Tinfoil hat

How digital security is turning into cognitive protection of the individual

News broke only recently about Facebook accessing users’ personal data and digital footprint. Kazakhstan is introducing a digital certificate. And Elon Musk has gone further still, announcing the creation of implants with direct access to the brain.

Evgeny SCHERBININ, CEO of Prime Source

On July 3, a major outage hit Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp: for several hours users could not open the apps or access their news feeds. All three services also failed to display images and avatars.

Because of the failure, users of Facebook and of the web version of Instagram were presented with an unusual picture — instead of photos, fairly accurate text descriptions appeared. A shot of a girl with a dog, for instance, was labelled with a set of tags: “This image may contain a girl and a dog”.

“One man, beard — a fairly unerring description of me,” was how another user assessed the text description of his avatar.

On July 17-18, residents of several Kazakhstani cities (only Nur-Sultan was officially announced) received an SMS with intriguing content. Subscribers were notified that they had to install a security certificate on all their devices by going to www.gca.kz. For citizens who looked into the matter, the essence of the innovation became clear. The positive side of using the security certificate is the detection and blocking of content that the government has identified as unlawful, which also includes malicious resources such as phishing sites. The worrying question is that adding the security certificate to the list of trusted ones would give the state the technical ability to intervene in a device’s traffic and to read, analyze, block and alter information.

According to officials — for example Askar Zhumagaliyev, Minister of Digital Development, Defence and Aerospace Industry — the use of the information obtained will be limited by law: “There is a law on investigative activities that defines and regulates all measures of this kind. And anyone who wants to do something today... After all, it is a criminal offence. So today this will be carried out within the framework of the legislation.”

The Chinese government has already announced the piloting of a so-called social credit system in several dozen regions. It is based on collecting information about every person, including purchases of goods and services, internet traffic, tax payments, offences, activity and connections on social networks, and even digitized movement data. Analysis of this information makes it possible to assign a person a rating that places everyone in a category, from the elite to the outcast of society. Depending on the rating and how it changes, government agencies and private companies are able to set their policy for dealing with a person. The story is very much like the plot of the “Nosedive” episode of the series Black Mirror — the fantasies of American futurists about the digital future of humanity, in which a member of society turns into a social user and their place in society is determined by a rating. This is not the future, it is what is happening right now.

But Elon Musk has gone even further. On July 17, on SiliconValley.com, he announced that one of his companies, Neuralink, is working on a Bluetooth device for implantation in the brain. According to him, such devices will be able to enhance memory, enable telepathy and restore a person’s motor functions. If such a project is realized, data will be transferable directly from the human brain.

“Collecting data from raw brain activity could put people at great risk and could be used to influence, manipulate and exploit them,” experts say, commenting on the news.

Today we face a major ethical, legal and technical challenge: how do we use information for the benefit of a person without violating their personal freedom? A person has the right to decide for themselves whether to allow or prohibit the use of their personal data. After all, the risks from Orwell’s novel “1984” are taking shape ahead of us — doublethink, thoughtcrime and so on. The global question of personal security now leads us not to the user’s digital footprint on the internet, but to the problem of a person’s cognitive security, the protection of the mind. And a tinfoil hat will not help here.

Kursiv, No. 28 (803), August 1, 2019