China’s Expanding Surveillance State

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by  Isabelle Qian, Muyi Xiao, Paul Mozur and Alexander Cardia in the New York Times: “China’s ambition to collect a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens is more expansive than previously known, a Times investigation has found. Phone-tracking devices are now everywhere. The police are creating some of the largest DNA databases in the world. And the authorities are building upon facial recognition technology to collect voice prints from the general public.

The Times’s Visual Investigations team and reporters in Asia spent over a year analyzing more than a hundred thousand government bidding documents. They call for companies to bid on the contracts to provide surveillance technology, and include product requirements and budget size, and sometimes describe at length the strategic thinking behind the purchases. Chinese laws stipulate that agencies must keep records of bids and make them public, but in reality the documents are scattered across hard-to-search web pages that are often taken down quickly without notice. ChinaFile, a digital magazine published by the Asia Society, collected the bids and shared them exclusively with The Times.

This unprecedented access allowed The Times to study China’s surveillance capabilities. The Chinese government’s goal is clear: designing a system to maximize what the state can find out about a person’s identity, activities and social connections, which could ultimately help the government maintain its authoritarian rule.

Here are the investigation’s major revelations.

Analysts estimate that more than half of the world’s nearly one billion surveillance cameras are in China, but it had been difficult to gauge how they were being used, what they captured and how much data they generated. The Times analysis found that the police strategically chose locations to maximize the amount of data their facial recognition cameras could collect…

The Chinese authorities are realistic about their technological limitations. According to one bidding document, the Ministry of Public Security, China’s top police agency, believed the country’s video surveillance systems still lacked analytical capabilities. One of the biggest problems they identified was that the data had not been centralized….(More)”.

Meet the fact-checkers decoding Sri Lanka’s meltdown

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Nilesh Christopher: “On the evening of May 3, the atmosphere at Galle Face Green, an esplanade along the coastline of Sri Lanka’s capital city of Colombo, was carnivalesque. Parents strolled on sidewalks with toddlers hoisted on their shoulders. Teenagers wearing bandanas played the flute and blew plastic horns. People climbed atop makeshift podiums to address the crowds, greeted by scattered applause. 

The crowd of a few hundred was part of a series of protests that had been underway since mid-March, demanding the ouster of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. For months, the country has been trapped in a brutal economic crisis: Sri Lanka is currently unable to pay for imports of essentials, such as food, medicines, and fuel. Populist tax cuts, an abrupt ban on fertilizer imports, decimated crop yields, and the collapse of tourism during the pandemic all helped to push the country into the worst economic crisis it has faced since gaining independence in 1948.

The island nation owes nearly $7 billion this year and has next to no foreign reserves left. “We don’t have any gas. We don’t have fuel and some food items. We lose power for three to four hours daily now,” Nalin Chamara, 42, a hotelier protesting with his family and children, told Rest of World. Meanwhile, the presidential family at one point controlled around 70% of the nation’s budget and ran it as a family business, spending billions of dollars of borrowed money on vanity projects, such as an extravagant airport and cricket stadium that now sit almost entirely unused.

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne walked among the Galle Face Green crowds, surveying the scene. He pointed out where demonstrators had jury-rigged their own electricity supply by welding solar panels atop an open truck and connecting them to a battery. The power generated was being used to charge over two dozen smartphones inside a big blue tent, which also contained a library housing 15,000 books. “This is what Sri Lankans will do if you let them build stuff. Fucking build infrastructure from scratch,” Wijeratne said. The protest featured a giant middle finger monument made of plastic bottles, directed at the Rajapaksas. “Our real educational export should be B.Sc. in protest,” Wijeratne said.

Wijeratne, 29 years old, is best known as the author of Numbercaste, a science fiction novel about a near-future world where people’s importance in society is decided based on the all-powerful Number, a credit score determined by their social circle and social network data. But he is also the chief executive of Watchdog, a research collective based in Colombo that uses fact-checking and open source intelligence (OSINT) methods to investigate Sri Lanka’s ongoing crisis. As part of its work, he and his 12-member team of coders, journalists, economists, and students track, time stamp, geolocate, and document videos of protests shared online.

Watchdog’s protest tracker has emerged as the most comprehensive online archive of the historic events unfolding in Sri Lanka. Its data set, which comprises 597 different protests and 49 conflicts, has been used by global news organizations to demonstrate the extent of public pushback.

“[Our] core mission is simple,” Wijeratne told Rest of World. “We want to help people understand the infrastructure they use. The concrete, the laws, the policies, and the social contracts that they live under. We want to help people understand the causality of how they came to be and how they operate.”…(More)”.

