Surviving Technocratic Authoritarianism: Understanding Location
Whether we like it or not, the emerging realities of our world are increasingly leaning towards Technocratic Authoritarianism. The merger between corporate powers and political ideologies is well under way and is producing an environment where technology is increasingly used to enforce political views and punish dissenting voices, sometimes in very real and tangible ways.
From 2010 to 2020, I served as a missionary in China. I witnessed the rise of Xi JingPing, who ushered China back into Mao-era oppression. Under his rule, the Chinese Communist Party has not only developed a number of sophisticated mechanisms of oppression - including the social credit system - but they have begun coercing other countries into building these oppressive systems (many of which use similar technologies to those being used by FB, Twitter, Google, and AWS). I survived in this environment by learning how to fly under the radar and obfuscate my personal visibility.
In this series I want to share some survival tips in the hope that you will starting thinking now so that you will be prepared to survive what may be coming.
REVIEW: UNDERSTANDING VISIBILITY
You cannot camouflage yourself until you understand your surroundings. For our purposes, the "surroundings" that you need to blend into are composed of your visible profile.
Your profile must have:
- Financial activity (i.e. banks, PayPal, credit cards, etc)
- Active credit scores (i.e. loans, credit cards, etc)
- Active mainstream social media accounts (i.e. FB, Amazon Prime)
- Location tracking (i.e. phone, home IP address, ISP, etc)
- Facial recognition profiles (i.e. profile pictures, family pictures, etc)
- Active mainstream social media activity (i.e. sharing memes, etc)
Visibility is primarily (not exclusively) determined by these five points:
- Location
- Device ID
- Browser ID
- Behavior patterns
- Meta-data
Creating a low-profile requires understanding how your profile is "seen":
- Identity what location activity is known about you
- Identify what devices can be identified with you
- Identify how your browser profile identifies you
- Understand your own behavior patterns (financial, digital, and location)
- Understand how data can be pieced together to identify you
UNDERSTANDING LOCATION
The sheer magnitude of location data collected on each person is overwhelming. I remember when I first began to realize how much data had been collected on me in China. My co-minister was in the opposite immigration line to me and could see the monitor of the boarder agent handling my case. Not only did the boarder agent have pictures from me at Starbucks, but he also had information that appeared to tie me to my phone and its location data, including my routes. My face was tied to my co-minister by our location-data!
The terrifying reality dawned on me that China knew who my best friend in the whole world was (who happened to also be my co-minister), because of my location data. Think about the ramifications of an authoritarian government knowing your most intimate relationships for a moment: if your best friend does something the government doesn't like, how long will it be before they show up at your door to start investigating whether or not your participated in his "sins"?
Location data is the secret data that can be used to create an extremely accurate profile on you whether or not you have social media. Your activity reveals your friends, your hobbies, your employment, your home, your interests, and even your emotional state (i.e. through unusual driving habits, etc). The degree to which your location data becomes relevant depends partly on how interested someone is in finding out more about you, but location data is the most important aspect of building an accurate profile on someone.
This might not bother you until you wake up one day and see on the news that the government has added all "libertarians to the terrorist watch list". You went to sleep a perfectly legal, safe, law-abiding citizen and woke up on a terrorist watchlist! The future suddenly seems much less uncertain. Because it has always been uncertain. Only now is the façade of certainty been ripped back. Every law-abiding citizen has a vested interest in maintaining their privacy!
LOCATION DATA COLLECTION
Location data is primarily (not exclusively) collected in the following ways:
- Phone (i.e. geometric location services, etc)
- Device ID (i.e. ISP IP recognition, devices pinging wifi hotspots, cell towers, etc)
- Surveillance technology (i.e. cameras, microphones, facial recognition AI, web-crawling AI, etc)
These broad categories include some of the more tin-foil-hat concerns like using advanced technology to pick up someone's voiceprint from device microphones in a crowd (which is only a concern for someone once they become a target, which is why I say "becoming a target is 'game over' "), and the more relevant concerns like the potential for Big Tech to use your associations to label you as a "potential threat" and censor your voice.
Imagine being refused boarding an airplane because you have been added to a no-fly list because you spent too much time at the local gun-shop and shooting range. This location data can be paired with meta-data like your NRA membership to suggest that you might be one of those "crazy conservative terrorists!"
In my case when I was abroad, if my location data was tracked to a book store, they could pair my location data with real-time tracking to see which section I was browsing: if I was in "the religious section", this would then trigger new criterion that AI would use to track my activity, further building a profile to determine whether or not I was a "religious worker".
To understand what location data is known about you, it is necessary to write down your activity in the three fields listed above so that you can understand your true profile. Once you understand your true profile, you can start blending into your environment.
In the next post, we are going to talk about managing location data.