The explanation always followed: “Nobody will do anything,” they’d say knowingly. Or, “There’s no crime.” And then, always, “There are so many cameras!”
There was a crash course on the invasive reality of a functionally cash-free society: credit cards refused and verge-of-extinct paper bills spurned. I had to do the thing I’d hoped to avoid, link a credit card to WeChat. That behemoth Chinese “super app” offers everything from banking to municipal services to social media to shopping, and is required to share data with the Chinese authorities. (Elon Musk, by the way, reportedly wants to turn his own app, X, into an invasive offering modeled after WeChat.) Having resigned myself to all-virtual payments, I knew I was corralled like everyone else into unbroken visibility, unable to spend a single yuan or wander down a forgotten side street without being tracked and recorded.
Crisscrossing China as a chaperone on my son’s school trip, I felt that a country I’d fondly remembered as a little rough-and-tumble had gotten calmer and cleaner. A part of me hated to see it. In my own mind, I couldn’t separate the safe, tidy streets from the repressive system of political control that underpins all those helpful cameras.
The Chinese Communist Party famously uses surveillance to crush dissent and, increasingly, is applying predictive algorithms to get ahead of both crimes and protest. People who screen as potential political agitators, for example, can be prevented from stepping onto trains bound for Beijing. During the Covid pandemic, Chinese health authorities used algorithmic contact tracing and QR codes to block people suspected of viral exposure from entering public spaces. Those draconian health initiatives helped to mainstream invasive surveillance and increase biometric data collection.
It would be comforting to think that China has created a singular dystopia, utterly removed from our American reality. But we are not as different as we might like to think. (...)
As my face was getting scanned all over China, Elon Musk’s minions with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were ransacking federal agencies to seize Americans’ data and sensitive information. Legal experts maintain that accessing this data is illegal under federal privacy laws, which broadly forbid government agencies from disclosing our personal information to anyone, including other parts of the government, without our written consent. But, in the event, neither the law nor our lawmakers protected us.
Mr. Musk’s team moved to access Social Security Administration data containing medical and mental health records, bank and credit card information, and birth and marriage certificates. This month, the Supreme Court temporarily allowed DOGE to access sensitive Social Security records. That means that DOGE staff, under the vague slogan of eliminating wasteful spending, can peruse files containing the most jealously guarded details of millions of American lives — everything from salary to addiction and psychiatric health records. (...)
The government’s enthusiasm for this emerging technology is disquieting. A.I. could help to supersize the surveillance state, offering the potential to quickly synthesize and draw inferences from massive quantities of data.
“The really powerful thing is when personal data get integrated,” said Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch. “Not only am I me, but I like these things, and I’m related to so-and-so, and my friends are like this, and I like to go to these events regularly on Wednesdays at 6:30. It’s knowing relationships, movements and also any irregularities.”
