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How Technology Strengthens Autocracy
Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Erica Frantz, and Joseph Wright
ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR is a Senior Fellow and Director of the
Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American
Security.
ERICA FRANTZ is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Michigan
State University.
JOSEPH WRIGHT is Professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State
University. The
Stasi, East Germany’s state security service, may have been one of the
most pervasive secret police agencies that ever existed. It was infamous
for its capacity to monitor individuals and control information flows.
By 1989, it had almost 100,000 regular employees and, according to some
accounts, between 500,000 and two million informants in a country with a
population of about 16 million. Its sheer manpower and resources allowed
it to permeate society and keep tabs on virtually every aspect of the
lives of East German citizens. Thousands of agents worked to tap
telephones, infiltrate underground political movements, and report on
personal and familial relationships. Officers were even positioned at
post offices to open letters and packages entering from or heading to
noncommunist countries. For decades, the Stasi was a model for how a
highly capable authoritarian regime could use repression to maintain
control. In
the wake of the apparent triumph of liberal democracy after the Cold
War, police states of this kind no longer seemed viable. Global norms
about what constituted a legitimate regime had shifted. At the turn of
the millennium, new technologies, including the Internet and the cell
phone, promised to empower citizens, allowing individuals greater access
to information and the possibility to make new connections and build new
communities. But
this wishful vision of a more democratic future proved naive. Instead,
new technologies now afford rulers fresh methods for preserving power
that in many ways rival, if not improve on, the Stasi’s tactics.
Surveillance powered by artificial intelligence (AI), for example,
allows despots to automate the monitoring and tracking of their
opposition in ways that are far less intrusive than traditional
surveillance. Not only do these digital tools enable authoritarian
regimes to cast a wider net than with human-dependent methods; they can
do so using far fewer resources: no one has to pay a software program to
monitor people’s text messages, read their social media posts, or track
their movements. And once citizens learn to assume that all those things
are happening, they alter their behavior without the regime having to
resort to physical repression. This
alarming picture stands in stark contrast to the optimism that
originally accompanied the spread of the Internet, social media, and
other new technologies that have emerged since 2000. Such hopefulness
peaked in the early 2010s [1] as social media facilitated the ouster of
four of the world’s longest-ruling dictators, in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia,
and Yemen. In a world of unfettered access to information and of
individuals empowered by technology, the argument went, autocrats would
no longer be able to maintain the concentration of power that their
systems depend on. It’s now clear, however, that technology does not
necessarily favor those seeking to make their voices heard or stand up
to repressive regimes. Faced with growing pressure and mounting fear of
their own people, authoritarian regimes are evolving. They are embracing
technology to refashion authoritarianism for the modern age. Led
by China, today’s digital autocracies are using technology—the Internet,
social media, AI—to supercharge long-standing authoritarian survival
tactics. They are harnessing a new arsenal of digital tools to
counteract what has become the most significant threat to the typical
authoritarian regime today: the physical, human force of mass
antigovernment protests. As a result, digital autocracies have grown far
more durable than their pre-tech predecessors and their less
technologically savvy peers. In contrast to what technology optimists
envisioned at the dawn of the millennium, autocracies are benefiting
from the Internet and other new technologies, not falling victim to
them.
THE SPECTER OF PROTEST The
digital age changed the context in which authoritarian regimes operate.
Such new technologies as the Internet and social media reduced barriers
to coordination, making it easier for ordinary citizens to mobilize and
challenge unresponsive and repressive governments. Data from the Mass
Mobilization Project [2], compiled the political scientists David Clark
and Patrick Regan, and the Autocratic Regimes [3] data set, which two of
us (Erica Frantz and Joseph Wright) have helped build, reveal that
between 2000 and 2017, 60 percent of all dictatorships faced at least
one antigovernment protest of 50 participants or more. Although many of
these demonstrations were small and posed little threat to the regime,
their sheer frequency underscores the continuous unrest that many
authoritarian governments face. Many
of these movements are succeeding in bringing about the downfall of
authoritarian regimes. Between 2000 and 2017, protests unseated ten
autocracies, or 23 percent of the 44 authoritarian regimes that fell
during the period. Another 19 authoritarian regimes lost power via
elections. And while there were nearly twice as many regimes ousted by
elections as by protests, many of the elections had followed mass
protest campaigns. The
rise in protests marks a significant change in authoritarian politics.
