CHAPTER 7
The strongest objection to FMPS is this: "Rules can be changed, but the infrastructure remains." If an authoritarian government came to power in the future, could it not rewrite the rules and use the streetlight network to repress citizens?
Scattered surveillance is hard to seize all at once; an integrated network is easier to seize. This concern is well founded. Anyone promoting FMPS has a responsibility to answer it.
Our answer is to protect by structure, not only by rules — so that even if the rules are rewritten, misuse remains technically difficult and impossible to hide.
FMPS units are designed not to stream footage. If communication bandwidth is kept small and the amount retrievable at one time is capped, then even if the rules were rewritten, it would be physically impossible to pull in the whole town's footage at once. Mass surveillance would require replacing the units — major work that cannot be hidden.
Managing encryption keys municipality by municipality, rather than centrally for the whole country, makes a seizure from the centre difficult. The Recorder and audit functions could also be distributed among several independent bodies outside government.
Changes to the rules are also recorded in tamper-evident form by VRAIO and published. Rules can still be changed through democratic procedures, but they cannot be changed secretly.
The system can be shut down under conditions set in advance. Shutdown criteria are established from the pilot stage onwards.
The danger of misuse is not abstract. On the field-trial system in Kiryu City, a misuse scenario was deliberately reproduced: a city-hall employee takes an interest in a woman he saw at city hall and follows her, switching cameras, from the car park to her home.
Even at a trial site with only eight cameras, her destination can be traced; with cameras at the same density across the city, she could be followed anywhere. On the other hand, the employee's viewing request, and the cameras and times he viewed, are all made public by the recording server. Any use for a purpose other than the stated reason will be found.
Demo 3: Stalking by a city-hall employee (PDF)
What FMPS + VRAIO aims for is to realise this "cannot be hidden" state at the scale of a whole town, as an institution that includes the Recorder, audits and sanctions.
No mechanism offers a complete guarantee. But the right comparison is not between FMPS + VRAIO and "a society without surveillance"; it is between FMPS + VRAIO and "the status quo, in which ungoverned surveillance keeps spreading" (Chapter 3). Which is more resistant to misuse: private records accumulating unverified by anyone, or an infrastructure in which every retrieval is recorded and structural safeguards are built in?
|
The content of this chapter is still being worked out as research. Within the JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Research (Exploratory) 26K21972, "Reconstructing Ethical Principles and Developing Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Defending Democracy in the AGI Era", we are examining the conditions under which VRAIO can be a tool that protects democracy and, at the same time, a tool that is hard to misuse when democracy itself is shaken. |
← Previous: 6. VRAIO: Governing Outputs | Next: 8. Uses and Phased Introduction →
FMPS + VRAIO: Public-safety infrastructure built on streetlights, and the governance of AI outputs | Yusaku Fujii (Gunma University) and NPO e-JIKEI Network Promotion Institute
This site presents a research-stage concept; all figures are estimates.