Dr. Valentin Weber
Introduction
Data-centric technologies are transforming how autocrats relate to information. Since the days of kings, queens, tsars, and emperors, information has been crucial to authoritarian projects of crushing dissent. Indeed, their spies and police forces would regularly serve up information on clandestine meetings and opposition movements. In the dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century, such as communist East Germany, surveillance—some of it tech-assisted—took on a pervasive character, leaving no facet of social or private life fully protected from prying eyes (or ears). Despite the introduction of technological tools, however, keeping people under watch remained a profoundly human endeavor. Devices might record conversations, but human security officers would have to manually sift through and make sense of the words on tape.
Today, technological advances in areas such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) help convert unprecedented volumes of information—consumer transactions, political speech, train trips or walks down the street, and even whether someone is happy or sad—into digital data.1 Security services can still use these data the old-fashioned way, manually perusing a given individual’s digital traces to build charges against a dissident or assess someone’s loyalty to the state. Yet they can also feed data en masse into automated systems that categorize people or flag population-level trends. While authoritarian leaders and their security apparatuses still make public security decisions most of the time, algorithms can increasingly offer or even implement a menu of options for repression.2
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