The fight in Serbia over Chinese-style surveillance (Part One)

 

On a quiet summer night in the capital, Belgrade, a young man, Luka Jovanović, was hit by a vehicle while he was pushing a car on the Brankovo Bridge, which connects the city center with New Belgrade across the Sava River.

 

The driver fled the scene. Although the Serbian police reacted quickly, the perpetrator managed to escape from the city and then from the country. After a month of searching, Serbian officials discovered that the driver fled to China via Hong Kong and Turkey.

 

Serbian police passed photos of the suspect to their Chinese counterparts and after just three days, they found and arrested the driver thanks to China's widespread, state-of-the-art surveillance technology, which includes facial recognition software.

 

The swift arrest and sophisticated tools at the disposal of the Chinese police impressed Serbian officials, who relied on older surveillance equipment.

 

It also sparked interest that led the Balkan country to sign a strategic partnership agreement with Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in 2017 to create the "Safe City" project in Belgrade - a concept exported by Beijing and its technology companies, with a focus on automation. and supplementing police work with video cameras and other digital technology to monitor suspicious or criminal behavior.

 

The episode known as the "Kantrimen case" because of the Mini Countryman car that hit and killed Jovanovic, set the stage for a deepening of the political divide over the spread of surveillance technology in Serbia.

 

Today, government attempts to expand the use of biometric surveillance face strong resistance from human rights and privacy activists because of the potential misuse of Chinese mass surveillance equipment by authorities to track and intimidate demonstrators to curb anti-government activity.

 

"The community of non-governmental organizations in Serbia was effective in initiating discussions on this issue and putting pressure on the authorities," Stefan Vladisavljev, expert on China's role in the Balkans and program director of the Belgrade-based BFPE Foundation, told RSE. "However, the government seems intent on finding a way to use all that technology."

 

 

When the Serbian authorities began installing the first of some 8,000 surveillance cameras they purchased in 2019, then-Interior Minister Nebojša Stefanović proudly claimed that every street and building around Trg Republike in downtown Belgrade would be covered with facial recognition surveillance cameras.

"We will know from which street (the suspect) came, from which car and who was previously sitting in that car," he said.

 

His words were quickly noticed by digital rights groups in Serbia, who called out the government and argued that the installation of surveillance cameras - and the use of facial recognition software - has no legal basis under Serbian law and does not comply with the data protection law, which Serbia is seeking to enforce. harmonize with the European Union.

 

Brussels has strict data protection rules and the use of facial recognition technology is strictly limited, with an outright ban being discussed, although there are currently exemptions for law enforcement within the EU.

 

Resistance within Serbia has so far managed to prevent the project from being fully implemented. Pressure from civil society led to the government asking the Ministry of the Interior to develop a legal framework for the use of the technology. Although thousands of cameras have already been installed, the facial recognition function on the cameras has not been activated.

 

"From the beginning, the government was quite clumsy with these efforts," Andrej Petrovski, technical director of the SHARE Foundation, a Belgrade-based human rights organization that is at the forefront of efforts to stop the introduction of facial recognition technology in Serbia, told RFE/RL. "First they bought the equipment and then tried to legalize it. That's a big problem, and in any functioning democracy that would be a major issue in itself."

 

Tensions have risen as the Home Office has tried to develop legislation on biometric surveillance, including in 2021 when it sought to introduce the legal basis for its use in a proposed new police law.

 

The draft law would have given Serbian authorities broad powers for mass surveillance and failed to acknowledge data and privacy concerns raised by activists. Faced with growing domestic and international controversy, the government withdrew the bill, but many experts expect a new legal attempt in the near future.

 

"The fact is that Serbia does not have a legal mechanism to use this technology, while protecting people's rights and controlling the data that is collected," said Vladisavljev.

 

Few details are known about how Serbia's agreement with China on the Safe City will be implemented and how much it will cost taxpayers. Journalists and civil society groups sought information on camera locations and public procurement, but the Interior Ministry said all documents were confidential due to national security concerns.

 

The Interior Ministry did not respond to RSE's request for comment on the use of Chinese surveillance technology, the Safe City project, or the development of a legal framework for the issue. The ministry previously announced that the technology is necessary to track criminals and terrorists.

Petrovski and his colleagues at the SHARE Foundation argue that facial recognition software seriously infringes on basic civil rights and liberties, and have quickly grown frustrated with what they say is a lack of government transparency about how the technology will be deployed and used.

 

While more and more Chinese-made surveillance cameras were installed during the pandemic, the organization launched a project to mass-collect photos of the newly installed ones, asking residents to put images of the cameras with their coordinates into the database. According to Petrovski, the project has so far mapped around 2,000 cameras throughout Serbia, most of which are in Belgrade.

A central concern expressed by the SHARE Foundation and other organizations is the lack of safeguards for the use of facial recognition and what they say is a haphazard and sometimes clumsy approach to implementing the technology.