Pandemic X Infodemic: How States Shaped Narratives During COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Innovation for Change – East Asia (I4C-EA): “The COVID-19 pandemic has left many unprecedented records in the history of the world. The coronavirus crisis was the first large-scale pandemic that began in a time when the internet and social media connect people to each other. It provided the latest information to respond to the COVID-19 and the technology to ask about each other’s well-being. Yet, it spread and amplified disinformation and misinformation that made the situation worse in real-time.

In addition, some countries have had opaque communications with the public about the COVID-19, and some government officials have aided in the dissemination of unconfirmed information. Other countries also created their own narratives on the COVID-19 and were reluctant to disclose important information to the public. This has led to restrictions on freedom of expression. Activists and journalists who tell the different stories from the state-shaped narrative were arrested.

To strengthen civil society’s effort to empower the public with better access to the truth, the Innovation for Change – East Asia Hub initiated “Pandemic X Infodemic: How States Shaped Narratives During COVID-19“; a research to track East Asian governments’ information, disinformation, and misinformation efforts in their respective policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020-21. This research covered four countries – China, Myanmar, Indonesia, and the Philippines – with one thematic focus on migrants in the receiving countries of Thailand and Singapore…(More)”.

Mobile phone data reveal the effects of violence on internal displacement in Afghanistan

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nearly 50 million people globally have been internally displaced due to conflict, persecution and human rights violations. However, the study of internally displaced persons—and the design of policies to assist them—is complicated by the fact that these people are often underrepresented in surveys and official statistics. We develop an approach to measure the impact of violence on internal displacement using anonymized high-frequency mobile phone data. We use this approach to quantify the short- and long-term impacts of violence on internal displacement in Afghanistan, a country that has experienced decades of conflict. Our results highlight how displacement depends on the nature of violence. High-casualty events, and violence involving the Islamic State, cause the most displacement. Provincial capitals act as magnets for people fleeing violence in outlying areas. Our work illustrates the potential for non-traditional data sources to facilitate research and policymaking in conflict settings….(More)”.

Understanding Public Participation as a Mechanism Affecting Government Fiscal Outcomes: Theory and Evidence from Participatory Budgeting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jinsol Park, J S Butler, and Nicolai Petrovsky: “This study aims to advance our knowledge about the role of public participation in formulating budgetary decisions of local governments. By focusing on participatory budgeting as a prominent form of public participation in the budgetary process, we posit that participatory budgeting serves two important roles in aligning the fiscal outcomes of local governments with citizen preferences: (1) increased transparency of the local budget and (2) improved budget literacy of citizens. This study investigates a link between participatory budgeting and the fiscal outcomes of local governments by utilizing data drawn from Korean local governments for seven fiscal years. Employing instrumental variable regression to address endogeneity, there is strong evidence that public participation and deliberation during the participatory budgeting process have a positive association with the fiscal balance. There is also weak evidence that the authority delegated to participatory budgeting participants affects the fiscal balance. The findings of this study imply that it is the quality of public participation that matters in holding the government accountable for its fiscal decisions…(More)”.

Rethinking gamified democracy as frictional: a comparative examination of the Decide Madrid and vTaiwan platforms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Yu-Shan Tseng: “Gamification in digital design harnesses game-like elements to create rewarding and competitive systems that encourage desirable user behaviour by influencing users’ bodily actions and emotions. Recently, gamification has been integrated into platforms built to fix democratic problems such as boredom and disengagement in political participation. This paper draws on an ethnographic study of two such platforms – Decide Madrid and vTaiwan – to problematise the universal, techno-deterministic account of digital democracy. I argue that gamified democracy is frictional by nature, a concept borrowed from cultural and social geographies. Incorporating gamification into interface design does not inherently enhance the user’s enjoyment, motivation and engagement through controlling their behaviours. ‘Friction’ in the user experience includes various emotional predicaments and tactical exploitation by more advanced users. Frictional systems in the sphere of digital democracy are neither positive nor negative per se. While they may threaten systemic inclusivity or hinder users’ abilities to organise and implement policy changes, friction can also provide new impetus to advance democratic practices…(More)”.

China’s Digital Ambitions: A Global Strategy to Supplant the Liberal Order

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Emily de La Bruyère, Doug Strub, and Jonathon Marek: “The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has diagnosed that the emergence of data as a factor of production is catalyzing a new industrial revolution. Chinese policymakers view this industrial revolution as a competitive opportunity to leapfrog to leadership of the international system. Beijing’s global digital strategy rests on seizing this opportunity by competing to control international data, its movement, and, by extension, the production, distribution, and consumption of resources and ideas internationally. 

