The Other AI

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Dark Arts

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How are authoritarians using artif= icial intelligence for political repression? Steven Feldstein on the global spread of anti-democratic applications.

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Sean Nangle / The Signal

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In March, the Reuters news= agency published a revie= w of more than 2,000 Russian court cases showing security-camera footag= e and facial-recognition technology having been used in the arrests of hund= reds of people. Initially, authorities were using the technology to identif= y and detain people who’d joined various anti-government demonstratio= ns, but after the invasion of Ukraine last year, they started using it to i= ntercept protesters and prevent them from demonstrating at all. Now they&rs= quo;re using it to spot and whisk away opponents of the Kremlin whenever th= ey want. It’s a remarkable story—and just one in a developing p= attern of autocratic regimes using technologies powered by artificial intel= ligence to clamp down on their populations. What’s the extent of all = this?

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Steven Feldstein = is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and th= e author of The Rise of Digital= Repression: How Technology Is Reshaping Politics, Power, and Resistance. As Feldstein explains, repression-enabling AI applications= have become key elements of the authoritarian repertoire globally. Autocra= ts have invested heavily in them because, although they’ve insulated = their power and rolled back democratic movements in recent years, they stil= l understand that the biggest enduring threat to that power in the contempo= rary world is their own people, either rising up in revolutions or voting t= hem out in elections. And the biggest emerging opportunity to control peopl= e is by connecting the digital environments they increasingly live in to st= ate surveillance systems powered by AI.

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This article is part of a series in partnersh= ip with the Human Rights= Foundation. Feldstein will be a speaker at the Oslo Freedom Forum in June.

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J.J. Gould: How h= ave autocratic authorities been using artificial intelligence?
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Steven Feldstein:= There was a moment in the early 2010s when new digital-information and -co= mmunication platforms—social-media applications especially—had = started to play this remarkable role in helping civilians around the world = mobilize and challenge the autocracies they were living under. We saw this = in the color revolutions in post-Soviet Eurasia through the Arab Spring. An= d it led to a lot of optimism that these liberation technologies&m= dash;as they were called—would help propel a new wave of democratic r= evolutions globally.
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What’s actually happened, al= as, is that autocratic governments have figured out how to use new digital = technologies—AI applications especially—to repress their citize= ns more effectively, undercut emerging liberation movements, and reinforce = autocratic political power. We’ve seen this above all in China—= but also in Russia, the Gulf states, and other authoritarian and illiberal = regimes. The range of applications has been expanding, but a few use cases = stand out.
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One is tracking popular discontent= and, when it comes to it, controlling mass protest. That can work in a num= ber of different ways. It can work on a mass scale through automated social= -media monitoring, interpreting what people are thinking from what they&rsq= uo;re saying online. It can work through public-surveillance cameras and ot= her ways of seeing when and where people are gathering—and then preem= pting political demonstrations or arresting people who participate in them.= We’ve seen this increasingly in Russia, for example, in these techni= ques Moscow uses to pick up and neutralize anti-war protesters.
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A second use case is maintaining c= ontrol in an area of a country where the state is experiencing unrest. Chin= a’s Xinjiang province, where there’s ongoing dissatisfaction an= d pushback against Beijing among the region’s Uyghur population, is a= prominent example. Here, Chinese authorities continue to use traditional a= utocratic repression tactics, including brutal reeducation camps. But they&= rsquo;re also supplementing these traditional tactics with advanced machine= -learning technologies—facial-recognition platforms, biometric scanni= ng, genomic surveillance, and so on—which the regime can integrate wi= th an information-management system that enables predictive policing carrie= d out by tens of thousands of security officers.

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A third use case is super-enhancin= g propaganda and disinformation. Where an autocratic regime has a constitut= ional obligation to hold formal elections, for instance, and where it might= have conventionally used methods of rigging those elections like ballot-st= uffing or voter suppression, it’s now more and more likely to augment= those methods with AI technology. It can now collaborate with bot and trol= l armies to spread approved messaging. It can identify and engage key socia= l-media influencers. It can leverage social-media platforms to push out aut= omatic, hyper-personalized disinformation campaigns. And it can use deep-fa= ke technology to generate ever-more realistic audio and video forgeries to = discredit challengers.

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Gould: Why the de= mand for repression-enabling AI technology? Haven’t traditional autoc= ratic means of repression worked just fine in preventing a new wave of demo= cracy globally?

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Feldstein: From t= he end of World War II through the late 1980s, the most common way for an a= utocrat to lose power was a coup—which is to say, by being forced out= by elite competitors internal to the regime. After the Cold War, the threa= t started to shift toward popular challengers external to the regime—= namely, toward mass revolts or electoral defeats. The implication for autoc= rats has been a need to focus on controlling those challengers—by rep= ressing popular civic movements and manipulating elections.

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There’s a very direct logic = aligning this perceived need with AI technologies. The application of these= technologies for political repression can be expensive to develop—bu= t in the end, not as expensive, in terms of either resource costs or politi= cal risks, as relying wholly on the manual work, as it were, of old-fashion= ed security forces. So in the context of the shifting threat to autocrats, = AI technologies have improved both the effectiveness and efficiency of poli= tical repression.

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Joseph Chan

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More from Steven Feldstei= n at The Signal:

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“Now you have govern= ments all over the world wanting to buy the technologies that enab= le this monitoring and management, and you have companies all over the worl= d manufacturing and selling them. Autocrats from the Gulf, like Qatar, or f= rom the Middle East, like Egypt, or from South Asia, like Pakistan, are all= to some extent importing Chinese technologies. But they’re also impo= rting technologies from companies in other countries, many of which are dem= ocratic. The world has become a lot more complicated in that way.” =09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09

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“There’s under= standably a lot of concern in democratic societies about the kinds= of social control the large language models that power AI will potentially= enable—both at an industrial scale, in spreading bad information, an= d in ways that are remarkably customized for persuasion at the individual l= evel too. There’s also a lot of concern about ways large language mod= els are starting to power surveillance techniques in criminal detection and= law enforcement—with the use of these techniques already, in some ca= ses, racing ahead without regard to any regulations that lay out standards = and norms for what’s private or secure and what isn’t.” =09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09

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“You can, to some ex= tent, deny the most advanced technologies—which are the hard= est to acquire—to those who’d accrue the most damage with them = against their citizens. As an example, in the U.S., an executive order on s= pyware recently came out … that would deny any kind of market a= bility within the U.S. to companies selling these tools to regimes with bad= human-rights records. That creates a big incentive to stop doing it. Does = this mean those countries won’t be able to attain the tools at all? P= robably not. They can probably get something like them from someone else. B= ut it makes it harder, it makes it more expensive, and it probably thwarts = these countries from being able to use the most top-of-the-line capabilitie= s they’d otherwise want to use.”

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