China’s expansion into Brazilian digital surveillance markets

Abstract

A number of countries in the Global South have adopted anti-China rhetoric in recent years. Here, we seek to assess the relation of such rhetoric to procurement of Chinese digital systems. We use the example of Brazil during the Bolsonaro government, examining whether Bolsonaro’s anti-China stance impacted procurement of Chinese surveillance technologies by sub-national (state/city) governments, which are the main bodies responsible for public security. We find that there has been broad and sustained procurement of Chinese surveillance technologies across the political spectrum; both among local governments politically allied to Bolsonaro and those from the opposition. Combined with acquisition at federal level, this suggests anti-China rhetoric does not feed through into procurement realities. Nor can China be singularly associated with diffusion of surveillance technologies as Western democracies have also been suppliers.

Keywords:

• Brazil
• chinese surveillance technologies
• digital authoritarianism
• digital surveillance
• facial recognition
• local governmental procurement

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of a series from the project, “China’s Digital Expansion in the Global South,” funded by the Faculty of Humanities, University of Manchester, UK. Richard Heeks and Seth Schindler of the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, were the facilitating editors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We thank Carlos Aguiar de Medeiros for his contribution in bringing forward these arguments.

2 “China’s digital efforts erode democratic values and enable the rise of digital authoritarianism around the world. At best, China is selling digital technology that has remarkable capacity for surveillance and control to authoritarian or authoritarian-leaning countries with no second thought for the consequences. At worst, China is pairing its economic investment with aggressive outreach and training on internet governance and domestic regulations to further inculcate authoritarian values and methods of social control.” (Minority Staff, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 2020, 26).

3 If any discussion on digital authoritarianism and the threat of Chinese technologies is to be taken seriously, then one should set the record straight regarding the threats posed by the competing technologies available in the market, for it has been demonstrated that importing US technology has meant mass surveillance and use of personal data by the US government. Snowden revealed that the US international surveillance system, in cooperation with the other Five Eyes members (intelligence agencies of Australia, the UK, New Zealand, and Canada), operated in all the distinct layers of the telecommunication system: from the physical layer, with submarine fibre optic cable taps through collaboration with “intercept partners” (MacAskill et al. 2013), i.e. commercial cable operators such as British BT and Vodafone Cable, and American Verizon Business (Ball, Harding, and Garside 2013); passing through cooperation with telecom operators such as AT&T to couple surveillance equipment to the operator’s routers and switches and redirect data to the National Security Agency (Gallagher and Moltke 2016); up to the application layer, in partnership with internet service providers such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype, Microsoft, Apple, YouTube, AOL and Paltalk, in Prism’s framework (NSA 2013).

4 Includes the left and the center-left.

5 Although not necessarily under the same rubric, the relative positioning of the parties presented above is consistent with the new ideological classification of Brazilian political parties presented by Bolognesi, Ribeiro, and Codato (2021).

6 This classification is not strictly rigid and was guided by the position of the states’ and cities’ governing parties relative to Bolsonaro, even though, in some cases, one might find some statements from the local government chief executive in disagreement with the general line adopted by his/her party. Such are the cases of Campinas and Foz do Iguaçu over the latter years of Bolsonaro’s time in office, when the mayors appeared to be more aligned with Bolsonaro and/or his political allies.

7 “Morpho Safran, now called IDEMIA … is a French multinational company dedicated to technology development, mainly focused on the sale of facial recognition products. The company has been criticized by Amnesty International for exporting digital surveillance technology to China, due to the human rights risk involved. IDEMIA was blamed for problems with the general election in Kenya in 2017, which resulted in the National Assembly cancelling its existing contracts and banning it from entering into new ones. The decision was repealed by the country’s Supreme Court” (Venturini and Garay 2021, 12).

8 According to Zanatta (cited in Tagiaroli 2021), this system may be used for political persecution, though it would be illicit were it to be used by intelligence agencies and its use not to remain strictly confined to specific investigations for which the data is gathered. Zanatta’s worries are plausible, especially after it came to light that an intelligence agency under Bolsonaro started to put together dossiers of antifascist public servants, particularly in public security and universities, and the government contracted an enterprise to monitor journalists according to their published standpoints vis-à-vis the government (Valente 2020a, 2020b).

9 Though we do acknowledge the argument that surveillance systems can introduce authoritarian tendencies into even democratic regimes (Hintz and Milan 2018).

10 In June 2022, a multiparty movement named “sai da minha cara” (“get out of my face”) was formed by parliamentarians acting in state and municipal legislatures in 13 different states, seeking to present legal proposals to ban the use of facial recognition in public spaces (Nakagawa 2022).