The future’s bright, the future’s red
A friend of mine used to work at GCHQ.
I once asked him what he did. “Maths” he said.
I never discovered if the reason he couldn’t say more was that he was leading some top-secret project and would have to kill me if he told me, or because he was solving equations fed to him by a machine and actually had no idea why.
Either way, last week, Jeremy Fleming, the head of GCHQ, warned that Britain faces a “moment of reckoning” in which Chinese tech values replace those of the West (for which actually read American).
Last week we talked about Google dominance and the dangers of outsourcing customer experience to the tech giants.
The reason is that the internet was created in America, and it is America’s cultural norms that infused how the technology developed. That includes an obsession with anonymity and privacy.
(Note, by the way, that when the tech giants like Amazon and Apple say this, they mean protection from Governments; who they regard as potentially dangerous. They don’t mean protection from tech giants; who, of course, they regard as entirely benign.)
Nevertheless, the cultural norms set when the internet was young still have a significant impact. The internet came of age in the aftermath of the cold war; when the consequences of state surveillance were still highly visible in the former East Germany and American policymakers were determined that the internet was going to be open and free. The standards that emerged were a mixture of American scepticism about Government and German fear of surveillance as mediated via the EU.
Big brother really is watching you
But, as Jeremy Fleming warned, as we move into a new era, innovations in smart cities (which incorporates transport) may be led by China, which takes a very different approach.
Chinese smart city implementations are heavily centralised, and with state surveillance as a specific objective. One of the market leaders in intelligent traffic systems is Hikvision; a Chinese company. Presumably, therefore, Hikvision’s technology is designed to facilitate the Chinese Government’s objectives. GCHQ’s fear is that more and more systems will end up being built with Chinese values and requirements at their core until it becomes almost impossible to procure a system that doesn’t share your data by default (possibly with the Chinese Communist Party).
When TfL produced their new “TfL Go” app, they published the detail of all the privacy implications and what they were doing about them. In a world where the norms are set not by America and Europe but by China, will this be forthcoming - or even possible? What’s the point in TfL putting in so much effort to protect our privacy, when the plumbing that underpins this technology is all accessible to the Chinese Communist Party? If Chinese suppliers have products that prioritise not privacy but identification, won’t they then try to maximise their return on these products by selling them overseas, meaning that a significant proportion of British smart city systems end up as surveillance-first systems, not privacy-first systems?
Obviously, in some ways, that’s a good thing. If a new ticket gate looks up the ticketless traveller in a central database, identifies them by name and automatically sends them a penalty fare, a lot of painful effort will have been saved. But it’s a very different world from the one we now inhabit.
Have you been a good boy?
As cameras become ubiquitous they will enable 24/7 tracking of individuals. Chinese-made systems are likely to default to share, just as under our current norms they have a default to remain private. In China, this surveillance is a key enabler of the growing “Social Credit” system, which allocates every citizen a score based on their social behaviour and provides perks and punishments automatically. Currently operated regionally, the goal is that it will become national with transport a key part. Beijing has just become the second major Chinese city to trial allowing faster station access to citizens with high social credit scores, while people with low scores are banned from buying long-distance train tickets. Smart city surveillance will feed the social credit system and then become part of the mechanism by which both rewards and punishments are disbursed.
If a city uses Chinese-made traffic management systems, cameras and vehicles; will they find that they’ve got all of the kit already set up and wired for a local social credit system of their own? Even if they didn’t intend to buy it, once they’ve got it, will they use it? I’m a big fan of star ratings, but not like that! This isn’t about anything that is going to happen soon, but if service suppliers that have built solutions to enable social credit in China start monetising their investments by selling similar products abroad, will our attitudes start to change?
Red lights as warfare
One of my favourite political scandals of recent years was BridgeGate; when Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie engineered appalling traffic jams in Fort Lee, New Jersey, to punish a political opponent. It seemed such a bonkers way of getting political revenge and it was as unsuccessful as you’d expect it to be: the scandal blew up Christie’s 2016 Presidential campaign, and he attributed to it Donald Trump’s decision not put him on the Presidential ticket as VP.
Nevertheless, security officials believe that disrupting civic society through hacking is likely to be a feature of future conflict. Given that the Chinese Government is increasingly exercising direct control over private companies, there is a possibility of ‘kill switches’ built into systems to enable them to hacked or taken down as part of future cyberwarfare. If they exist, they won’t be features presented as part of the tender.
Procurement as a tool of nationalism
Globalisation has created a norm in which we no longer care where goods come from. If kit is sold in the UK, it must conform to UK standards and that’s good enough for us. But this is much more difficult than checking that a Chinese-made telly conforms to local safety standards.
If Hikvision, to give an example, is secretly required to include features to assist in future conflict, no customer could possibly know. If Hikvision then becomes the default smart cities provider for the UK, will the councils that buy its services know for certain that they’re not exposing themselves to risk of cyber attack? Yet refusing to buy from a supplier simply because of their nationality would be inexcusable based on all our norms of procurement.
Smart Cities are a key part of China’s current tech strategy, so put transport in the front line of these dilemmas through the 2020s and 2030s.
These are not issues that readers of Freewheeling are likely to be able to address. It’s difficult, complicated geopolitics. But expect the Government to start to take a lot more of an interest in where transport systems come from as they attempt to navigate a tricky path between globalization and cultural values.
I suspect my GCHQ friend had it easier just doing ‘maths’.
