Read My Mind?

Two days before Valentines Day, 1993, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both ten years old, played hooky. They went to a shopping mall, found a two year old boy whose mother had taken her eyes off him for just a moment, led him away, tortured him and killed him. Those who remember the story remain horrified by every detail.

What is not as well known is that Thompson and Venables were identified and convicted solely because they were seen on a closed-circuit TV (CCTV) feed, then something of a rarity in England. As a direct result of this becoming known, surveillance cameras went overnight from being a little spooky to being a godsend. Britain quickly became covered with CCTV, and to this day remains in the top ten worldwide in terms of public surveillance (China, USA, UK, Singapore, Australia, Germany, Poland, Brazil, Hong Kong, India, in that order).

On December 2, 2015, husband and wife Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik walked into a Christmas party with high powered weapons and opened fire, killing fourteen and seriously wounding twenty-two others. The FBI later seized their cellphones and tried to hack them. Unable to do so, they requested the help of Apple, and were denied. The day before a court application seeking an order that Apple assist, the FBI announced that a third-party hacker had managed to break into the phones. (What they didn’t announce was that there was nothing of interest to be found, but that’s a different story.)

In early August, 2021, Apple announced that it was rolling out software enabling Apple to analyze images and messages, in real time, on the phone in your pocket, looking for indicators of child abuse and child pornography.

Now, of course, there are no images or messages of this nature on the phone in your pocket, so what’s the worry? As is often said, “Yeah, we’re watching you, but if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

What’s wrong with a CCTV on every street corner or the big tech companies surveilling your phone and your computer? Well, nothing, so long as you’re not doing anything wrong.

But here’s the problem: who gets to decide the definition of “doing anything wrong”? In many countries, criticism of the ruling party can get you tortured and killed, even if you criticize in private. If you lived in China, Myanmar, or Belarus, would you want the security establishment to have untrammeled access to your computer and your phone? How about if you live in Pakistan, where “blasphemy” remains a capital offence?

Now let’s take the technology a step further. Researchers have now been able to turn brain signals directly into an audible human voice signal. Here’s an example (https://zuckermaninstitute.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/m5_dnn_vocoder.mp3) of a computer reading a subject’s thoughts as they were counting. In this case, a voluntary subject.

Nifty, right? I don’t know about you, but it scares the bejeebers out of me that we stand at the threshold of somebody being able to read my thoughts.

Without doubt we all want to feel safe, and without doubt we all want to see the bad guys caught and punished. But let’s take some time to consider who gets to surveil all of our private thoughts and moments, because in the absence of some limitations within societies purporting to uphold democracy and the rule of law, any and all of us can be “bad guys”.