Historically, coups by military elites and officers posed the greatest
threat to dictatorships. Between 1946 and 2000, coups ousted roughly a
third of the 198 authoritarian regimes that collapsed in that period.
Protests, in contrast, unseated far fewer, accounting for about 16
percent of that total. Fast-forward to this century, and a different
reality emerges: coups unseated around nine percent of the dictatorships
that fell between 2001 and 2017, while mass movements led to the
toppling of twice as many governments. In addition to toppling regimes
in the Arab Spring, protests led to the ouster of dictatorships in
Burkina Faso, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. Protests have become the most
significant challenge that twenty-first-century authoritarian regimes
face. The
growing threat of protests has not been lost on today’s autocrats. In
the past, when they feared coups, most such leaders relied on “coup
proofing” tactics, such as overpaying the security services to win their
loyalty or rotating elites through positions of power so that no one
could develop an independent base of support. As protests have
increased, however, authoritarian regimes have adapted their survival
tactics to focus on mitigating the threat from mass mobilization. Data
compiled by Freedom House reveal that since 2000, the number of
restrictions on political and civil liberties [4] globally has grown. A
large share of this increase has occurred in authoritarian countries,
where leaders impose restrictions on political and civil liberties to
make it harder for citizens to organize and agitate against the state.
Beyond narrowing the space for civil society, authoritarian states are
also learning to use digital tools to quell dissent. Although technology
has helped facilitate protests, today’s digitally savvy authoritarian
regimes are using some of the same technological innovations to push
back against dangerous popular mobilizations.
MEANS OF CONTROL Our
analysis using data from Varieties of Democracy [5]’s data set (which
covers 202 countries) and the Mass Mobilization Project shows that
autocracies that use digital repression face a lower risk of protests
than do those autocratic regimes that do not employ these same tools.
Digital repression not only decreases the likelihood that a protest will
occur but also reduces the chances that a government will face large,
sustained mobilization efforts, such as the “red shirt” protests in
Thailand in 2010 or the anti-Mubarak and antimilitary protests in Egypt
in 2011. The example of Cambodia illustrates how these dynamics can play
out. The
government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has been in office since 1985,
has adopted technological methods of control to help maintain its grip
on power. Under Hun Sen’s rule, traditional media have restricted their
coverage of the Cambodian opposition. In the run-up to the July 2013
election, this led the opposition to rely heavily on digital tools to
mobilize its supporters. The election was fraudulent [6], prompting
thousands of citizens to take to the streets to demand a new vote. In
addition to employing brute force to quell the protests, the government
ratcheted up its use of digital repression. For instance, in August
2013, one Internet service provider temporarily blocked Facebook, and in
December 2013, authorities in the province of Siem Reap closed down more
than 40 Internet cafés. The following year, the government announced the
creation of the Cyber War Team, tasked with monitoring the Internet to
flag antigovernment activity online. A year later, the government passed
a law giving it broad control over the telecommunications industry and
established an enforcement body that could suspend telecommunications
firms’ services and even fire their staff. Partly as a result of these
steps, the protest movement in Cambodia fizzled out. According to the
Mass Mobilization Project, there was only one antigovernment protest in
the country in 2017, compared with 36 in 2014, when the opposition
movement was at its peak.
Dictatorships harness technology not only to suppress protests but also
to stiffen older methods of control. Our analysis drawing from Varieties
of Democracy’s data set suggests that dictatorships that increase their
use of digital repression also tend to increase their use of violent
forms of repression “in real life,” particularly torture and the killing
of opponents. This indicates that authoritarian leaders don’t replace
traditional repression with digital repression. Instead, by making it
easier for authoritarian regimes to identify their opposition, digital
repression allows them to more effectively determine who should get a
knock on the door or be thrown in a cell. This closer targeting of
opponents reduces the need to resort to indiscriminate repression, which
can trigger a popular backlash and elite defections.
