Where is surveillance used

France, Germany, Japan, and the United States are also major players in this sector. Figure 2 breaks down the leading companies in the sector. Third, liberal democracies are major users of AI surveillance. The index shows that 51 percent of advanced democracies deploy AI surveillance systems. Liberal democratic governments are aggressively using AI tools to police borders, apprehend potential criminals, monitor citizens for bad behavior, and pull out suspected terrorists from crowds.

The most important factor determining whether governments will exploit this technology for repressive purposes is the quality of their governance—is there an existing pattern of human rights violations? Are there strong rule of law traditions and independent institutions of accountability? That should provide a measure of reassurance for citizens residing in democratic states.

But advanced democracies are struggling to balance security interests with civil liberties protections. In the United States, increasing numbers of cities have adopted advanced surveillance systems. Photos are snapped every second, and the plane can be circling the city for up to 10 hours a day.

On the U. The United States is not the only democracy embracing AI surveillance. The goal of the program is to reduce crime by establishing a vast public surveillance network featuring an intelligence operations center and nearly one thousand intelligent closed-circuit television CCTV cameras the number will double by The package included upgraded high definition CCTV surveillance and an intelligent command center powered by algorithms to detect unusual movements and crowd formations.

The fact that so many democracies—as well as autocracies—are taking up this technology means that regime type is a poor predictor for determining which countries will adopt AI surveillance.

A better predictor for whether a government will procure this technology is related to its military spending. A breakdown of military expenditures in shows that forty of the top fifty military spending countries also have AI surveillance technology. This finding is not altogether unexpected; countries with substantial investments in their militaries tend to have higher economic and technological capacities as well as specific threats of concern.

If a country takes its security seriously and is willing to invest considerable resources in maintaining robust military-security capabilities, then it should come as little surprise that the country will seek the latest AI tools. Future research might examine country-level internal security figures and compare them to levels of AI surveillance. State surveillance is not inherently unlawful. Governments have legitimate reasons to undertake surveillance that is not rooted in a desire to enforce political repression and limit individual freedoms.

For example, tracking tools play a vital role in preventing terrorism. They help security forces deter bad acts and resolve problematic cases. They give authorities the ability to monitor critical threats and react accordingly.

But technology has changed the nature of how governments carry out surveillance and what they choose to monitor. Communications data are storable, accessible and searchable, and their disclosure to and use by State authorities are largely unregulated. Analysis of this data can be both highly revelatory and invasive, particularly when data is combined and aggregated.

As such, States are increasingly drawing on communications data to support law enforcement or national security investigations. States are also compelling the preservation and retention of communication data to enable them to conduct historical surveillance. Under international human rights law, three principles are critical to assessing the lawfulness of a particular surveillance action.

First, does domestic law allow for surveillance? Third, are the interests justifying the surveillance action legitimate? Disagreements abound when it comes to determining what constitutes legitimate surveillance and what is an abuse of power.

The legal standards required to legitimately carry out surveillance are high, and governments struggle to meet them. Even democracies with strong rule of law traditions and robust oversight institutions frequently fail to adequately protect individual rights in their surveillance programs. AI surveillance exacerbates these conditions and makes it likelier that democratic and authoritarian governments may carry out surveillance that contravenes international human rights standards.

Declining costs of technology and data storage have eradicated financial or practical disincentives to conducting surveillance. As such, the State now has a greater capability to conduct simultaneous, invasive, targeted and broad-scale surveillance than ever before.

AI surveillance in particular offers governments two major capabilities. One, AI surveillance allows regimes to automate many tracking and monitoring functions formerly delegated to human operators. This brings cost efficiencies, decreases reliance on security forces, and overrides potential principal-agent loyalty problems where the very forces operating at the behest of the regime decide to seize power for themselves.

Two, AI technology can cast a much wider surveillance net than traditional methods. The index does not specify, country-by-country, whether these instruments are being used by governments in lawful or illegitimate manners. Rather, the purpose of the index is to identify which countries possess sufficiently advanced tools that allow them to pursue a range of surveillance objectives. Overall, China is making a sustained push for leadership and primacy in AI.

