Welcome back to 10 blogs. This is Teddy Kupfer, an associate editor of City Journal. And I'm joined on the show today by

Corbyn K. Bartold. Corbin is the Internet Policy Council and Director of Appellate Litigation for

Tech Freedom. He's written a number of pieces for CJ about the state of the tech industry,

about civil liberties in a digital world. We're going to talk about those topics and his writing on them today. So

thank you very much for joining Corbyn. Great to be here, Teddy. Thanks for having me. Let's start

with your article in our autumn print issue, which we ran online recently, the Chinese social

credit system and whether something like it can happen in the United States.

You know, in China, there is this apparatus constructed by the state, the notion being to

reward good citizenship, to punish bad citizenship, people's behavior is tracked. The system is still,

I would say, in a developmental phase, but those who follow the rules receive rewards. You know,

you get a better ticket on a train. Your dating app profile receives some benefits. You can get cheaper hotel rooms, but if you do the wrong things,

if you behave badly, you will suffer. Can something like this happen in the United States?

That's the question you ask. What is the answer? The answer is a qualified no, or at least I'm not too worried yet.

Now, as a matter of just preliminary brush clearing, it's probably a good idea to separate out in terms of the situation in China, the apparatus for surveillance and social control in general versus an actual social credit system.

And the surveillance and control is quite far along, and maybe we can circle back to that.

The social credit score aspect is very haphazard at this point.

It's still sort of in an experimental stage where local

governments are encouraged to tinker with it. Some areas have it pretty extensively, some areas

barely at all. So will that become a national system where you sign in or there is just a score that exists,

that is your national score?

I don't know.

That could actually be quite far off.

...