Relying only on the uprising of the people: is it possible to avoid the "digital concentration camp"

In March this year, Novye Izvestia published another material from a series of predictions that may come true in the near future - "Millions of video cameras have turned the life of the Chinese into an electronic concentration camp".

Among other things, it also described an experiment conducted by a correspondent for the British television company BBC working in China. He uploaded his photo to the database on which an extensive surveillance system is looking for people, and went out into the street. Cameras, face recognition algorithms and the police worked instantly - he was detained just seven minutes later...

To date, over 570 million video cameras have been installed in major Chinese cities, linked to other citizen surveillance systems. “For example, the world's largest online service, Alibaba, has an entire Shendong (Magic Shield) team that monitors marketplaces and marks potentially risky transactions. And most Chinese companies have police stations in their offices - if employees who monitor suspicious transactions or accounts find a hint of illegal activity, they can quickly pass on information to the security forces. Everything is moving towards a predictive justice system, when criminals can be detained in advance - so that they do not even have time to take to the streets. Needless to say, this means the final death of any civic activism.

In September 2020, it was reported that China was preparing to export digital surveillance technology for its citizens. The then head of the Pentagon, Mark Esper, noted that the surveillance tools, which are based on artificial intelligence technologies and facial recognition systems, will go to authoritarian regimes friendly to China, to which Esper also ranked Russia. According to him, this could open up a "new era of digital authoritarianism" in the world, our publication reported.

This material attracted the attention of network analyst Alexander Rozov, who recalled that at the end of the last century, people saw the Internet as a kind of ocean of free information that would abolish barriers and distances, hierarchy and bureaucracy. It was in this light that the then science fiction writers presented the world wide web. But even in a nightmare, they could not imagine what this dream would actually turn out to be, the rubbish that would grow on it as a result. We did not imagine that the Internet would be entangled with censorship and bans, that digital concerns and state bureaucracy would wreak havoc on the Internet, and handheld devices would spy on their users, harm them and deceive them, forcing them to act in the interests of concerns and bureaucracy...

As a result, Rozov rightly notes, everything boiled down to the main issue of political science - the issue of power, since information networks, which have a huge variety of their own functions and gadgets connected to them, only make those in power stronger. But! (and this is important), if an authoritarian leader or simply a criminal group is in power, then a digital concentration camp will be built in society, and if the power belongs to the people, then it will already be a digital republic...

That is, in the first case, the police regime will have the personal data of all citizens, and know all their personal secrets, and in the second, the possession of these data will not make the special services dangerous for citizens, since the law will protect them from any manifestation of curiosity.

Speaking about the trend existing in the real world, the analyst cites another excerpt from the Novye Izvestia publication: “Imagine that Amazon has expanded to incredible proportions - the company has taken over the remnants of offline retail, absorbed banks, bought Google and its services. The giant knows everything about you: from movie preferences to credit history and the average check for purchases of products... ”If we add that this conditional Amazon has also merged with political power, as it happened in China, then this is rubbish.

However, one should not forget that such dictatorships are not at all omnipotent, since their behavior is subject to universal political science principles:

1. The concentration camp is not created by geniuses, but by fools, and therefore they are not at all invulnerable.
2. The more complex the structure of a concentration camp, the more vulnerable it is.
3. The more complex the structure of the concentration camp, the more its authorities believe in their power, and this belief is also a sign of vulnerability.
4. The tougher the concentration camp, the more prestigious the activities of the partisans who undertook to destroy it, and whom the authorities call terrorists.
5. Ordinary prisoners of such a concentration camp, although they do not in themselves pose a real threat to the authorities, since they always take the side of the partisans, their support will ultimately ensure victory for the partisans.