There is some truth to this argument—a subset of Chinese exports goes directly to countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela that are gross human rights violators and which would otherwise be unable to access such technology. But AI surveillance is not solely going from one authoritarian country China to other authoritarian states.

Rather, transfers are happening in a much more heterogeneous fashion. China is exporting surveillance tech to liberal democracies as much as it is targeting authoritarian markets.

Likewise, companies based in liberal democracies for example, Germany, France, Israel, Japan, South Korea, the UK, the United States are actively selling sophisticated equipment to unsavory regimes. Saudi Arabia is a good case in point.

Huawei is helping the government build safe cities, but Google is establishing cloud servers, UK arms manufacturer BAE has sold mass surveillance systems, NEC is vending facial recognition cameras, and Amazon and Alibaba both have cloud computing centers in Saudi Arabia and may support a major smart city project.

We compromise, we negotiate, and we balance. That being said, there are special reasons why experts are applying greater scrutiny to Chinese companies. Huawei is the leading vendor of advanced surveillance systems worldwide by a huge factor.

Its technology is linked to more countries in the index than any other company. It is aggressively seeking new markets in regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Huawei is not only providing advanced equipment but also offering ongoing technological support to set up, operate, and manage these systems.

A recent investigative report by the Wall Street Journal provides an eye-opening example. The reporters found that Huawei technicians in both Uganda and Zambia helped government officials spy on political opponents. The result is that a country like Mauritius obtains long-term financing from the Chinese government, which mandates contracting with Chinese firms.

It is also increasingly clear that firms such as Huawei operate with far less independence from the Chinese government than they claim. A recent academic study by Christopher Balding and Donald C. Even if Chinese companies are making a greater push to sell advanced surveillance tech, the issue of intentionality remains perplexing—to what extent are Chinese firms like Huawei and ZTE operating out of their own economic self-interest when peddling surveillance technology versus carrying out the bidding of the Chinese state?

At least in Thailand, recent research interviews did not turn up indications that Chinese companies are pushing a concerted agenda to peddle advanced AI surveillance equipment or encourage the government to build sophisticated monitoring systems. He told me that we are thinking about giving wristbands to tourists so that we can track them, we can help them. Something like that. Smart city in Phuket turns out to be providing free Wi-Fi and internet to tourists! The following sections will describe key AI surveillance techniques and how governments worldwide are deploying them to support specific policy objectives.

States use AI technology to accomplish a broad range of surveillance goals. It also describes enabling technologies—such as cloud computing and Internet of Things IOT networks—that are integral for AI surveillance tools to function. Enabling technologies are not incorporated in the index. Importantly, AI surveillance is not a standalone instrument of repression.

It forms part of a suite of digital repression tools—information and communications technologies used to surveil, intimidate, coerce, and harass opponents in order to inflict a penalty on a target and deter specific activities or beliefs that challenge the state. Table 1 summarizes each technique and its corresponding level of global deployment. But there is growing concern that smart cities are also enabling a dramatic increase in public surveillance and intrusive security capabilities.

IBM, one of the original coiners of the term, designed a brain-like municipal model where information relevant to city operations could be centrally processed and analyzed. Huawei has been up-front about trumpeting public safety technologies for smart cities.

How do these platforms work in practice to advance surveillance goals? The IT firm Gartner, which partners with Microsoft on smart cities, provides an example:. Data is collected via a wristband embedding identity information, special healthcare requirements and a GPS. Unsurprisingly, such systems lend themselves to improper use.

Smart city platforms with a direct public security link are found in at least fifty-six of seventy-five countries with AI surveillance technology. Facial recognition is a biometric technology that uses cameras—both video or still images—to match stored or live footage of individuals with images from a database. Not all facial recognition systems focus on individual identification via database matching. Some systems are designed to assess aggregate demographic trends or to conduct broader sentiment analysis via facial recognition crowd scanning.

Unlike ordinary CCTV, which has been a mainstay of police forces for twenty-five years, facial recognition cameras are much more intrusive.

