rollout of facial recognition systems, the Moscow government has launched several data-driven projects in a bid to elevate its status as a smart city pioneer. Moscow has digitized healthcare for residents by integrating all medical records into a centralized system. In 2018, the United Nations ranked Moscow as the top global leader in e-government services such as digitized parking, bills and education.

Moscow is also keen to establish itself as an international tech hub, like London or San Francisco. In 2019 the Moscow government allocated $1.8 billion to the Agency of Innovations, which has since created a centralized program for young start-ups to grow and collaborate — both with the government and each other.

One of the Agency’s flagship projects is an educational tech program called Profilum, a data-driven career counselling service, supported by the Harvard Innovation Lab. Profilum creates automated matches between students and their career paths, and has been rolled out among 400 Russian schools, profiling 500,000 students with a target age of 12-18. 

Profilum collects students’ personal data for the program, and shares aggregated data with both the government and partnering tech giant Yandex, known as the Russian version of Google. “Obviously there’s a ton of issues around data privacy and that’s been tough,” said Profilum CEO Anya Shay at a press lunch in Yerevan organized by the Agency of Innovations. “Like everywhere else, it’s a question of how do you regulate that and how do you exchange data.”

Parabuchev believes Moscow’s commitment to canvassing citizens is what distinguishes the city’s tech programs from those in China. “They do not consult their citizens,” he said of the Chinese government. “They impose something which is probably for public good, but there’s a lack of communication.”

“I think it’s all a bit – too much,” said Parabuchev, referring to Chinese surveillance. “They’ve got a very strict approach to their citizens. We’ve got a different approach. More human-facing.”

The next stage of Popova’s lawsuit will see the activist appear in court on October 21. “If we lose the Moscow court case without question we’re going to higher courts and to the international courts,” she said. “No one is planning on stopping with the Moscow court, especially since we all know how our court systems work."

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Chen said that bus stations in Karamay, a city with 400,000 residents, were equipped with electronic screens displaying travel information. In homes, ageing residents could push panic button to alert emergency services or relatives. If the social security system recorded an increase in unemployed people, officials would know right away — all thanks to Karamay’s smart city web of 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi networks.

Karamay was an early adopter in a smart city trend that will reshape much of the world, and China remains a leader in the field. According to the British financial services firm Deloitte, there are currently just over 1,000 smart city projects in countries like Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Around half of them are in China, making the country home to the world’s largest concentration of smart cities.

Those in the smart city industry lionize these projects as the cutting edge of urban planning. A report released last year by subsidiary Deloitte China, titled “Super Smart City: Happier Society with Higher Quality,” celebrates China’s drive to build “super smart cities” which integrate data across services like health care, transport, education and public safety.

“Drones, wearable computing, facial-recognition, and predictive video help law enforcement fight crime and maintain public safety,” the report says. “Agencies pre-empt crimes by tapping into all streams of data including social and crowdsourced data.”

Billed by Deloitte as a virtual utopia, China’s smart cities represent the biggest and most intrusive surveillance architecture ever built by any single nation, according to experts and analysts.

Early smart city projects like Karamay have since blossomed into a computerized police state in Xinjiang, home to the most comprehensive surveillance architecture ever built. Versions of Karamay have spread across Xinjiang to track some 2.5 million residents, targeting the province’s Uyghur Muslim minority.

Persons who are flagged for suspicious activities — such as praying — can be investigated by Chinese intelligence and detained in “re-education” camps. Currently, some one million ethnic Uyghur Muslims have been interned in what has been described by the United Nations as “a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”

Western governments have widely condemned the emerging police state in Xinjiang. But Western tech companies, in the name of building smart cities, helped build that police state.

The New Surveillance Paradigm

Western government agencies have recently raised alarm bells about the dangers of exports from Chinese technology companies like Huawei. Last week, President Trump cited national security concerns when he blocked U.S imports from Huawei and another Chinese company, ZTE Corp. The U.S. Commerce Department also stated that Huawei would be forbidden from buying new products like computer chips from American companies.

Huawei has been the primary target of these measures. Last year, the heads of six U.S. intelligence agencies warned U.S. citizens to avoid using Huawei products. In December, Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou was arrested by Canadian authorities at the request of the U.S. government on the grounds of misleading banks about Huawei’s dealings with Iran in breach of U.S. sanctions.

It is true that Huawei helps the Chinese government surveil its own citizens, by helping build smart cities among other things.. But government studies, corporate documents, leaked official reports and public records reveal that China did not invent the paradigm of the smart city by itself. It did so with the help of a number of Western governments and major Silicon Valley companies, including IBM and Microsoft.