THE CHINA MODEL The
advancement of AI-powered surveillance is the most significant evolution
in digital authoritarianism. High-resolution cameras, facial
recognition, spying malware, automated text analysis, and big-data
processing have opened up a wide range of new methods of citizen
control. These technologies allow governments to monitor citizens and
identify dissidents in a timely—and sometimes even preemptive—manner. No
regime has exploited the repressive potential of AI quite as thoroughly
as the one in China. The Chinese Communist Party collects an incredible
amount of data [7] on individuals and businesses: tax returns, bank
statements, purchasing histories, and criminal and medical records. The
regime then uses AI to analyze this information and compile “social
credit scores,” which it seeks to use to set the parameters of
acceptable behavior and improve citizen control. Individuals or
companies deemed “untrustworthy” can find themselves excluded from
state-sponsored benefits, such as deposit-free apartment rentals, or
banned from air and rail travel. Although the CCP is still honing this
system, advances in big-data analysis and decision-making technologies
will only improve the regime’s capacity for predictive control, what the
government calls “social management.”
China also demonstrates the way digital repression aids the physical
variety—on a mass scale. In Xinjiang, the Chinese government has
detained more than a million Uighurs [8] in “reeducation” camps. Those
not in camps are stuck in cities where neighborhoods are surrounded by
gates equipped with facial recognition software [9]. That software
determines who may pass, who may not, and who will be detained on sight.
China has collected a vast amount of data on its Uighur population,
including cell phone information, genetic data, and information about
religious practices, which it aggregates in an attempt to stave off
actions deemed harmful to public order or national security. New
technologies also afford Chinese officials greater control over members
of the government. Authoritarian regimes are always vulnerable to
threats from within, including coups and high-level elite defections.
With the new digital tools, leaders can keep tabs on government
officials, gauging the extent to which they advance regime objectives
and rooting out underperforming officials who over time can tarnish
public perception of the regime. For example, research has shown [10]
that Beijing avoids censoring citizens’ posts about local corruption on
Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) because those posts give the
regime a window into the performance of local officials. In
addition, the Chinese government deploys technology to perfect its
systems of censorship. AI, for example, can sift through massive amounts
of images and text, filtering and blocking content that is unfavorable
to the regime. As a protest movement heated up in Hong Kong last summer,
for example, the Chinese regime simply strengthened its “Great
Firewall,” removing subversive content from the Internet in mainland
China almost instantaneously. And even if censorship fails and dissent
escalates, digital autocracies have an added line of defense: they can
block all citizens’ access to the Internet (or large parts of it) to
prevent members of the opposition from communicating, organizing, or
broadcasting their messages. In Iran, for example, the government
successfully shut down the Internet across the country amid widespread
protests last November.
Although China is the leading player in digital repression, autocracies
of all stripes are looking to follow suit. The Russian government, for
example, is taking steps to rein in its citizens’ relative freedom
online by incorporating elements of China’s Great Firewall [11],
allowing the Kremlin to cut off the country’s Internet from the rest of
the world. Likewise, Freedom House reported in 2018 that several
countries were seeking to emulate the Chinese model of extensive
censorship and automated surveillance, and numerous officials from
autocracies across Africa have gone to China to participate in
“cyberspace management” training sessions, where they learn Chinese
methods of control.
THE VELVET GLOVE
Today’s technologies not only make it easier for governments to repress
critics; they also make it easy to co-opt them. Tech-powered integration
between government agencies allows the Chinese regime to more precisely
control access to government services, so that it can calibrate the
distribution—or denial—of everything from bus passes and passports to
jobs and access to education. The nascent social credit system in China
has the effect of punishing individuals critical of the regime and
rewarding loyalty. Citizens with good social credit scores benefit from
a range of perks, including expedited overseas travel applications,
discounted energy bills, and less frequent audits. In this way, new
technologies help authoritarian regimes fine-tune their use of reward
and refusal, blurring the line between co-option and coercive control.
Dictatorships can also use new technologies to shape public perception
of the regime and its legitimacy. Automated accounts (or “bots”) on
social media can amplify influence campaigns and produce a flurry of
distracting or misleading posts that crowd out opponents’ messaging.
