National

Google, Mozilla and Apple are taking a coordinated action to prevent the Kazakhstani government from using bulk surveillance on citizen web browsing. 

The big picture: Web browsers use a system known as certificates to verify and encrypt communications with websites. Kazakhstan is reportedly forcing residents to circumvent that system by using a national certificate rather than the trusted certificates browsers normally use. 

Why it matters:  The national certificate would give the Kazakhstani government the ability to snoop or even change internet communications. 

Google, Mozilla and Apple, makers of the Chrome, Mozilla and Safari web browsers, have agreed not to accept that national certificate, making it difficult for the national certificate scheme to work. Google and Apple's operating systems dominate the cell phone market, making their browsers the default web browsers of the mobile internet. 

Between the lines: The three tech firms can pull this move off based on Kazakhstan's small market power and the relative lack of other options for web browsing and mobile operating systems. 

 But that could change as nations like China develop native options to expand their influence. 

A confluence of geopolitical turmoil accelerated both China's attempts to create native alternatives to Western technology and international alliances against Western notions of a free and open internet. Western web browsing may not be a permanent check on governments like Kazakhstan. 

Web browsers unite against reported Kazakhstani surveillance

Apple, Google and Mozilla have all agreed to thwart the plan.

A Kazakhstani resident waves a flag at a 2016 auto rally. Photo: Patrick Baz via AFP/Getty Images

Technology

Internet

World

Surveillance

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

With a surge of violent crime plaguing the streets of Baltimore, some residents whose lives have been upended by murder are pushing for a drastic measure:  citywide surveillance. 

Why it matters: Americans have historically valued privacy over security and generally reject the idea of being monitored by anyone, especially law enforcement.

But record-setting homicide rates in Baltimore — not to mention national attention on the city's problems following President Trump's recent Twitter insults —  may test that mindset.

Baltimore's surveillance saga began in 2016, when a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS) embarked on a quiet pilot project with the city's police force to test the firm's wide-area surveillance technology. 

How it works: From a plane flying overhead, powerful cameras capture aerial images of the entire city. Photos are snapped every second, and the plane can be circling the city for up to 10 hours a day.

"It's like Google Earth Live meets TiVo," said Ross McNutt, the company's CEO, via Skype when Axios asked for a demonstration of the technology. 

When a 911 call is received, police relay location information to analysts watching the footage in real time. Those analysts can zoom in just enough to make out the movement of vehicles and people near the scene of a crime. 

Using time stamps and a lot of mouse-clicks, analysts track the movements of cars and people — which look like pixelated shapes on the screen without any visible identifying features — and can tell police where suspects may have fled. 

Officers can then tap into other technologies, like street-level security cameras, to piece together clues. 

The problem: The police department kept the project secret, and it ended abruptly when it was revealed by media reports.

The incident came amid heightened tensions between the public and law enforcement, only a year after the 2015 death of Freddie Gray, who died while in police custody. 

PSS also pitched the service as a way to keep police officers accountable.

The system's effectiveness is largely untested, and pilot projects have been too short to assess impact on crime reduction.

The ACLU called it "the technological equivalent of putting an ankle GPS monitor on every person in Baltimore" and a "cynical attempt to profit off the city's trauma."

Violent crime has continued to soar. Baltimore has had more than 300 homicides for 4 years in a row. In 2018, the number hit 342, a record per capita rate for the city and well above other major metros with more than 500,000 people. 

Through June of this year, more than 150 people have been killed — a 17% increase over the same period last year, per the Baltimore Sun. 

Two of those losses devastated the family of Archie Williams, whose 15-year-old nephew and 24-year-old cousin were killed recently. 

Williams, 39, is among those pushing to bring PSS back to the city.  Sacrificing privacy to save lives, he said, is a "no brainer."

"If you live in this city, you have to be concerned," he told Axios. "We can use technology to nip this in the bud, or sit here and watch people die."

State of play: McNutt has held 58 community meetings in the city in the past two years to demonstrate the technology and try to ease people's concerns — but reactions have been mixed.

