smile youre on the cctv

February 2nd, 12:20am February 1st, 10:43pm Nick V. Quijano Jr.Out and About

Did you hear about the joke involving closed-circuit television (CCTV) and a government official?

Well, an aging Cabinet member toured one morning a country’s premier spy agency. Before monitors blinking high-resolution images of passersby fed by state-of-the-art CCTV, the official suddenly blurts out: “Look at that woman, she’s shameless! Under her clothes, she is totally naked!”

The obvious point of the joke is about truth – that no matter how lies entombed it, truth is still there. Not so obvious is the jab against bureaucrats of a gerontocracy or the rule of old men not knowing what is going on.

Now, not knowing what is going on somewhat underlies objections to the Duterte administration’s P20-billion “Safe Philippines” project. The China-funded project involves installing 12,000 security cameras in public places in Metro Manila and Davao City, with a national command center in Clark, Pampanga.

An alarmed Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto, as early as last year, says the government-run video surveillance project not only raises security issues but also apparently, and more importantly, lacked serious study.

Scrutinizing national security risks, we best leave to the likes of Recto who probably possesses more information and is in the best position to do something if there are security risks.

While we can momentarily ignore security risks, we are gravely disturbed by Recto’s other charge that the project had not been fully studied. Any government policy involving massive video surveillance of the public cries for thorough scrutiny as alarms are going off all over the world about how public spying is changing how governments work.

By now, many see CCTV surveillance as acceptable and is thought beneficial, particularly in resolving crimes and terrorist activity. But state-of-the-art security cameras are developing at a fast clip on a scale few of us now understand.

In China, for example, surveillance CCTV has “facial recognition” capabilities and is used to spot criminals mingling in crowds. As I understand it, police feed real-time CCTV images of suspicious people into a database of 10,000 pictures of suspects. In a matter of milliseconds identities are checked by super computers armed with sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) software.

If you think China is the only one developing facial recognition systems, Western countries are on par, with the surveillance capacities of big-data companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft equally disturbing.

A recent example is the viral “10-year challenge” gimmick on Facebook. In the challenge, users are asked to post side-by-side pictures of themselves taken 10 years ago with one taken recently. All looks fun, but experts warn the gimmick helps Facebook expand its AI software to recognize faces over time.

Anyway, technology experts say we must pay attention to three important things here. First, the harvesting of raw information like the CCTV’s real-time videos. Second, enormous databases or “Big Data” where all sorts of information about people are stored. And lastly, a tool to quickly make sense of all the harvested information via AI.

Here, if the CCTV project is approved, then the rudiments of public surveillance by government start. Our government already has numerous databases containing information about all of us, with the National ID project just updating any new information about us. AI is still far off but is coming.

All these mind-boggling computer-based technologies, experts say, eventually go beyond crime fighting and towards governance itself. China is again leading the way here in networking sophisticated surveillance techniques, big data and AI into one complex whole for use in governance.

“No government has a more ambitious and far-reaching plan to harness the power of data to change the way it governs than the Chinese government,” as one political analyst puts it.

Using networked technology systems as a governing tool has a motivation. It is meant to solve the basic political problem of any government or ruling class: “figuring out what’s going on at lower levels and across society.”

Democratic and open countries solve this vexing feedback issue by allowing grievances be heard in public debates, tolerating civic activism and holding periodic electoral exercises.

Closed and authoritarian countries, however, do not allow democratic processes and the solution to skirt that seems to be technology. By using sophisticated technology systems employing complex algorithms, a government supposedly knows what citizens are thinking, their specific wants and complaints. Knowing all these, a government gets to control citizens “without putting the police on every doorstep.”

As it is, I have barely touched the surface of the emerging complex relationship between technologies and governing. New computer-based technologies are developing so fast at a dizzying speed that it is very hard to grasp what it is all about.

Ironically, too, experts also say technologists working on or making use of these technologies don’t also have any better idea of what the future they’re building looks like than the rest of us do.

With the majority of us, including technologists, not fully grasping where technology is taking us, what does that make of our aging bureaucrats now in charge of new technologies?

Paranoia is not my cup of coffee. But when bureaucrats don’t tell us what they know or don’t know but still strut arrogantly as if they knew all about high technology when they can’t even fully figure out the powerful computer in their pockets, the smartphone, I have cause for worries.