They nailed the bumbling Russian assassins who tried to murder Sergei Skripal, a retired MI6 spy, in Salisbury in 2018.īut our watch-keepers do this only against specific targets, instructed by elected politicians, with permission from judges and under parliamentary scrutiny. They will have used them to track down terror suspect Daniel Khalife after he absconded from Wandsworth prison. Our security services have these tools, too. Visit a church or a mosque, talk to a foreigner, browse the wrong bits of the internet: nothing is secret or private. ![]() Who is meeting whom, when and where? Anonymous behaviour becomes impossible. It also enables the snoopers to spot patterns of behaviour. What is he trying to hide? Pull him in for questioning. Search a crowd for the one person who does not have a phone and who pays cash. It analyses the data and quickly highlights oddities. The result was muddle and error, and an unforeseen political explosion that led to the downfall of the totalitarian regime.ĪI changes that. The system produced too many tapes, too many photos, too many reports from informers. But without modern technology, they drowned in it - as I witnessed as a foreign correspondent in the 1980s, covering countries such as the old East Germany, where the Stasi secret police had spies everywhere. True, dictatorships have collected data for decades. Mobile phones track our movements and our communications electronic records show our spending. CCTV cameras capture biometric data such as faces, height, gait and body shape. ![]() Nowadays, every part of modern life leaves a digital trace which can feed the remorseless maw of the snoopers' computers. He lived in fear of 'telescreens', which recorded every sound and movement in every home and workplace.Ĭhina is set to be invited to the showcase international summit on AI in November This cowardly and short-sighted attempt to ingratiate ourselves with Beijing is a mis-step worthy of the so-called 'Golden Age' pioneered by David Cameron and George Osborne, a decade ago, in which this country disastrously kowtowed before the Communist Party dictatorship.įor in truth, the scale of the threat from China easily echoes the plight of Orwell's hero Winston Smith. Yet far from girding our defences, our Government is proposing to hobnob with those who are trying to breach them.Ĭhina is set to be invited to the showcase international summit on AI in November. In his depiction of a dystopian totalitarian Britain of '1984', the greatest writer of the last century explained how total information in the hands of our masters breeds total control.Ĭhina's use of AI has turned Orwell's fictional nightmare into reality. It is a fair bet that George Orwell's 1984 is not on the agenda for November's Artificial Intelligence Summit at Bletchley Park, hosted by our Government.
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