The seeds of China’s smart city projects were first planted by IBM in its “Smarter Planet” concept in 2009 when the company engaged with over 200 city mayors across China and established a joint “Eco-City” research lab with Northeastern University in Shenyang City, funded with $41 million from the local government.

The following year, IBM announced a 10-year smart city development strategy for China at a conference in Beijing. Future cities would use mass data collection to tackle issues like transportation, food safety, manufacturing, water resources management, energy and public services. A 2012 IBM investor briefing titled “Smarter Cities” said the company had established 82 IBM branches across China, encompassing research, innovation and software development — including in Xinjiang’s emerging “smart city” of Karamay.

Among the company’s early smart city projects was the installation of its flagship Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) for Smarter Solutions in the city of Zhenjiang in 2012. Although the project focused on the real-time monitoring of traffic, buses and passenger behavior, IBM’s IOC was also designed to integrate data for “security” purposes.

According to an IBM handbook published the same year, the IOC is capable of combining vast quantities of information across city functions including “security agencies” and “other levels of government.” Sources include feeds from “weather, citizens, law enforcement, social welfare, video” that can help run the city more efficiently. The handbook also identifies the potential of Sentiment Analysis, which learns what citizens are saying about city services and policies through social media.

But though smart cities are couched in the language of urban planning and good governance, they contain the seeds of dystopia.

According to Fan Yang, a privacy expert specializing in Chinese smart cities at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia, “Mass surveillance inherently comes along with the smart city campaign, not just in the context of China but also in the global scenario.” Smart cities inherently rely on “citizen’s data collected in real-time from all walks of their life,” she said.

Yang added that while most Chinese citizens are aware of surveillance, they are often “not aware or conscious that their privacy is at risk on their way to work, on their way home, when they order dishes or make purchases on WeChat, or when they borrow public bicycles by scanning QR codes.” What is remarkable about Chinese surveillance is not just that it happens, but the extent to which all levels of behavior are ingested and analyzed. In China, Fang says, “mass surveillance has already gone beyond the monitoring of individuals, but [also] their networks and behaviors.”

IBM’s Dance with Huawei

Karamay was just the first project in a bigger plan to connect cities across Xinjiang. In the first half of 2014, 5,000 4G mobile stations were installed across Xinjiang’s 16 main cities and 63 counties. By the end of that year, a total of 12,000 4G base stations would be built.

By 2016, as smart city infrastructure was expanded across Xinjiang, IBM was still operating in Karamay, and began introducing “cognitive IoT” (Internet of Things) according to the city’s local government website. IBM’s technology was built around the Watson IoT platform, an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can find patterns and relationships across vast amounts of different types of data.

According to a former IBM Watson product manager, the platform’s power lies in its ability to ingest and analyze any form of data, in almost any format, and to search for correlations with other types of data. The platform can process weather data, scientific articles, fleets of vehicles, environmental sensors, or audio-visual feeds and is extraordinarily well-suited for a wide range of surveillance applications.

How exactly the Watson platform was practically applied in Karamay is unclear. IBM declined to respond to questions for this article. But Karamay is home to many Uyghur “re-education” camps, whose inhabitants are often detained by police for wearing Muslim clothing or having long beards. These practices are automated by the city’s extensive surveillance networks — first established under IBM’s “public security” platform, they have evolved into Huawei’s “Safe City” program.

Over the last decade, Huawei has established dozens of Safe City programs across China in cities including Shanghai, Jiangsu, Guangdong and beyond. In May 2018, Huawei continued its work in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, with a new partnership with the Public Security Bureau, establishing an “intelligence security industry” innovation lab. According to a senior Huawei official, the lab would create a cluster of expertise for the region to “unlock a new era of smart policing and help build a safer, smarter society.”

Among the technologies now being applied in Xinjiang is advanced facial recognition designed to search exclusively for Uyghurs based on their appearance, ushering in what the New York Times has called “a new era of automated racism.” Huawei did not respond to questions about whether its work in Urumqi supports the emergence of such technologies.

IBM has a longstanding business relationship with the Chinese company. Huawei’s tremendous growth would have been impossible without significant support from IBM. As early as 2000, IBM signed an agreement with Huawei providing it with unprecedented access to its microelectronics division’s R&D facilities.

And according to Huawei’s founding chief executive Ren Zhengfe in a 2016 interview with China Daily, the Chinese telecoms giant pays IBM more than $100 million every year in management consultancy fees. Like IBM, Huawei did not respond to requests for comment.

