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Blanked-out spots on China's maps helped us uncover Xinjiang's camps
- rjsw 6y agoThere are blank spots on western maps too, I can think of at least one [1] that isn't in Google maps. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviano_Air_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviano_Air_Base
- t3rabytes 6y agoNot true -- https://www.google.com/maps/place/Aviano+Air+Base/@46.0333642,12.5899364,6763m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x47797a73c3f500fd:0x696a4ad38bdf15ea!8m2!3d46.0255886!4d12.6122712 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Aviano+Air+Base/@46.033364...
- the_gipsy 6y agoTry this one, I just noticed it while on vacation nearby: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ccm3ZcQ771mb6Jtj8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/ccm3ZcQ771mb6Jtj8 Edit sorry I can't link to satellite view from mobile. It's the Mola Fortress on Menorca.
- enriquto 6y agoIn France, many military and nuclear facilities are also smoothed out in google maps. It seems a bit ridiculous since you can easily see public (free and paid) satellite images of the same places.
- speps 6y agoFrenchelon example: Blurred: https://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=44.786389~1.238056&style=h&lvl=15&sp=Point.44.786389_1.238056_Frenchelon___ https://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=44.786389~1.238056&style=h... Revealed: http://osmz.ru/imagery/#18/44.78662/1.23807/mp http://osmz.ru/imagery/#18/44.78662/1.23807/mp
- suprfsat 6y agoThe Maxar/DigitalGlobe imagery is sharp: http://osmz.ru/imagery/#16/39.8754/4.3182/mp http://osmz.ru/imagery/#16/39.8754/4.3182/mp
- stordoff 6y agoIf you look at the historical imagery in Google Earth, it'll show your the 2015 imagery fine: https://i.imgur.com/Jk8Kn1r.png https://i.imgur.com/Jk8Kn1r.png It's noticeably lower resolution than the surrounding 2017 imagery, but it doesn't appear to be censored in the same way (it's of the same quality as the surrounding areas when imaged in 2015). It does the same for what appears to be a large circular antenna installation just to the west of here.
- rjsw 6y agoOk, it has changed, it was just a blank space when I was driving around there in 2016.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stordoff 6y agoWikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_with_missing_or_unclear_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w...
- gruez 6y agoSo? The issue isn't satellite/aerial imagery being censored, it's that it's being censored to cover up unsavory things. The equivalent in the US would be ICE/CBP detention camps being covered up on maps, but it doesn't look like that's happening: https://www.ice.gov/detention-facilities https://www.ice.gov/detention-facilities
- newacct583 6y agoDuring the months in 2018 where Child Separation was official US policy, there were absolutely attempts made by the government to prevent reporting on the known facilities, discovery of which facilities held separated children, or even reporting on accounting data of how many children were being held. It's true that this sort of thing works poorly in the US (e.g. eventually someone on the cleaning staff gets upset and calls a journalist). But the impetus was absolutely identical. The US government tries to hide its crimes too, basically. We're just bad at it. (And Child Separation proved a PR disaster, and officially ended even though lots of those kids will probably never see their parents again).
- uptown 6y agoYou'd think going forward they'll fill in these blank voids with land that works with the surrounding landscape in order to mask these gaps.
- ryaan_anthony 6y agoOr maybe they could not commit genocide?
- tobyhinloopen 6y agoHey hey now maybe they’re just schools where they sing happily and build sand castles
- selimthegrim 6y agoWhich just happen to be their permanent addresses (pace Dick Gregory)
- gruez 6y agoOr use a neural network to do it, like thisbuildingdoesnotexist
- netsharc 6y agoThey could put cartoon images of "land", like this TV show's overlay on top of a lady wearing Muslim dress: https://youtu.be/17oCQakzIl8?t=270 https://youtu.be/17oCQakzIl8?t=270 Interesting how the IMO Chinese "Eh, imma just half-ass it!" mentality (hopefully having visited the country and experienced half-assery, I'm allowed to comment) basically lead to this research work.
- jandrese 6y agoThe scale was definitely a problem. The article talked about how they had millions of blanked out areas, anything of even the most minor strategic importance was blanked out. It might even be an attempt to stymie this kind of investigation by making the data too noisy. They definitely screwed up when they made the censoring so easy to spot.
- Razengan 6y agoSpeaking of maps, I've always wondered what's in that huge, mostly-unlabeled region that is more than half of Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Russia It looks like it could comfortably fit a few countries and then some. Even when watching history documentaries there's a period where Russia is basically a thin strip at the western edge of its current territory, before suddenly and inexplicably blowing up to engulf almost half of Asia.
- FranOntanaya 6y agoHorseflies.
- 082349872349872 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik1Y88n1Uog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik1Y88n1Uog [1] does give the impression of the sort of place where one wishes to avoid the snowmelt line in spring. And that's down in the populated region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Highway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Highway says it was first fully paved in 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfbbd-8hbWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfbbd-8hbWM Also in the populated part, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family detached from their society and went foraging in the wild, but lost most of their tech tree in doing so. A former soviet colleague told me during perestroika that they planned their taiga field work for winter, because dealing with snow was much easier than dealing with mud. [1] This clip has "women, horses, and wide open spaces." For "steam-baths, vodka, accordion, and lox" you'll have to do your own searching.
- areactnativedev 6y agoNice summary of the above indeed "The boreal forest, or taiga, supports a relatively small range of animals due to the harshness of the climate. Canada's boreal forest includes 85 species of mammals, 130 species of fish, and an estimated 32,000 species of insects."
- Cactus2018 6y ago
- tyingq 6y agoThe story seems to counter the popular view that BuzzFeed is low brow, low effort journalism. Did they have some kind of campaign to get better?