Former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh had said she would consider bringing the program back if the community supported it. She resigned in May. 

But new Mayor Bernard C. "Jack" Young, who had scheduled a hearing on the issue last year when he served as City Council President, isn't interested in reviving the surveillance program.

"At this time, that is not something Mayor Young is looking at as part of the crime fighting strategy for Baltimore," emailed Young's press secretary, James Bentley.

The Baltimore Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.

The big picture: While the legal landscape around real-time surveillance is shifting, finding the balance between privacy and law enforcement comes down to community conversations, said Kelsey Finch, senior policy counsel at the Future of Privacy Forum.

And while some people may generally be comfortable with sensors on cars or streetlights, seeing planes or drones flying overhead can feel much more threatening.

"That sense that you can see it and it's watching you can evoke much more visceral privacy concerns than other technologies that might actually have the same impacts," Finch said. 

That visceral reaction is exactly what will help deter crime, McNutt said. 

"We want to be public and visible in what we're doing. We want someone who's thinking about breaking the law to look up and see that airplane and decide not to do it."

This Bloomberg video shows how the technology works. 

Pro Publica journalist and Baltimore resident Alec MacGillis takes a deeper look at the city's struggle with violent crime.

Baltimore wrestles with aerial surveillance

Soaring homicide rates are prompting some interest in city-wide surveillance technologies.

Illustration of the Baltimore city skyline with a massive CCTV camera overlooking the city from above. 

Cities

Future

Residents of major American cities are constantly watched by ubiquitous cameras, mushrooming license plate readers and a battery of new smart city sensors.

But, but, but: It's not just the government keeping tabs. An explosion of private surveillance — set up by businesses, landlords and neighbors — is being driven by increasingly cheap but powerful technology. And what these observers see could make its way back to law enforcement. 

Big picture: Old-school video cameras have long watched over stores and gas stations. Now, a new wave of technology, once too expensive and complex to be used by anyone but the police, is making its way into mom-and-pop shops, front porches and residential streets.

Video cameras that flag unusual movements and recognize faces are being stuffed into popular "smart" doorbells that constantly send footage to the cloud.

AI-powered "video analytics" can identify specific actions like smoking, and search thousands of hours of archived footage for one person. It's popping up in public schools, like in Broward County, Fla., which includes Parkland.

License-plate readers are now guarding the entrances of wealthy neighborhoods, tracking every vehicle that passes and automatically flagging blacklisted cars.

"We're seeing a growing adoption of home security technology as a part of a digital neighborhood watch," says Mana Azarmi, policy counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "These technologies can be abused by stalkers, criminals and suspicious spouses."

Driving the news: At least 10 neighborhood homeowner's associations in the Denver area have bought license-plate readers to monitor every car coming in and out, reports Elise Schmelzer for the Denver Post. The cameras also record the faces of passersby.

The technology, which now costs only a couple hundred bucks to set up, is also being taken up by landlords that rent to low-income communities — often to police their own tenants.

One security company uses 475 cameras to watch over hundreds of properties, flagging guest-policy violations, parking lot collisions and illegal dumping, reports Josh Kaplan for Slate.

The data that private security systems gather are often open for law enforcement to dip into, potentially allowing police to get around restrictions on government surveillance that don't apply to private citizens, privacy experts say.

"If the only regulation on police is on what they can do with their own equipment and their own license-plate technology, it becomes trivial to avoid that," says Nathan Freed Wessler, an ACLU staff attorney.

In that case, Wessler says, police "have access to an incredible compendium of Americans' movements across time and space, going back years, potentially."

Some departments, savvy to this symbiotic arrangement, subsidize the price of video cameras in return for access to residents' surveillance archives.

What's next: Some states, including New Hampshire and Utah, have passed laws limiting police access to private plate-scan databases. But curbing purely private surveillance is difficult, legal experts tell Axios, because the First Amendment protects photography in public places.