This is an area in which Russia has played a leading role. The Kremlin
floods the Internet [12] with pro-regime stories, distracting online
users from negative news, and creates confusion and uncertainty through
the spread of alternative narratives.
Maturing technologies such as so-called microtargeting and
deepfakes—digital forgeries impossible to distinguish from authentic
audio, video, or images—are likely to further boost the capacity of
authoritarian regimes to manipulate their citizens’ perceptions.
Microtargeting will eventually allow autocracies to tailor content for
specific individuals or segments of society, just as the commercial
world uses demographic and behavioral characteristics to customize
advertisements. AI-powered algorithms will allow autocracies to
microtarget individuals with information that either reinforces their
support for the regime or seeks to counteract specific sources of
discontent. Likewise, the production of deepfakes will make it easier to
discredit opposition leaders and will make it increasingly difficult for
the public to know what is real, sowing doubt, confusion, and apathy.
Digital tools might even help regimes make themselves appear less
repressive and more responsive to their citizens. In some cases,
authoritarian regimes have deployed new technologies to mimic components
of democracy, such as participation and deliberation. Some local Chinese
officials [13], for example, are using the Internet and social media to
allow citizens to voice their opinions in online polls or through other
digitally based participatory channels. A 2014 study [14] by the
political scientist Rory Truex suggested that such online participation
enhanced public perception of the CCP among less educated citizens.
Consultative sites, such as the regime’s “You Propose My Opinion”
portal, make citizens feel that their voices matter without the regime
having to actually pursue genuine reform. By emulating elements of
democracy, dictatorships can improve their attractiveness to citizens
and deflate the bottom-up pressure for change.
DURABLE DIGITAL AUTOCRACIES As
autocracies have learned to co-opt new technologies, they have become a
more formidable threat to democracy. In particular, today’s
dictatorships have grown more durable. Between 1946 and 2000—the year
digital tools began to proliferate—the typical dictatorship ruled for
around ten years. Since 2000, this number has more than doubled, to
nearly 25 years. Not
only has the rising tide of technology seemingly benefited all
dictatorships, but our own empirical analysis shows that those
authoritarian regimes that rely more heavily on digital repression are
among the most durable. Between 2000 and 2017, 37 of the 91
dictatorships that had lasted more than a year collapsed; those regimes
that avoided collapse had significantly higher levels of digital
repression, on average, than those that fell. Rather than succumb to
what appeared to be a devastating challenge to their power—the emergence
and spread of new technologies—many dictatorships leverage those tools
in ways that bolster their rule.
Although autocracies have long relied on various degrees of repression
to support their objectives, the ease with which today’s authoritarian
regimes can acquire this repressive capacity marks a significant
departure from the police states of the past. Building the effectiveness
and pervasiveness of the East German Stasi, for example, was not
something that could be achieved overnight. The regime had to cultivate
the loyalty of thousands of cadres, training them and preparing them to
engage in on-the-ground surveillance. Most dictatorships simply do not
have the ability to create such a vast operation. There was, according
to some accounts, one East German spy for every 66 citizens. The
proportion in most contemporary dictatorships (for which there are data)
pales in comparison. It is true that in North Korea, which ranks as
possibly the most intense police state in power today, the ratio of
internal security personnel and informants to citizens [15] is 1 to
40—but it was 1 to 5,090 in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and 1 to 10,000 in
Chad under Hissène Habré. In the digital age, however, dictatorships
don’t need to summon immense manpower to effectively surveil and monitor
their citizens.
Instead, aspiring dictatorships can purchase new technologies, train a
small group of officials in how to use them—often with the support of
external actors, such as China—and they are ready to go. For example,
Huawei, a Chinese state-backed telecommunications firm, has deployed its
digital surveillance technology in over a dozen authoritarian regimes.
In 2019, reports surfaced that the Ugandan government was using it to
hack the social media accounts and electronic communications of its
political opponents. The vendors of such technologies don’t always
reside in authoritarian countries. Israeli and Italian firms [16] have
also sold digital surveillance software to the Ugandan regime. Israeli
companies have sold espionage and intelligence-gathering software to a
number of authoritarian regimes across the world, including Angola,
Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. And U.S. firms have
exported facial recognition technology to governments in Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates.
