National

Axios Science

Data: SurveyMonkey online poll of 3,454 employed adults, Aug. 20–25, with a margin of error of ±2.5 points. Chart: Andrew Witherspoon/Axios

The point of surveillance is to track and influence people's behavior — in the political sphere, at school, in the subway or in the workplace. Just how new technologies affect someone's behavior and thinking at work depends on each individual, what they are doing and the goals of those who are surveilling.

The big picture: Experts predict AI-fueled mass surveillance will alter people’s behavior. But exactly how it will change our thinking isn’t well understood.

Studies of electronic monitoring in the workplace offer some insights into the psychological impact of surveillance.

The positive: In some circumstances, monitoring can be used to improve performance or train employees.

The negative: It can also focus people on optimizing for a particular goal at the expense of others, diminish the quality of someone's work or increase stress.

When the purpose of monitoring isn't clear or trusted, employees can come up with ways to avoid it, spurring managers to monitor them even more, a 2018 study of TSA workers suggests.

"Managers should be good at communicating their intent widely and clearly but also demonstrating how it will be helpful to workers," says Curtis Chan, who studies organizational management at Boston College and was an author of the TSA study along with Michel Anteby of Boston University.

Now there is data tracing our days — Slack messages, comings and going via fob swipes and social media posts.

When managers poke and prod that happenstance information or monitor employees without communicating a clear purpose in doing it, it can signal a lack of respect and trust, says psychologist Tara Behrend of George Washington University. 

"There is a sense of each party owes the other one something and this kind of surveillance can violate that," she tells Axios. 

Some people will then look for ways to reassert their autonomy, for example, by withholding effort or not helping to train a new employee. 

62% of people surveyed by Axios and SurveyMonkey said it is appropriate for an employer to routinely monitor employees using technology. 

48% said they would change their behavior if they knew their employer was monitoring them.

That's not surprising, says Behrend, but the type of data being monitored may matter (physiological measures of sweat levels, for example, versus work emails) and whether someone considers themselves as being monitored.

Society doesn't mirror the workplace: The agreements between parties are different. 

Still, Behrend says surveillance in both cases involves one party having power over the other — a dynamic that defines monitoring and its effects on behavior.

The bottom line: The basic principles of learning, motivation and trust still apply when these technologies are deployed. "We can’t just start throwing tech at things and not expect it to have profound psychological effects," says Behrend.

Methodology: These data are from a SurveyMonkey online poll conducted among employed adults ages 18 and older in the United States. Respondents were selected from the more than 2 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. Data have been weighted for age, race, sex, education and geography using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to reflect the demographic composition of the United States age 18 and over. The survey was conducted August 20-25, 2019 among 3,454 employed adults. The modeled error estimate for the full sample is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

How AI police surveillance treats people of color

How surveillance changes behavior

The point of surveillance is to track and influence people's behavior.

Technology

Deep Dive - Surveillance

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.

Those websites we reported on last week that target iPhone users with malware appear to have been part of China's long-running effort to monitor its Uighur population.

The big picture: The security vulnerabilities that mobile malware takes advantage of are scarce and expensive, and countries are loath to risk burning their tools by widely exposing them. 

The only scenario where it makes any economic sense to use such techniques this broadly is one involving a wealthy government trying to mount a vast surveillance effort — as with China's campaign among the Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Why it matters: No one has attempted to spread mobile malware to such a wide group before because no one has tried to surveil an entire ethnic group this way before.

Driving the news: On Thursday, Google announced it had discovered several campaigns using popular websites to indiscriminately inject malware onto iPhones. 

Subsequent reporting showed that the campaign looked to infect not only iPhones but Android devices and Windows computers as well. 

The firm Volexity found evidence those sites included Uighur news outlets and other Uighur community sites.

Background: Surveillance of the Uighurs is nothing new. "The Chinese government has long harbored suspicion about the Uighur population’s loyalty to China, confusing ethnic identity with separatism," said Sophie Richardson, China lead for Human Rights Watch. 

China has created "re-education camps" housing as many as 1.5 million Uighurs.

But in recent years, China has tightened its heavy-fisted rule of Xinjiang province with high-tech techniques.

Biometrics: China uses widespread facial recognition research to detect and track the Uighur minority, and it has roped in Western research institutions to help. Western research institutions and journals have aided in development of facial recognition to distinguish Uighur facial features using artificial intelligence. 

China tracks Uighurs through other biometrics too, including DNA. 

Digital tools: China tracks digital communications from Uighurs and stores information tapped from WiFi-enabled devices. Tourists must install a monitoring app on phones when entering the Xinjiang province that scans for Quran passages and other contraband information, and Reuters reported Thursday that China hacked telecoms to spy on Uighur travelers.

All of the information is filtered through a machine learning algorithm-fueled mobile app used to direct police activity. 

Human Rights Watch reverse-engineered the app and found a wide variety of factors play a role in determining who is treated as a suspicious individual — including whether they use their home's front or back door.

The bottom line: This is not a small undertaking. China's willingness to spend on technology to surveil Uighurs has created a niche, high-growth industry among military contractors.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently described the crackdown on Uighurs as the “stain of the century.” And the White House added a Uighur American to the National Security Council to contribute to China policy.

A new window onto China's Uighur spying

A massive surveillance program is using smartphone malware in unprecedented ways.

A screen showing images of Chinese President Xi Jinping in Xinjiang

A screen showing images of Chinese President Xi Jinping in Xinjiang where a pervasive security apparatus has subdued the ethnic unrest, June 2019. Photo: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

Uyghur

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

Internet

World

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

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. 

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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