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China Uses High-Tech Surveillance to Subdue Minorities

• idlewords 7y ago
  This apparatus of surveillance is functionally identical to what has been commercially deployed in the U.S., except that we are considerably ahead of China in areas like in-car monitoring and always-on home microphones.
• OrgNet 7y ago
  Im happy to not be a minority... even in the USA.
  • Grazester 7y ago
    ...Until the minority becomes the majority. Hopefully when that happens everyone gets along. Maybe when we're all one mixed up race :)
    • tide_ad 7y ago
      > ...Until the minority becomes the majority. Not exclusively There are typically minority and majority powers which have to be recognized. This typically is correlated with the prevalence of a particular ethnic group acting in its own interests by numerical representation, but it does not always exist this way. In some places it is easy to see how current minority groups becoming majority groups would still not inherit power accumulated via generational wealth, or would not have a realistic means of gaining consensus on changing socioeconomic circumstances in their favor. A more collaborative approach to different groups in a system would be necessary, instead of fearing demographic changes.
• drak0n1c 7y ago
  It's not just for home use. China is also exporting their surveillance and social credit technology to Venezuela, Cuba, NK, and even Australia. Those white crowd control vehicles used by Maduro forces to run over dozens of protestors a few weeks ago? Another tailor-made export. https://nypost.com/2019/05/18/chinas-new-social-credit-system-turns-orwells-1984-into-reality/ https://nypost.com/2019/05/18/chinas-new-social-credit-syste...
  • flattone 7y ago
    nypost?
  • orhmeh09 7y ago
    Could you provide a source for your final two statements? The page that you have linked doesn’t make the same claim.
    • drak0n1c 7y ago
      1) Crowd control exports: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics/venezuelan-official-says-chinese-riot-control-gear-averts-casualties-idUSKBN1990YR https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics/venezu... https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA07/20170913/106398/HHRG-115-FA07-Wstate-EllisR-20170913.pdf https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA07/20170913/106398/HHRG... 2) Running over of protestors (NSFW): https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/venezuela/article229853509.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-base-vehicle/venezuela-national-guard-vehicle-runs-over-protesters-in-caracas-reuters-tv-idUSKCN1S61ZB https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-base-v...
      • chrischen 7y ago
        China also makes NYPD uniforms.
  • yorwba 7y ago
    That article was discussed 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19958313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19958313 It's barely more than a thinly-veiled book ad, though. If you want to learn more about the topic, you're probably better off reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
  • stcredzero 7y ago
    It's not just for home use. China is also exporting their surveillance and social credit technology to Venezuela, Cuba, NK, and even Australia. On the home front, we have AI recognizers and pattern matching being applied to YouTube videos and comments to prohibit certain words or certain messages because they're "wrongthink." We also let political opponents/activists report on certain words, certain messages, and the use of certain kinds of language. How is that any different from what China is doing, in principle? It's not. It just covers a smaller fraction of the population and culture, for now. Granted, some of the people targeted by these activities are unpleasant and bad people. Not all of them are, however. The organizations and people who do this targeting (through AI recognizers and pattern matching and through taking reports from social media) are problematic for the US in that, 1) no one elected them to do this, 2) the people who control the mechanisms and rules overwhelmingly belong to one political party, and 3) for all that there is little concern demonstrated by those who have the power, over how such power can be abused. Yet, it's already openly acknowledged that the use of and control over such media does have significant political ramifications. Many in China recognize that the power over social media is one-sided, but they don't mind because they consider Uyghur terrorist organizations and people like Falun Gong to be shady troublemakers at best or evil at worst. We in the US and the rest of the west recognize that such unchecked power results in abuses. It's easier to criticize the flaws and quirks of another society, but much harder to recognize when the same exists in our own.
• baybal2 7y ago
  > “The digitalization of police work has achieved leap-like growth in Xinjiang,” Zhang Ping, a counterterrorism officer from Jiujiang, a city in southeastern China Sounds ironic. Xinjiang is now the only province in China to register a recession after eighties
  • bitL 7y ago
    It's like applying recent patches to Intel CPUs - your CPU is now slower, but safer ;-)
  • yimoburu 7y ago
    "Xinjiang is now the only province in China to register a recession after eighties" Where is the source?
    • yorwba 7y ago
      I'd be interested in that, too. I was under the impression that even the central government can't get reliable economic data on its provinces, because the numbers are fudged at every level, so they have to estimate them indirectly e.g. using electricity consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Keqiang_index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Keqiang_index
• quotz 7y ago
  In other news, water is wet.
• haunter 7y ago
  Why is this topic so popular on HN? I'm just curious because there are so many social problems and actual politics news in the world but somehow this is always up here.
  • sergiomattei 7y ago
    Well, we're a crowd of mostly technology enthusiasts, developers, and scientists. This is very related to the topic of HN - we're witnessing the (worry-inducing) birth of an oppressive technology-fueled dystopian society.
