Chinese spycams back under the tree?

By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner

He knows if you’ve been good or bad – but have you ever wondered how? Tales dogging surveillance technology are not just for Christmas, but there are traditionally more bad tidings at this time of year. Who can forget the wide-eyed little Furbies, charged – though never convicted – with spying for China back in the Christmas of ‘98? With the rise of the seasonal smart device, every year the Internet of Things produces enough festive headlines to fill the Twelve Days of Christmas (spies a-watching, watches spying, doorbells dobbing… you get the picture). Amid this year’s chorus about air fryers cooking our digital goose, it’s a good time to unwrap a few present truths.

Let’s open with state surveillance. It’s easy to laugh off the latest warnings about state-sponsored hacking of our appliances: “any government that wants to look inside my washing machine…” [Fill in your own punchline]. But this misses a key point. A real risk here is not really about surveillance; it comes less from what can be seen and more from what can be sown.  One of the distressing things about burglary is the feeling of violation and insecurity it leaves. For a foreign power to infiltrate parts of our establishment is one thing, but what if it could reach into your home and rummage through your life, shutting down the router or dialing up the thermostat right under your nose – and our government’s? That wouldn’t just be unsettling poltergeistery. Distributed disruption by a hostile entity would be a sinister demonstration that we are within easy range. Officials have warned us about the ability to ‘wreak havoc’ with communications services providers, manufacturers, utilities suppliers and government bodies; subtler, domestic interference is a potent threat too.

Our fetishisation of remote gadgetry has supercharged this risk by increasing the number of smart devices we rely on.  So, as you open your app to switch on the tree lights before you get home, remember this: if you can adjust something remotely, so can someone else. Whether it’s your boiler, your cat flap or your nursery cam, anything with a power source and an IP address is fair game; peer-to-peer (P2P) devices don’t even need the latter. Hooking up these novelties gifts capability to others who may not have our best interests at heart.

State activity does, of course, stretch to surveillance as this week’s headlines are corroborating once again. And if you’re lucky enough to be getting a new mobile phone, malign actors won’t need it to masquerade as anything else. Smart phones are startlingly capable of many things, the least imaginative being voice calls. After learning that spyware can be dropped into them almost undetectably and knowing how they have been used to hack journalists, track celebrities and jack bank accounts, we still trust our phones implicitly, sometimes unthinkingly. While there’s not much we can do at an individual level about Salt Typhoon, we should see our phones as the loose-lipped office gossip (with unrestricted access to our call record metadata) rather than incorruptible confidant.

As for our own state, self-surveillance leaves little need for seasonal disguise in order to see what we’re up to since everyone’s merrily transmitting it all year round. Without invoking spycraft, our eagerness to share everything has pulled back the curtain on our private worlds. Debates about the police using live facial recognition mumble on while the tactic of ‘request-and-ingest’ from dash cams has become a standard practice for UK police forces. A rudimentary paste and search in your browser will find hourly police appeals for footage from anything with a lens and we’re readily uploading it. That’s not to say this is wrong, just that this aspect of state surveillance is tapping into limitless aggregated capability without a policy word being uttered.

So, what might next year have in store? We’ll see more surveillance capability without seeing more cameras.  How?  Because smaller devices integrated within the fabric of buildings, vehicles and clothing are the evolutionary direction.  This is a boon for any actor bent on discreet surveillance, hostile state or tawdry snooper. For a glimpse into that future look to South Korea where an explosion of tiny devices has spawned a new species of digital vulnerability. Molka (‘sneaky cameras’) built into benign objects like car keys, picture frames and light switches are being used for everything from snaring and sharing political stings to live streaming toilet bowls. Many people (women in particular) have changed their behaviour, even in the most intimate of settings like their own bedrooms and holiday rental bathrooms. This, along with the evidence from Mazan, Provence supplies every definition of the so-called ‘chilling effect’ of surveillance. It may not be next year but when remote biometrics meet nanotechnology, privacy as we’ve understood it will be extinct.

Not wanting to be the gizmo Grinch, but each year we’re making it easier for those with an unhealthy interest in our private lives – and that’s worth bearing in mind as we bag more smart tech this season. The UK data regulator has recently cited complacency as another unseen risk; we will be getting more guidance about giving data to smart devices in the new year – just in time to make our surveillance resolutions.

In the meantime, I’ve just spotted some lights in the sky. My neighbour has taken delivery of a night vision stealth drone from Shenzhen which is now flying over the rooftops like a micro-sleigh. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

About the author

Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner, is Professor of Governance and National Security at CENTRIC (Centre for Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research) and a non-executive director at Facewatch.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  China  |  data privacy  |  facial recognition  |  Fraser Sampson  |  video surveillance