Friends in High Places

As part of its anti-Huawei campaign, Washington has painted the company as a dangerous organization with the potential to surveil anyone at the behest of the Chinese government. A closer look reveals that it was foreign companies, and not just IBM, who helped Huawei build its surveillance capabilities within China.

In 2017, Huawei signed agreements for its “Safe City” program for video analytics and facial recognition technologies produced by three companies: Agent Vi, an Israeli firm one of whose investors is the U.S.-based telecoms giant Motorola Solutions; Ipsotek, a British security firm specializing in intelligent video analytics that is accredited by the U.K.’s Home Office; and Xjera Labs, based in Singapore.

In the same year, Huawei also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Frequentis, an Austrian technology firm specializing in the supply of communications and information systems for government agencies that provide public safety services like air traffic management and emergency services. Frequentis provides its technology to over 140 countries including the U.S., U.K. and across Europe. Its customers include the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense, London’s Metropolitan Police, NASA and the U.S. Navy.

According to national security expert Anders Corr, a former analyst for the U.S. military’s Pacific Command, such partnerships pose serious potential risks.

“Western and allied corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value. Expecting these companies to act according to any other ethic is misguided,” said Corr. “This is why we need government to regulate our corporations to protect national security, personal liberties and human rights, including the human rights of Chinese citizens.”

In reality, the opposite has happened. Despite the Trump administration’s frequently stated hostility toward Chinese tech firms, the U.S. government has long encouraged American companies to capitalize on China’s digitalization drive with few qualms, though Trump’s recent anti-Huawei executive order does limit exports to China.

In the summer of 2017, the Department of Commerce published a country guide for U.S. companies who want to invest in China, identifying investment opportunities across Big Data, IoT, AI, cloud computing, and “smart city development.”

Three months later, the Commerce Department partnered with the Chinese government-funded Shanghai Pudong Smart City Research Institute to host the “U.S.-China Smart Cities Forum” in Shanghai.

The British government, which recently approved the supply of equipment from Huawei for a new 5G network, has also tried to capture China’s attention by providing direct funding through its China Prosperity Strategic Program Fund (SPF) for joint smart city projects in both U.K. and Chinese cities. The project introduced British firms “into the Chinese smart city market,” but also sought to leverage research on Chinese smart city practices for implementation at home.

Eyes Wide Open

If Western governments appear ignorant of the potentially authoritarian applications of foreign technology in China, a report on smart cities published by the EUSME Center — an E.U. Commission-funded project based in Beijing — suggests they are in fact happy to play a part in building China’s security state. The Center’s purpose is to help small and medium sized enterprises in Europe prepare to do business in China.

The EUSME smart city report, which is not publicly available, was published in January 2016 and prepared by officials from a group called the China-Britain Business Council, which delivers China business development services for the U.K.’s Department for International Trade and works closely with the British Foreign Office.

The document acknowledges that smart city opportunities include innovations around “public safety” and “public security.” The report also points out the goal of integrating data collection across any city is to provide “population management” that supports “intelligent city security systems,” for a range of stakeholder agencies including “policemen.”

Made in China? Or the USA?

Silicon Valley giants like IBM and Microsoft have not been transparent about their role in helping build China’s smart city surveillance paradigm. As a result, the mechanisms and any safeguards on how technology and data is shared by private firms, central and municipal governments remain unknown.

“The seemingly innocuous partnerships between Western companies like IBM and Microsoft and certain oppressive regimes are most concerning,” said Privacy International’s Eva Blum-Dumontet. “Under the pretense of building smart cities or facilitating the flow of information for government services, some of the companies can effectively play a part in human rights abuses.”

But China is just the beginning. In coming years, the smart city is set to become the dominant paradigm of urban government. “Most smart cities built in the Far East have unfortunately become smart cities of surveillance, tracking your every move,” said Dr Anne Cavoukian, former Information Commissioner of Ontario, Canada, and Member of the International Council of Smart Cities

Huawei’s official literature on the “Safe City” program claims to have exported the model to over 230 cities around the world.

Among the early adopters of Huawei’s safe city solutions have been countries with a history of authoritarianism and internal violence, including Russia, Pakistan, Laos, Angola, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. In Serbia, Huawei was contracted for public safety in the capital of Belgrade, where its facial recognition cameras systems have been heavily criticized by digital rights watchdog the Share Foundation for violating citizen privacy laws.

“It is now hard to tell whether it is the Western city paradigm that has more impact on China’s smart city design or vice versa,” said Fan Yang.
By 2025, the global smart city market will be worth $2.5 trillion dollars. Dominated by Chinese companies like Huawei, it is a market which no serious Western technology firm and few governments want to be excluded from.

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