    • slg 7y ago
      But it is strange that there is a lot of discussion about the slippery slope of what happens when this tech falls into the wrong hands. Meanwhile there is relatively little discussion about things that get us closer to the government actually being the "wrong hands".
      • stcredzero 7y ago
        But it is strange that there is a lot of discussion about the slippery slope of what happens when this tech falls into the wrong hands. Not strange at all. One can already see a lot of abuses of such technological power in the US through the exploitation of political affiliations or connections. We've already slipped down the slope, and we've already seen the fingerprints of those hands. Meanwhile there is relatively little discussion about things that get us closer to the government actually being the "wrong hands". The government has checks and balances. Though those are imperfect, they can be used as tools to check the overstepping of power. There are also laws against the government censoring speech. The popular refrain among technologists is that it only pertains to Free Speech if the government is doing it, and it's just private businesses doing their justified activities when tech giants do it. What's wrong in principle is still wrong, even if laws and societal wisdom are lagging technology. Large swathes of the populace feel their voice is being stifled against their wishes, and many can't even spend their money to support who they wish to without overcoming barriers put in place by powerful corporate actors. That's not people losing/winning in a free marketplace of ideas. That's willful manipulation of the free marketplace of ideas.
• bitL 7y ago
  Most Deep Learning papers related to tracking human pose, identifying abnormal behavior, detecting crime from video feeds etc. have Chinese authors. Literally bleeding-edge stuff used to subdue people. Can't wait to see some western politicians to hop on the same train once this tech is cheap after China beta-tests it and irons out all the quirks.
  • dheera 7y ago
    There are also plenty of less dystopian uses for pose tracking, including games, cashless convenience stores, VR/AR applications, and driverless cars predicting pedestrian behavior.
    • bitL 7y ago
      There are. I am using them myself which is why I had to read many recent papers about them. Though if you look specifically at activity detection, identifying abnormal movements associated with crime or social disturbance, Chinese authors dominate there. They probably receive many grants from their government on these specific topics.
    • mschuster91 7y ago
      The key is that said "less dystopian" uses commoditize the technology that the governments can use to spy on its citizens without even spending any major amount of r&d investment. Hell, Alexa in a TV and you have a 1984 system - willingly installed by consumers, no less. A 1984 system that for all intents and purposes can be converted into a surveillance system per secret court order. The recent crackdowns on TOR darknet services are also frightening. While I'm not shedding tears for child porn distributors, the inevitable message that comes across with the monthly takedown press releases is "we can even get those with the best experience in using cryptography and hiding tools, how do you expect to organize resistance in case government goes the China way?" Maybe parts of the US could provide resistance given that many people have enough private firearms to make sure any kind of government intrusion will result in unbelievable bloodshed, but disarmed populations like many European countries? They will have no way to voice any opposing thought anymore. We already see this in Hungary where Orban's friends have all but eliminated free independent press or in Turkey where tens of thousands get arrested for "terrorism" charges.
• femiagbabiaka 7y ago
  There is nothing in this article that the U.S. hasn't been doing via technology exported out of the Acela corridor _forever_. Both are bad, but it will likely take China another 50 years to match what our MIC has done. Just this morning I was reading about how the notorious Azov Battalion of Ukraine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Battalion) got much of its military training and weapons from the U.S. amongst others.
• contingencies 7y ago
  Subdue? Not sure of that. But this is ironic on a number of levels. First, China's crackdown on Xinjiang followed a prolonged (multi-decade) period of low intensity guerilla resistance to their occupation that essentially garnered no international reporting. Second, everywhere else in China has suffered deep and substantial cultural losses in the rush through socialism to modernity as well, with religion, festivals and local languages and dialects front and center. Third, China only really stepped up its efforts in Xinjiang right after the US made "terrorism/national security" the catch-all political excuse de riguer in the noughties, post 911. Fourth, the Islamic presence in Xinjiang literally corresponds to a complete cultural genocide against a range of multicultural (but predominantly Buddhist) kingdoms so effective that we are still piecing together how to read their (significant) literature today. Fifth, a $290M CCTV contract is nothing versus daily US military-industrial spending. Sixth, modern China's main push against peoples in this region began as early as the 1940s based on a joint China-Russia opposition to nomadic tribes in the region, documented in the book Kazak Exodus. http://pratyeka.org/books/kazak-exodus/ http://pratyeka.org/books/kazak-exodus/
• mzs 7y ago
  journalist's thread: >Three years ago China’s leading maker of military electronics, CETC, came to Xinjiang with a vision: bring the tech of battlefield management to control and surveil all aspects of the lives of Uighurs. This is our attempt to walk through how it works. … >That shows how important the power of the Chinese state is in creating such a totalizing surveillance system. But it also shows how powerful readily available commercial technology has become and how easily it can be made into the basic ingredients of a police state. https://twitter.com/paulmozur/status/1131360852429266945 https://twitter.com/paulmozur/status/1131360852429266945