2024 - 40 = 1984

Stop for a moment. Let's join the dots.

Talk of Orwell is often a turn-off I know. But wait: however innocent you think you are this does effect you more than you realise.

History is a sequence of dots – moments which may not seem significant at the time but join together to form the insurmountable fabric of the world we inhabit today.

Today I want to talk about a few important dots relating to AI, facial recognition, disinformation, surveillance, indexing and the corruption of power.

I’m not making any predictions - but you need to know how these dots are joining up.

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Our dots are as follows:

• The DVLA
  The UK government currently holds a portrait photograph of 50 million people at the DVLA along with futher databases at HMPO (passports) and FCDO (migrant workers).
  

• Criminal Justice Bill 2023/24
  Next year, the Criminal Justice Bill (currently at its second reading) will become law, including new powers to make the databases above readily “searchable”, first to the police and ultimately, no doubt, to other departments.
  

• Facial Recognition
  The government here in the UK is backing the roll-out of passive and live facial recognition in commercial and retail settings, as well pushing an increased uptake of the technology to the police for criminal investigations as well as for use at large sporting events and, of course: protests.
  

• Corrupt Oversight
  We used to have a “biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner” here in the UK. The post and others like it were dissolved this year leaving little or no academic oversight. Having approved the private biometrics company Facewatch for the deployments above our commissioner, Fraser Sampson, left his post to become a non-exec director at Facewatch the very next day.
  

• Indexing & Accuracy
  It’s not like it is in the movies. A computer doesn’t flicker through 50 million pictures on someone’s screen trying to find a match. Searching the index for a single face is near instant - as fast as Google. It’s not, however, that accurate. Countless examples show that if you’re a person of colour - or a woman - there’s a high risk you will be matched by mistake.
  

• Disinformation Monitoring
  As well as tracking you on the street, our government is also invested in sucking up and monitoring a huge volume of what is said online through a vast “Counter Disinformation Data Platform” run for DCMS/BEIS¹ by Faculty - a company closely tied to the government and already mired in potential conflicts of interest.

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Joining the dots…

So why am I writing this article now? What’s changed?

Well, I’ve talked a little about some of the more etherial ways in which technology, particularly AI, might change humanity over the next few years and before we get too far on that front I wanted to cover the slow but inexorable change in the way in which governments around the world – in this case, here in the UK – leverage technology to…

… to do what? To keep us safe? Or to to protect their own interests, their ideologies and their grip on power?

However optimistic you might be about the motivations of those in power, the one thing that is obvious when you look at the dots I’ve laid out … is the direction of travel.

Vast databases of human faces do exist and they have been indexed for legitimate purposes like improving airport security and flow-rate. It’s also true that our illusion of democracy is utterly at the mercy of the capacity of bad (foreign?) actors. The social media algorithms that define our world view are easily manipulated and so, in turn, are we.

Casual retail crime is on the rise, disinformation is rife and this new biometric and monitoring technology is a cheap, perhaps effective, certainly alluring tool to crack down on both symptoms without having to address the systemic causes of either.

The danger, however, seems obvious.

The definition of crime is not fixed, nor does it seem particularly balanced or proportionate so while peaceful protestors can be jailed for six months, those with connections can embezzle hundreds of millions of public pounds, with little or no redress.

Nor is the definition of misinformation fixed. My work in the field means I know about its risks more than most. Meanwhile I have both a deep technical understanding of the government’s counter-disinformation apparatus and I have first experience watching digital systems being casually misused on the whim of ministers or data being systemically misrepresented to meet treasury rules.

So as I’ve said, whatever your view of today’s politics may be, I think we can agree on the direction of travel:

• our capacity for mass surveillance of where people are and what they say or think is growing rapidly - in ability and deployment

• there is an increasing body of evidence that those in power use this capacity as much to protect themselves and their ideology as they do to protect the people from outside threats.

Consequences

So the obvious quote here is “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” — (was that Orwell² or Goebbels?) but the truth is that what you have to hide might be closer than you think.

In September this year Anna Fazackerley broke a series of stories in the Guardian showing that education experts were being actively excluded from conferences by the DfE because the government had been monitoring — and disapproved of — something as benign as which social media posts certain speakers had “liked”.

I want you take a pause, just for a second, and think that through.

Our government - a liberal western democracy - is influencing academic speaker selection based on the surreptitious monitoring and probable misinterpretation of what they assume subject-matter experts think.

I know this stuff goes on - it always has - under the purview of protecting us from baddies … but this is more akin to McCarthyism than anti-terror and we’re talking about education policy ffs … it’s a weird as it is terrifying.

Anyway — I raise it as a documented real-world example, in case you think I get ahead of myself.

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Things seldom change overnight. The metaphor of a frog, boiling on the stove, is a far more accurate way to think about social change.

Orwell talked about ubiquitous surveillance, thought police, mind control and a total loss of privacy.

We have all those apparatus at hand, government departments prepared to use it and real people already facing the consequences.

The question for you, I guess, is: are you just going to sit here and do nothing before the pot boils over?

1. Contracted to Faculty in 2021 and renewed this autumn.

2. It’s actually neither. It goes back at least to 1918 and probably long before that…