A SLIPPERY SLOPE As
autocracies last longer, the number of such regimes in place at any
point in time is likely to increase, as some countries backslide on
democratic rule. Although the number of autocracies globally has not
risen substantially in recent years, and more people than ever before
live in countries that hold free and fair elections, the tide may be
turning. Data collected by Freedom House [17] show, for example, that
between 2013 and 2018, although there were three countries that
transitioned from “partly free” to “free” status (the Solomon Islands,
Timor-Leste, and Tunisia), there were seven that experienced the
reverse, moving from a status of “free” to one of “partly free” (the
Dominican Republic, Hungary, Indonesia, Lesotho, Montenegro, Serbia, and
Sierra Leone). The
risk that technology will usher in a wave of authoritarianism is all the
more concerning because our own empirical research has indicated that
beyond buttressing autocracies, digital tools are associated with an
increased risk of democratic backsliding in fragile democracies. New
technologies are particularly dangerous for weak democracies because
many of these digital tools are dual use: technology can enhance
government efficiency and provide the capacity to address challenges
such as crime and terrorism, but no matter the intentions with which
governments initially acquire such technology, they can also use these
tools to muzzle and restrict the activities of their opponents.
Pushing back against the spread of digital authoritarianism will require
addressing the detrimental effects of new technologies on governance in
autocracies and democracies alike. As a first step, the United States
should modernize and expand legislation to help ensure that U.S.
entities are not enabling human rights abuses. A December 2019 report by
the Center for a New American Security (where one of us is a senior
fellow) highlights the need for Congress to restrict the export of
hardware that incorporates AI-enabled biometric identification
technologies, such as facial, voice, and gait recognition; impose
further sanctions on businesses and entities that provide surveillance
technology, training, or equipment to authoritarian regimes implicated
in human rights abuses; and consider legislation to prevent U.S.
entities from investing in companies that are building AI tools for
repression, such as the Chinese AI company SenseTime. The
U.S. government should also use the Global Magnitsky Act, which allows
the U.S. Treasury Department to sanction foreign individuals involved in
human rights abuses, to punish foreigners who engage in or facilitate
AI-powered human rights abuses. CCP officials responsible for atrocities
in Xinjiang are clear candidates for such sanctions. U.S.
government agencies and civil society groups should also pursue actions
to mitigate the potentially negative effects of the spread of
surveillance technology, especially in fragile democracies. The focus of
such engagement should be on strengthening the political and legal
frameworks that govern how surveillance technologies are used and
building the capacity of civil society and watchdog organizations to
check government abuse. What
is perhaps most critical, the United States must make sure it leads in
AI and helps shape global norms for its use in ways that are consistent
with democratic values and respect for human rights. This means first
and foremost that Americans must get this right at home, creating a
model that people worldwide will want to emulate. The United States
should also work in conjunction with like-minded democracies to develop
a standard for digital surveillance that strikes the right balance
between security and respect for privacy and human rights. The United
States will also need to work closely with like-minded allies and
partners to set and enforce the rules of the road, including by
restoring U.S. leadership in multilateral institutions such as the
United Nations. AI
and other technological innovations hold great promise for improving
everyday lives, but they have indisputably strengthened the grip of
authoritarian regimes. The intensifying digital repression in countries
such as China offers a bleak vision of ever-expanding state control and
ever-shrinking individual liberty. But
that need not be the only vision. In the near term, rapid technological
change will likely produce a cat-and-mouse dynamic as citizens and
governments race to gain the upper hand. If history is any guide, the
creativity and responsiveness of open societies will in the long term
allow democracies to more effectively navigate this era of technological
transformation. Just as today’s autocracies have evolved to embrace new
tools, so, too, must democracies develop new ideas, new approaches, and
the leadership to ensure that the promise of technology in the
twenty-first century doesn’t become a curse.
Copyright © 2020 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. Source URL:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-02-06/digital-dictators
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https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FIW2014%20Booklet.pdf |