Communications data are storable, accessible and searchable, and their disclosure to and use by State authorities in South Asia are largely unregulated. Analysis of this data can be both highly revelatory and invasive, particularly when data is combined and aggregated. As such, South Asian countries are increasingly drawing on communications data and AI 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 on its citizens. It goes without saying that such intrusions profoundly affect an individual’s right to privacy. Surveillance likewise may infringe upon an individual’s right to freedom of association and expression as well. 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 as highlighted in Snowden leaks. Countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Maldives with weak legal enforcement or authoritarian systems routinely shirk these obligations.
AI surveillance exacerbates these conditions and makes it likelier that democratic and authoritarian governments may carry out surveillance that contravenes international human rights standards. Frank La Rue explains: “Technological advancements mean that the State’s effectiveness in conducting surveillance is no longer limited by scale or duration. 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[1]. 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. Unlike human operatives “with limited reserves of time and attention,” AI systems never tire or fatigue. As a result, this creates a substantial “chilling effect” even without resorting to physical violence; citizens never know if an automated bot is monitoring their text messages, reading their social media posts, or geotracking their movements around town.
Empirically, Chinese companies led by Huawei are leading suppliers of AI surveillance in South Asia. Overall, China is making a sustained push for leadership and primacy in AI. A growing consensus singles out China as a global driver of “authoritarian tech.” Experts claim that Chinese companies are working directly with Chinese state authorities to export “authoritarian tech” to like-minded governments in order to spread influence and promote an alternative governance model. The authoritarian tech has been vastly exported under the Belt and Road iniatives in South Asian countries especially in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Maldives. But AI surveillance is not solely going from one authoritarian country (China) to other authoritarian states for example Pakistan. Rather, transfers are happening in a much more heterogeneous fashion. 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 in South Asia.
Pakistan is a good case in point. Huawei is helping the government build safe cities, ZTE is establishing cloud servers, and mass surveillance systems, France is providing facial recognition cameras. Huawei is the leading vendor of advanced surveillance systems worldwide by a huge factor. Its technology is linked to more countries in South Asia than any other company. It is aggressively seeking new markets and business in the region. Huawei is not only providing advanced equipment but also offering ongoing technological support to set up, operate, and manage these systems under the direct support of People Republic of China. Huawei is directly pitching the safe city model to national security agencies, and China’s Exim Bank appears to be sweetening the deal with subsidized loans. The result is that a country like Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh obtains long-term financing from the Chinese government under the Belt and Road initiative, which mandates contracting with Chinese firms. The national governments then turn to Huawei as the prime contractor or sub-awardee to set up the safe city and implement advanced surveillance controls.
The spread of AI surveillance continues unabated. Its use by repressive regimes in South Asia to engineer crackdowns against targeted populations in India, Pakistan, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh has already sounded alarm bells. But even in countries with strong rule of law traditions like India, AI gives rise to troublesome ethical questions. Experts’ express concerns about facial recognition error rates and heightened false positives for minority populations like the Hazara community in Pakistan. The public is becoming increasingly aware about algorithmic bias in AI training datasets and their prejudicial impact on predictive policing algorithms and other analytic tools used by law enforcement. Even benign IOT applications smart speakers, remote keyless entry locks, automotive intelligent dash displays may open troubling pathways for surveillance. Pilot technologies that states are testing on their borders for instance the Line of Control with Pakistan and Line of Actual Control with China now have world-class surveillance systems. The units can be used for real-time social media monitoring and even the prediction of adversary actions. These projects are part of the 12 AI domains identified by the National Task Force of Technology. The AI-based suspicious vehicle recognition system has been deployed in the Northern and Southern commands. This software has been deployed to generate intelligence in counter-terrorism operations[2].
Disquieting questions are surfacing regarding the accuracy, fairness, methodological consistency, and prejudicial impact of advanced surveillance technologies. Governments have an obligation to provide better answers and fuller transparency about how they will use these new intrusive tools.
[1] Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Frank La Rue,” A/HRC/23/40.
[2] https://indiaai.gov.in/news/the-army-deploys-140-ai-based-surveillance-systems-to-enhance-border-security