A new global digital architecture is taking shape. It is both disrupting the existing hierarchy and creating the foundation for a new kind of geopolitical power. China intends to define this digital architecture by building its physical infrastructure and corresponding virtual networks and platforms, setting the technical standards that govern them, and shaping the emerging global digital governance regime. In doing so, it is cementing Chinese control over the international flow of data—and, as a result, resources.


The digital revolution promises a new era of opportunity, technological advancement, and freedom of movement and thought. However, it also entails unprecedented dangers: the possibility of digitally empowered authoritarianism that reaps profits as it asserts control, a monopolistic network power that squeezes out competition in favor of a rent-based system of political and commercial hegemony, and the capacity to shape, alter, and amplify information at a network effect pace and scale. China’s digital ambitions threaten the ability of companies to compete fairly in the international marketplace, of information to circulate freely, and of governments to defend themselves. China’s success would undermine the existing global system as well as the norms, freedoms, prosperity, and stability that it affords. But China’s success in achieving its digital ambitions is not a foregone conclusion—if, that is, liberal democracies and market economies stand up to Beijing’s challenge. They must work together to promote and defend a digital architecture that can resist illiberal, non-market control and protect the free flow of information. This will be the defining battleground of international relations for the decades ahead…(More)”.

We need to build a deliberative democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Neera Chandhoke: “There was a time when elections in India were described as ‘the carnival of democracy’. Today, they are a theatre of war. And war has no rules. In the Mahabharata, law-giver Krishna advises deceit: recollect the killing of Karna, the tragic hero who epitomised courage, valour, honour, generosity and loyalty. Analogously, in the current elections to five Assemblies, every rule protecting human dignity has been violated. Wild allegations are thrown around, history is distorted, people are divided, the hijab becomes a core issue, poverty and unemployment are non-issues and politicians strike Faustian bargains. Political languages are turned upside down, and we no longer know who stands for what, or whether they stand for anything at all.

The unnecessary hype over elections is odd. In parliamentary democracies, elections come and go, politicians appear and disappear, and life goes on. In India, elections are a matter of life and death. Television channels carry no other news. Ministers of the Central government focus their attention on state and even panchayat elections, and pay scant attention to what they should be doing: governing the country, providing jobs, ensuring wellbeing, moderating political excesses.

Considering that every year some or the other state goes into the election mode, we are fated to live amidst this hysteria and this name-calling, this empty symbolism and even emptier rhetoric…(More)”.

Japan to pitch data-sharing framework to bolster Asia supply chains

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nikkei coverage: “The Japanese government is set to propose a scheme to promote data-sharing among companies in Asia to strengthen supply chains in the region, Nikkei has learned.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) hopes that a secure data-sharing framework like the one developed in Europe will enable companies in Asia to smoothly exchange data, such as inventory information on products and parts, as well as information on potential disruptions in procurement.

The ministry will propose the idea as a key part of Japan’s digital trade policy at an expert panel meeting on Friday. The meeting will propose a major review of industrial policy to emphasize digitization and a decarbonized economy.

It sees Europe’s efforts as a role model in terms of information-sharing. The European Union is building a data distribution infrastructure, Gaia-X, to let companies in the region share information on supply chains.

The goal is to counter the monopoly on data held by large technology companies in the U.S. and China. The EU is promoting the sharing of data by connecting different cloud services among companies. Under Gaia, companies can limit the scope of data disclosure and the use of data provided to others, based on the concept of data sovereignty.

The scheme envisioned by METI will also allow companies to decide what type of data they share and how much. The infrastructure will be developed on a regional basis, with the participation of various countries.

Google and China’s Alibaba Group Holding offer data-sharing services for supply chain, but the Japanese government is concerned that it will be difficult to protect Japanese companies’ industrial secrets unless it develops its own data infrastructure….(More)”

Financing Models for Digital Ecosystems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rahul Matthan, Prakhar Misra and Harshita Agrawal: “This paper explores various financing models for the digital ecosystem within the Indian setup. It uses the market/non-market failure distinction and applies it to different parts of the ecosystem, outlined in the Open Digital Ecosystems framework. It identifies which form of financing — public, private and philanthropic — is suitable for the relevant component of the digital world — data registries, exchanges, open stacks, marketplaces, co-creation platforms, and information access portals. Finally, it treats philanthropic financing as a special case of financing mechanisms available and analyses their pros and cons in the Indian digital ecosystem…(More)”.