Go deeper: Private license-plate readers help police and lenders target the poor (The Atlantic)

Rise of the digital neighborhood watch

Legal experts say curbing purely private surveillance is difficult because the First Amendment protects photography in public places

Animated illustration of a neighborhood crime watch sign with a camera aperture opening and closing as the eye. 

Get ready for a debate over the role of private security cameras, particularly the doorbell cameras used in services like Ring and Nest, owned by Amazon and Google, respectively.

What's happening: Law enforcement and cities actively subsidize Ring cameras, in exchange for potential access to the footage, the AP reports. And some departments use Ring’s Neighbors app, which encourages residents to share videos of suspicious activity.

Law enforcement describe the footage as a digital neighborhood watch.

Why it matters: The reason for cameras is understandable. Packages get stolen off doorsteps and suspicious people might come to your door — or you just want to remotely let in a guest or service worker.

The big picture: The increasing worry is that the cameras will turn neighborhoods into places of constant surveillance — with the heaviest cost imposed on people of color.

Law enforcement and Ring stress that sharing the content is voluntary, but its existence means a search warrant is always a possibility.

The bottom line: "Tech that seems like an obvious good can develop darker dimensions as capabilities improve and data shifts into new hands," WashPost's Geoffrey Fowler wrote earlier this year.

"A terms-of-service update, a face-recognition upgrade or a hack could turn your doorbell into a privacy invasion you didn’t see coming."

The surveillance camera next door

The worry is the cameras will turn neighborhoods into places of constant surveillance.

Axios Login

The government of Kazakhstan has started intercepting all of the secure HTTPS traffic within its borders.

Why it matters: The move is yet another example of the Balkanization of the once-global internet, as different countries seek to monitor or restrict what citizens can see. Authorities in China, Russia and other parts of Asia and Africa have all considered or imposed restrictions on their citizens' internet access.

"As [the] world accepts Chinese and Russian interpretation of Internet sovereignty and borders, this will more and more be the norm."

 James Mulvenon, a general manager at defense contractor SOS International and co-author of "Chinese Industrial Espionage," said via Twitter

How it works: Internet service providers in the country are being required to install a special government-issued certificate on customers' devices and web browsers, allowing authorities to decrypt and read secure web traffic, per ZDNet.

Beginning Wednesday, those in Kazakhstan trying to access the internet were interrupted with instructions on how to download the required certificate. The country tried, but backed off from, a similar move in both 2015 and 2016.

Kazakhstan's internet censorship move

It wants to monitor or restrict what citizens can see.

Public spaces are under constant surveillance from AI cameras, cellphone towers and advertisers that can follow people from home to work and back again.

But life inside the home, too, is increasingly transparent to watchful outsiders, the result of mushrooming internet-connected devices that consumers are setting up in their dens and bedrooms.

What's happening: Internet-connected devices can pick up your voice, interests, habits, TV preferences, meals, times home and away, and all sorts of other sensitive data. The gadgets send all this back to the tech companies where they were made.

The big picture: Constant surveillance at home is not yet a reality — but it's the direction we're moving in, says Jay Stanley, senior policy counsel at the ACLU.

Three main groups are peering into the home: tech companies, hackers and the government.

Companies receive data from "smart" things inside your home; hackers try to intercept it; governments can get it straight from the tech firms with a subpoena.

And most of this watching is enabled by the watched — residents who bring AI assistants, connected thermostats, video doorbells, "smart" appliances and even Wi-Fi lightbulbs into their own homes.

There are still "dumb" alternatives to nearly every internet-connected thing. You can still buy a toaster that does not have Alexa in it, or a lightbulb that's switched on with, well, a switch.

But year by year, the trade-off is becoming more dramatic. Keeping internet-connected tech out of your home will leave you increasingly far behind the convenience curve.

In some cases, it's not even up to you. Apartments are starting to come with connected devices preinstalled — to the horror of some privacy-conscious residents.

The massive spread of these devices introduce "enormous potential for abuse, for discrimination, and for shifts in power away from the individual and toward companies and agencies," says Stanley.

But people are increasingly OK being watched, as long as they get something out of it. According to an Axios/Survey Monkey poll, 70% of people are comfortable living with "smart home" devices.

