Foreign affairs 2019 09-10

The Internet Freedom League

September/October 2019 187

Although that is a worthy goal, it ignores the reality that in many

countries where citizens do not enjoy those rights o    ine, much less

online, the Internet is less a safe haven than a tool o repression. Re-

gimes in China and elsewhere employ articial intelligence to help

them better surveil their people and have learned to connect security

cameras, nancial records, and transport systems to build massive

databases o information about the activities o individual citizens.

China’s two-million-strong army o Internet censors is being trained

to collect data to feed into a planned “social credit” scoring system

that will rank every resident o China and dole out rewards and pun-

ishments for actions committed both online and o    ine. The so-

called Great Firewall o China, which prohibits people in the country

from accessing material online that the Chinese Communist Party

deems unacceptable, has become a model for other authoritarian

regimes. According to Freedom House, Chinese o†cials have held

Logged out: a woman at an Internet café in Beijing, July 2011

IM CHI

YIN

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NEW

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