Privacy for Convenience
Semiconductors, drones, precision missiles and privacy. How technology has changed geopolitics.
This interview with Steve Feldstein was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
My name is Steve Feldstein. I'm a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment think tank based in Washington, DC. I write and research on issues related to technology, democracy, and geopolitics. I wrote a book that came out in 2021 called The Rise of Digital Repression. It looks at how dictators and autocrats use digital technology tools to advance their political objectives. More recently, I've been thinking a lot about the role of technology when it comes to security and geopolitics, whether it's the war in Ukraine or strategic competition against China. I'm currently working on a new book that examines these very issues – what role does technology play when it comes to countries competing with one another, fighting in a war, and so forth.
How do you define “technology” for your research purposes?
I am focused on security-oriented technologies, but also on general-purpose technologies that are viewed as critical to a country's power and capacity. I've been looking a lot at semiconductor chips right now. Semiconductors can be used for a range of things — AI systems, drones, supercomputers, and precision missiles. And there is a linkage between military innovation and how that extends more broadly to affect a country's competitiveness.
Yeah, China is the comparison people usually make. Do you think the U.S. is still competitive?
That’s an interesting question. The short answer is yes I do. In terms of leading-edge technologies, the United States is still far in front of China. And in fact, the U.S. is trying to restrict our most advanced technology, our most advanced chips, from coming into China because there's a fear that they could catch up. The idea that China is ahead when it comes to supercomputers is not true. Where I think China has caught up, is when it comes to broader manufacturing capacity.
Interesting. Is there an advocacy or policy connection to your work?
The current book I'm writing is a commercial press book for St. Martin's Press, it is meant to be viewed by the same type of readership that reads the New York Times, in addition to subject matter experts. And separately, I'm also thinking through different ideas and having separate conversations with policymakers and government officials about insights that I'm coming upon or ideas that I think are relevant when it comes to U.S. policy.
I've noticed that a lot of the topics that I'm exploring are being scrutinized in the popular media currently. Last night, I was writing a chapter looking at TSMC and the CHIPS Act, which is a leading Taiwanese semiconductor firm investing in plants in Arizona. As I was writing it, Marketplace came on and reported a story about the local impact of that very same story!
Was that reporting similar to yours? Covering the same angles?
They started getting into questions about Arizona’s workforce and whether we have the right workforce in America to staff these plants. I was thinking about the issue a little more in terms of industrial policy and government regulation. Does it make sense for the government to pick winners and losers?
You do other work on surveillance — you created something called the AI Global Surveillance Index — can you talk about that a little?
Essentially, I broke down four different types of technology and surveillance methods and looked at, around the world, what countries were using them, and how they were using them. Later, I also put out an index looking at what governments were using spyware against their citizens. Both of these are part of this bigger project that I've undertaken in the last few years about how technology is changing the relationship between citizen and state, and how it's affecting policing and government oversight in general, particularly in dictatorships.
In regards to Surveillance Index is there just an indefinite amount of monitoring of the expansion of surveillance that you have to do?
Yeah, I've stopped updating it because I think we're sort of reaching a point of where there are just so many countries using these technologies. At some point, everyone's going to do it. The only countries that are not doing it are those that are under-resourced to do so. Now, the real question is how facial recognition surveillance or AI surveillance, or some of these newer technologies will be combined to achieve the types of repression that we've been talking about.
Were you watching what was happening last night at Columbia at all?
A little bit, in terms of breaking up the protests.
Masks and face coverings are so familiar now when you watch protests, I don’t think that was as true pre-pandemic.
It reminds me of the ”Umbrella” protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020. One of the tactics, pre-pandemic, that the protestors used was umbrellas to hide their faces. When I first started writing about face recognition in surveillance in 2019, it was a pretty novel thing. People were pretty shocked and said, “Oh my gosh, you can use biometric technology to recognize faces and identify individuals?” And now, it feels just very ordinary. Like, of course.
Now, our digital footprint is everywhere. Think about the things that you would post on social media or the things that other people would post about you on social media or how there are facial recognition cameras no matter where you are. One of the things we've learned is that if you have security services that are very dedicated to figuring out who has attended a particular rally, whether you're in Moscow and it's the government trying to pick up anti-war protestors, or whether it's the US government trying to figure out who was at the Capitol during the insurrection, they can do so because the sensors out there, biometric or otherwise, to pick up the digital footprint of people and track their whereabouts is baked in structurally. There is no way out of that right now unless we go back to an analog era without smartphones, without posting. But, for better or worse, that's where society is. There is no way back from that.
Yeah. It's like putting toothpaste back in the bottle. I mean, if there's no way out, is it just about protecting ourselves? Is the conversation now about what one can do with the information?
I think that ought to be where it is. But, in terms of privacy regulations, we've gone nowhere. We're still one of the leading countries in the world without any kind of data privacy regulations. Ideally, we'd have some basic framework that would at least ascribe a floor when it comes to things the government or companies can or cannot do when it comes to our personal data. In the absence of that, there's not much we can do other than regulate our own behavior.
I drive by this Apple billboard near my house every day with a photo of a woman holding an iPhone in front of her face, and the caption says privacy, that’s iPhone. And I just think, we are so dumb, and they know it.
We've traded privacy for convenience every step along the way. Isn't the original sin the fact that because we were so reluctant to pay a subscription fee to social media, we basically agreed to use these platforms for free and let them mine all our information and sell to advertisers as much as they wanted. We knew this a long time ago, and we've still taken that bet every single time. So Americans can care about privacy, it's really important to me, but all our choices indicate otherwise. We're willing to allow others to exploit our data, sell it off, make money, and commodify it. We get irked by it occasionally, but basically, we just accept it.
Did you notice when the broader culture’s thinking about privacy and surveillance changed?
I feel like I’m in the generation that went from one side to the other. By the time I was in grad school in the early 2000s, I had a cell phone — not a smartphone, but a cell phone. But I was on Facebook and so on. I have gradually watched that change happen. I'm not from the digital native generation. I think privacy for a digital native means something very different than it does for me. I have a kind of natural caution, I worry about it. I have increasingly found myself concerned more about privacy than other things, and I've retrenched a little bit in terms of my digital habits. I don't know to what extent that's true for digital natives. I think for them the answer is probably very different. I would ask you the same thing. Has your own attitude shifted? Do you feel like privacy means something different now than it did five, or 10 years ago?
Can I tell you a funny privacy thing that happened to me six months or so ago?
Please.
I noticed about a year ago that a Wikipedia page had been created for me. I don't know how it was generated. Maybe it was generated automatically because of my last book or something. I have no idea. But I certainly did not make it. No one I knew created it. And the thing about this Wikipedia page now is that, I mean, it's, it's generally fine. It mostly kind of just takes things from like my bio and Carnegie's website, but there are a couple of things that are very wrong there. They give me an affiliation with one organization that I definitely do not have.
I can't even change it because there are some weird rules with Wikipedia where if you're the subject, you're not allowed to actually change what's there, even if it's factually incorrect. So, this thing is out there publicly, and anytime you google my name, the first thing that shows up is information that's incorrect. What does that tell you about your own ability to control who gets to know publicly something about me or not? Fortunately, it's not something bad, but it could be. And if it was something bad, the perception is reality.
Yeah. We'll be sure to link to your Wikipedia.
<laughs> Okay, sounds good. Bye.