What to watch: The home is still a sanctuary under the law — but the lines around it have become blurry.

"Technology can't change the fact that our homes are a key safe haven for our right to privacy, but it does make us vulnerable in new ways," says Jake Laperruque, a senior counsel at the Project on Government Oversight.

Police need a warrant to search your home — but they can ask Amazon to hand over recordings from your kitchen-counter Echo without even telling you.

But in recent rulings, the Supreme Court has placed new limits on digital snooping without a warrant.

The steady erosion of privacy at home

IoT devices can pick up your voice, interests, habits, TV preferences, meals and all sorts of other sensitive data.

Illustration of a house with a magnifying glass revealing binary code

There are millions of surveillance cameras in the U.S., but not nearly enough eyes to watch them all. When you pass one on the street, you can rightly expect your actions to go unnoticed in the moment; footage is instead archived for review if something goes wrong.

What's happening: Now, AI software can flag behavior it deems suspicious in real-time surveillance feeds, or pinpoint minute events in past footage — as if each feed were being watched unblinkingly by its own hyper-attentive security guard. The new technology, if it spreads in the U.S., could put an American twist on Orwellian surveillance systems abroad.

Big picture: In a new report today, ACLU surveillance expert Jay Stanley describes a coming mass awakening of millions of cameras, powered by anodyne-sounding "video analytics."

Collecting data has become dirt cheap, but attention has remained a scarce, expensive resource — especially for analyzing video, Stanley says. That's what is changing.

"The danger is that video analytics would be used to make sure that if you do anything, it will never be missed," Stanley tells Axios. That would be a significant departure from today's largely unmonitored cameras.

"We're right on the cusp of this technology really becoming real."

Quick take: This new software democratizes high-powered surveillance — once the purview of wealthy governments and organizations. Companies are selling it effectively as "surveillance in a box" for far cheaper than hiring video analysts.

Police, retailers, railroads and even carmakers are installing various shades of this software. And we've written about its use in schools.

The full extent of its deployment, or even how well the technology lives up to its marketing promises, isn't entirely clear.

What's certain is that there's demand for it. Analysts predict that the video analytics market, which was worth $3.23 billion in 2018, will grow to $8.55 billion in 2023.

How it works: The software is marketed as being able to: 

Detect specific events like people hugging, smoking, fighting or drinking, or instead automatically detect "anomalies" — deviations from the usual goings-on in a certain feed, like a car driving the wrong way or a person loitering at an odd hour.

Search historical footage by clothing or even skin color and "summarize" countless hours of footage into a single image or a short clip.

Determine a person's emotional state or even make assumptions about their personality, based only on their face and body movements.

The danger: Losing anonymity in public can change the way people behave, experts say, much like China's omnipresent surveillance can cause residents to constantly look over their shoulders.

"People will start to wonder if they'll be cataloged or monitored if they're at a protest or political event, and potentially be subject to retribution," says Jake Laperruque, a privacy expert at the Project on Government Oversight.

And in the case of emotion detection, significant decisions — like whether or not you get a job — can hang on the software's interpretation of your facial expressions, says Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of NYU's AI Now Institute.

AI is "awakening" surveillance cameras

New technology can constantly watch for "anomalies" in live feeds.

Illustration of surveillance cameras with a binary code overlay

One unexpected byproduct of the robotization of food — an accelerating trend I reported on last week — is an explosion of data about eaters' habits and preferences.

Why it matters: Companies often use this information to personalize food or ads to individual preferences. But seemingly trivial information about what and when you eat is also a gold mine that companies share with other interested parties — like your employer.

The same tradeoff at the center of the internet — personal information for convenience — is at play with trendy new food robots. When that data reveals something about employee work habits, their bosses get very interested.

Two companies that are selling drinks and food inside offices are also gathering valuable information on who buys them, and when.

Briggo, a robotic barista, prepares specialty coffees ordered on an app, so that you can grab a nice cappuccino rather than scorched office coffee as you arrive at work.