They can scan distinctive facial features in order to create detailed biometric maps of individuals without obtaining consent. Often facial recognition surveillance cameras are mobile and concealable.

To answer these questions, we analyzed data from EarthCam for each major city in the country with some interesting results: When we look at the top 50 cities in the country, we can see there is a good mix of live camera view types from aquariums to karaoke. So what are the top ten most-viewed cameras in America? Well, the lively and bustling Bourbon Street in New Orleans is the most viewed live camera in America with over 84 million views. Coming in second is New York with its beautiful skyline camera being viewed over 63 million times.

Surprisingly, in third place, we have Miami with a cafe as its most-viewed camera with over 24 million views. Los Angeles is in fourth place with the glitz and glamor of its Hollywood Boulevard camera attracting over 16 million views. Viva Las Vegas! Boston comes in seventh with its skyline camera being viewed over 10 million times.

Dallas comes in ninth with its skyline camera being viewed over 7 million times. Last, but not least, we have St. Louis in tenth place with its breathtaking Gateway Arch camera attracting over 5. The eventual goal is to be able to identify a target within five seconds based on their cardiac signal, or 'heartprint. Coats, walls, even rocks and rubble are no obstacle for another nascent surveillance technology, however.

Researchers are hard at work developing radar-based systems capable of tracking vital signs for a range of purposes, from non-invasive monitoring of patients and aiding in medical diagnoses to finding survivors in search and rescue operations.

But why bother installing new radars when we're already bathed in a different sort of radiation pretty much all the time? Wi-Fi can also be used to locate individuals, identify their position in the room and whether they're sitting or standing, and even track vital signs.

Until recently, it was thought a dedicated Wi-Fi network was required, in part because the technique depends on knowing the exact position of the Wi-Fi transmitters. In , however, a group of researchers at the University of California built an app which allowed them to figure out the exact location of existing Wi-Fi transmitters in a building. With that information, they were able to use normal smartphones and existing ambient Wi-Fi networks to detect human presence and movement from outside the room.

Some research groups want to go further than just using Wi-Fi to identify people. Based on movement and vital signs, they claim it is possible to monitor the subject's emotional state and analyse their behavioural patterns. These researchers have formed a company to market a 'touchless sensor and machine learning platform for health analytics', which they claim has been deployed in over homes and is being used by doctors and drug companies.

Beyond the potential benefits for healthcare and emergency responders, however, the technology also has obvious applications for surveillance. Technology which is capable of building up a profile of a person's heartbeat and breathing in order to watch for abnormalities in a health context is readily adaptable to being used to identify one person from another. Radar-based security surveillance systems capable of detecting people are already on the market , It's only a matter of time, and perhaps not even very much time, before the ability to identify individual people is layered on top.

Every person emits around 36 million microbial cells per hour, and human microbiomes are unique for a certain period of time a study found that around 80 per cent of people could be re-identified using their microbiome up to a year later. This means that the constant trail of microbial traces we leave behind us, as well as those we pick up from our surroundings, can be used to help reconstruct a picture of a person's activities and movements, like where they walked, what objects they touched and what environments they have been in.

Identifying people by smell is actually one of the oldest police tricks in the book, but doing it with computers instead of bloodhounds is still in its infancy in comparison with facial and fingerprint recognition. The field of odor biometrics may be useful for individual authentication but is not well suited to mass surveillance — separating exactly who smells like that in a crowd can be tricky, as anyone who has been stuck in public transport on a hot day probably knows.

Then there are the identification techniques designed for very specific use cases. One pioneering suggestion from a team of Japanese researchers for an anti-theft system for cars was based on using sensors to measure the unique shape of the driver's rear end.

Despite achieving a 98 per cent accuracy rate in trials, tragically this important security innovation does not seem to have gone any further than lab testing. Trying to regulate surveillance technologies one by one is likely to be futile. The surveillance industry is simply developing too fast, and it is too easy to switch from one kind of surveillance to another.

The difference between a facial recognition system and one based on behavioural biometrics may simply be a matter of swapping the software on an existing camera network, for example.