 

Five months before Stefanović spoke about the use of cameras in Trg Republike, Huawei published a case study on its website in which it states that its project team has already started the first phase of the Safe City project and installed more than 100 cameras and video management systems on 60 locations in Belgrade.

 

An incident similar to the "Kantrimen" case was also described as an example of what the company hoped to implement in Serbia. After the SHARE Foundation and other activists pointed out the case study, it was removed from Huawei's website.

 

"The fact that the article was removed from Huawei's site means that it was a matter of great political concern for our government," Petrovski said. "When they planned this, they obviously didn't expect any friction in society."

On the other side of the initiation of the legal framework for the use of facial recognition technology is Milan Marinović, Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Protection of Personal Data.

 

In the role of a civil servant independent of the MUP, Marinović is the main authority for the drafting of the law on the method of collecting biometric data through facial recognition technology and mass surveillance in Serbia.

 

His office proved to be an obstacle to the Ministry's attempts to pass the law, and Marinović criticized attempts to include biometric surveillance in the 2021 draft law, which was later withdrawn.

 

"You have a police database of missing persons and criminals, but you also have another database of ordinary people that exists through their identity cards, passports and other documents," Marinović told RSE. "Our main task is to separate the two databases and ensure that the database of ordinary citizens is strictly guarded and access to it is restricted."

So far, the Ministry has not been able to fulfill these requirements in what it presented to Marinović's cabinet, and he says that he will not sign any law until something is established that properly protects this data.

 

Faced with protests following the 2021 draft law, the Interior Ministry has also begun consulting with outside experts and has repeatedly convened an informal working group on how to design a legal framework that can address the concerns of law enforcement and human rights activists. These groups included Marinović's cabinet and the SHARE foundation.

 

"We had informal consultations with the government, but we still believe that the issue of abuse is just something that cannot be prevented," said Petrovski. "We have a history not only of the abuse of power in this country, but also of the lack of accountability for those abuses."

 

Despite the concerns caused by the work of the Ministry of the Interior and the lack of transparency, as well as the use of facial recognition technology in general, regardless of its origin, some experts have warned that Chinese technology also comes with additional risks.

 

Chinese suppliers and the government have had little trouble with which governments they sell to and how their technology will be used. Companies like Huawei argue that the responsibility lies with the end user.

 

Thirty-six countries that are part of the Belt and Road Initiative have artificial intelligence technology that can monitor citizens.

 

There are also concerns that Chinese suppliers, which have close ties to the government, could allow Chinese state security to access sensitive data. Several Western governments have warned against this in recent years, while there is a growing list of examples of Chinese companies in dozens of countries being involved in espionage and data breaches.

 

In addition, several Chinese firms have been blacklisted by the US for developing technology such as facial recognition software to identify Uyghurs, which has aided Beijing in its massive repression and rights abuses in Xinjiang.

 

"Chinese companies are not unique in that they provide facial recognition software or other surveillance technology, but they are problematic in that they were created to meet the demand in the Chinese domestic security market," Dalija Peterson (Dahlia), a research analyst at RSE, told RFE/RL. Center for Security and Emerging Technology at the American Georgetown University.

 

"It's a very different environment and that means their technology has been developed to be used for what other companies would consider unethical or even illegal."

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić maintains close relations with Beijing that show no sign of slowing, but there are some signals that Belgrade is looking for potential alternatives to relying on Chinese technology for surveillance in the country.

 

In September 2020, Vučić and Kosovo Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti (Avdullah) met at the White House to sign an agreement with US President Donald Trump (Trump). The agreement set a number of economic and political provisions, among which is the obligation to refrain from installing 5G infrastructure from so-called "unreliable suppliers". Although no company has been named, it is believed to be a reference to Huawei.

 

Questions remain about how binding the deal is, but Belgrade has meanwhile postponed the tender for the Chinese company's 5G infrastructure.

 

The Balkan Research Network (BIRN) reported in April that the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs is trying to arrange the purchase of facial recognition software from the Swedish company Griffeye.

 

The report, which lists the terms of the Ministry of Procurement, did not confirm the sale, but noted that the Serbian government is considering other software suppliers for its Safe City project. Grifaj's software is used by Europol, the EU's law enforcement agency, and experts say it could theoretically be compatible with Huawei's hardware.

 

Regardless of the type of software used, Marinović says that until an appropriate legal framework is established, the use of facial recognition technology in Serbia will be illegal.

 

In the meantime, the SHARE Foundation continues its efforts to get more details from the government on how the technology will be used and is campaigning to put the issue of mass surveillance higher on the political agenda.

 

Petrovski said that he believes that the authorities in Serbia will continue to work on drafting a law that gives them as much freedom as possible and that they intend to implement facial recognition technology in the country.

 

"There's no question that they want to use it and they won't stop while they can," he said. "We won't stop either. So this is going to go on for a while."