Byte places large, fancy vending machines in offices, offering employees easy access to healthy lunches and snacks while keeping them near their desks.

"We know everything about you, everything about the drinks you ordered," said Charles Studor, Briggo's founder, said at a food robotics conference last week. "We blow [employers] away with how much data we have about customers," he said.

Briggo collects information about employees — like when they arrive at work, and their circadian rhythms, according to Briggo VP of Marketing Mike Westgate — and shares anonymous patterns with employers. The bots have been slinging beans at Dell's Austin-area headquarters for three years.

Byte convinced one law firm of the machines' worth when it revealed how many more hours were billed because lawyers stayed at the office during lunch, the company's co-founder, Lee Mokri, said at last week's conference. Mokri later told Axios he estimates Byte saves employers 140 hours of productivity a month, on average.

What they're saying: Both companies say they share aggregate usage data, not individuals' habits, with employers.

The one exception: Briggo found that an employee was gaming its promotions and sign-up bonuses. The company tattled on the employee, who was fired.

Briggo says it's never heard privacy concerns from employees. "I suspect most folks can deduce the amount of information we know about them," said Westgate.

Go deeper: Automating food from farm to front door

Your lunch is watching you

Data about what and when you eat can be a gold mine for employers.

Illustration of a lunch shaped like a smiling face

Food

Business

For years, we've known that the phones we love and are glued to also record our locations, faces, and fingerprints. And we've understood that the same sensors that serve our individual needs could also, theoretically, be used to conduct surveillance on us.

Driving the news: It's increasingly clear that things have moved from the theoretical to the real, as a pair of reports in the New York Times underscores.

1. One article details how law enforcement in the U.S. has been making use of a trove of location data assembled by Google, called Sensorvault, that helps find both suspects and witnesses to crime.

"Anytime a technology company creates a system that could be used in surveillance, law enforcement inevitably comes knocking," writes NYT's Jennifer Valentino-DeVries.

"Sensorvault, according to Google employees, includes detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide and dating back nearly a decade."

2. The other piece describes how China is using facial recognition to identify and take action against its Uighur Muslim population.

The AI-based system, which uses surveillance cameras in public places rather than phones, tracks the minority population's members not only in their home province but when they travel in other Chinese regions.

"Using algorithms to label people based on race or ethnicity has become relatively easy," writes NYT's Paul Mozur. "But China has broken new ground by identifying one ethnic group for law enforcement purposes."

Meanwhile, marketers are also stepping up their use of location data to deeply target advertising, as Axios' Sara Fischer reports.

Google has already started to build the next phase of its advertising business around its ability to track users' location in real time. 

The company is beefing up the ads served via its real-time navigation app Waze. Waze announced last month that it's parenting with ad giant WPP (via its ad-buying arm GroupM) to help Waze develop new ad formats.

In a pitch deck revealed to Digiday last month, the company expanded on its efforts to sell such ads. It said it would sell ads that try to convince drivers to alter their routes by using things like "branded pins" that would guide drivers to nearby stores or restaurants.

It has also begun publicly talking about its next big moneymaker: maps. Rajas Moonka, director of product management for Google Maps, told Bloomberg last week, “We want to be able to highlight things that are around you and surface them nearby to you in a way that’s not disrupting your experience."

Why it matters: This data can be used for purposes that some might identify as good and others might find objectionable. But it's most definitely already being used, ever more widely, while our legal systems and personal understandings lag far behind.

Our thought bubble: It's (past) time to start making rules for how this information can and can't be accessed and by whom.

Go deeper: AI surveillance goes to school

From China to the U.S., sensor surveillance gets real

From location tracking to facial recognition, the theoretical is happening now.

As nationalism rises around the world, globally minded tech companies are finding their businesses increasingly hemmed in by association with their home countries.

The big picture: The bonds of international trade that for decades were viewed as a key driver of economic growth are instead coming to be seen as national security risks — by the U.S. as well as many of its trading partners.

The U.S. has long raised questions about Chinese companies, especially Huawei and ZTE, over espionage risks. Objections over Huawei, in particular, have increased, with the U.S. bringing criminal charges against both the company and top executives.

National security concerns have also surfaced over U.S. companies acquired by Chinese entities, such as gay dating site Grindr.

Russia's Kaspersky Lab is trying to overturn a ban on federal purchases of its software in the U.S.

U.S. companies can face similar concerns abroad, especially in Europe, where both security and antitrust concerns have been raised about U.S. tech companies.

Between the lines: U.S. policymakers often argue that fragile laws in countries like China and Russia won't protect companies' customers, data, and intellectual property from demands made by authoritarian governments — and there's plenty of evidence and examples to support that view.

The Snowden revelations about NSA surveillance showed how closely U.S. tech firms work with their own government.

Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal showed how poorly some U.S. firms protect their users' data.

That has left American companies facing an uphill battle to claim high ground in this realm.

Context: Judging companies on where they're based and what motives they might have beyond commercial interests is part of a larger shift in thinking, says Robert D. Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

"We went through about a 20-year idealistic period where the 'One Worlders' believed everything would be this one giant global market with massive free trade and everything will be great," Atkinson said. "It turns out that's a myth. Really what we have now are competing blocs."

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told Axios in a statement that Chinese companies should be viewed as agents of the state.

"In China, companies like Huawei and Hikvision willingly advance the authoritarian regime’s goals, yet here in America, we can't even get Apple to crack open an iPhone for the FBI to investigate a terrorist attack."

In a Washington Post op-ed, Sens. John Cornyn and Tom Cotton made the case for keeping China out of 5G networks in Europe.

Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, said the controversies are about more than just the location of a company's headquarters.

"I don't think it's that companies should be viewed based on their home countries, but rather that ... those companies' relationships with the state and the laws that govern them are important to understand and — in the case of Kaspersky, Huawei and ZTE — have direct implications for national security."

Nationalist concerns are splintering global tech

Amid gowing concerns about what foreign companies will do with data.

Computer screens with the Russian, Chinese and American flags on the monitor

Nationalism

President Trump's crackdown on TikTok suggests that the U.S. government is starting to see the internet more like China does — as a network that countries can and should control within their borders.

The big picture: Today's global internet has split into three zones, according to many observers: The EU's privacy-focused network; China's government-dominated network; and the U.S.-led network dominated by a handful of American companies. TikTok's fate suggests China's model has U.S. fans as well.

Why it matters: As the global internet splinters further, the U.S. and China look set to enter a Cold War-style battle for the hearts and minds of global users and developing nations. In this fight, U.S. nationalism may make a weaker case to the world than the ideal of internet freedom and open networks that the U.S. once evangelized.

Driving the news: President Trump's threat to ban TikTok from the U.S. has fast-tracked an effort to force the video-sharing app's Chinese owners to sell it to a U.S. company (Microsoft is in talks).

Be smart: The move puts other foreign-owned companies on notice that the U.S. intends to favor American-owned businesses in the digital world. 

That's a giant break from a long-established bipartisan consensus that American interests are best served by a U.S. marketplace, online and off, managed as a level playing field.

China started this game — it was the first country to self-isolate from the global internet. 

China controls information flows inside its borders, and its "great firewall" keeps most information the government dislikes from entering the country. 

The Chinese government has ensured that its most widely used search and social services are domestically owned, and its laws now require any internet service to share data with the authorities.

Meanwhile, the EU's new privacy rules have created a different kind of internet zone  governed by a stringent set of standards for handling individual user data.

Last month, a major EU ruling struck down the Privacy Shield, an arrangement between the EU and the U.S. that enabled companies to transfer data into and out of EU nations without risk. 

Trump's crackdown on TikTok suggests that the U.S. is now adopting a more China-like perspective on what kinds of actions governments should take toward internet companies, including:

picking winners and losers among companies based on the whims of leaders;

insisting that companies make data available to the government for its needs — as Attorney General William Barr's argument for weak encryption does;

The U.S. is now playing by China's internet rules

China believes in nationalist control over digital networks, and increasingly, so does the White House.

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