- flak48 6y agoBuzzfeed News has a lot of excellent journalism. Even in its non US editions, like India for example. They cover a lot of important stories that the mainstream outlets refuse to touch. Like other comments have already mentioned Buzzfeed (not Buzzfeed News) is the low effort listicle / clickbait part of the business which is unfortunately better known (mostly for pioneering the entire "10 things... you won't believe number 7" genre)
- nickthegreek 6y agobuzzfeednews and buzzfeed are not the same thing.
- tyingq 6y agoAhh..that's what I missed. Googled it, apparently they moved the "real news" to its own domain in 2018.
- detaro 6y agoBuzzfeed News has been doing good stuff for a long time.
- rsynnott 6y agoBuzzfeed does a lot of fluff ("You won't believe these 87 talking cats") plus decent, fairly well-regarded journalism (paid for by the fluff). This actually isn't that different to how normal papers operate; sports, gossip (called 'society' if the paper is sufficiently fancy) etc, bring in the money, with investigative journalism not exactly being a big earner. The difference is that Buzzfeed had the fluff before it did journalism. Due to the travails of the news industry, there are currently a lot of good journalists and not a lot of jobs for them, so this sort of non-traditional route works. Teen Vogue is another example, arguably, though a less dramatic one; surprisingly good journalism in an outlet where you wouldn't traditionally expect journalism at all.
- tosh 6y agointeresting related read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_data_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_dat...
- userbinator 6y agoThe US probably has a more complete map of China than China itself, thanks to things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20845111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20845111
- nefitty 6y agoHere’s another relevant Wikipedia article regarding censorship/absence of map data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_with_missing_or_unclear_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satellite_map_images_w...
- canada_dry 6y agoWhen I was traveling around China a few years ago it was extremely frustrating trying to use my phone's GPS+offline map. Realtime mapping in China is purposely offset by hundreds of meters making navigation quite challenging!!
- dirtyid 6y agoKind of frustrating the reporting didn't compensate the pins on the map to adjust for this. Most of the dots currently point to nothing useful. I hope the data set gets released with real + compensated coordinates so people can conduct followup analysis.
- aminecodes 6y agoThe least the EU and US could do is sanction and ban Baidu and other Chinese tech companies responsible for covering up this genocide.
- adventured 6y agoIt would have very little effect, which is why it's not a primary threat now. Despite China's aims, their tech giants have made little headway in pushing their core businesses far outside of China. Huawei is the primary success story in that regard (the US has obviously been aggressively targeting them across the board). Baidu was supposed to conquer the world and defeat Google, it failed miserably and is largely just a China search engine today, nearly all of their revenue comes from China, so sanctions wouldn't do much. China's tech giants are, for the most part, captives within China. ByteDance did manage to build a global phenomenon in TikTok, however that too is now under threat of being turned back. Sanctions on most parts of China's system will have little effect, similar to how China's retaliatory sanctions on US Senators are largely meaningless. There are three primary ways to hurt China. 1) Cut them off on technology (eg semiconductors), which is an angle the US is using to an extent. There is some question over how long China will tolerate that before they just start ignoring international rules/laws/norms and start openly steal-cloning the tech they want (I'd bet they won't tolerate it for very long). 2) Humiliate them politically, through isolation & exclusion; cut them out of the global system; that requires a widespread effort from the top several dozen economies, it can be done however. 3) Target their export machine & dollar dependency, cut them off financially from the global economy (USD, Euro and Yen combined entirely dominate the global economy, along with the connected banking & financial systems); this will work for a while, however China is aware of the weak spots and is very aggressively working to build out their domestic service economy to lessen the importance of their exports to their economy, and they're always looking to lessen their dollar dependency. All that said, China is well beyond the point where you can really restrict them in the sense that you can most nations (like Iran or Venezuela). They've accumulated enough capability, tech, wealth, productivity, infrastructure, domestic know-how, etc. that they are fully free standing now. They have $60 trillion or so in domestic wealth. They have the world's #2 military. They have the world's largest manufacturing engine, and can increasingly manufacture at or near the highest tiers (eg jet engines & planes, semiconductors, etc). They have very few real weak points that can threaten them in a serious sense. The last time it was possible to squeeze China was before the great recession, when their economy was still far smaller than the US & EU, and back then it was hoped that wouldn't be necessary.
- throwaway69123 6y agoHow as a consumer do I avoid the moral dread of buying made in China when 99% of everything is made in China.
- Beached 6y agounfortunately you will likely have to spend hours of research for every product, and be content with paying double once you find a suitable product.
- foolinaround 6y agomaybe a crowdsourced google form or something?
- crispyporkbites 6y agoDisproportionately purchase items made in your own country. Encourage others to do the same. Vote for government officials who encourage similar policies, write to government official who do not. Start/join action groups, engage in political debate at all levels. Start / invest in a local manufacturing company, run for local office, run for president, get rich and invest in local brands.
- propertymagnate 6y agoThese are excellent suggestions. I've been wishing for some kind of "made in democracy" stamp, or a "produced humanly" if that would also shut out other more moderate manufacturing centres, similar to fair trade chocolate. https://www.fairtradeamerica.org/shop-fairtrade/fairtrade-products/chocolate/ https://www.fairtradeamerica.org/shop-fairtrade/fairtrade-pr...
- yial 6y agoThis doesn’t quite answer all of your needs, but you can find quite a lot of goods through Ten Thousand Villages Or through The fair trade federation and their list of suppliers. Disclosure: I work for a non profit tied to Ten Thousand Villages and I also sit on the board of a fair trade organization.
- frequentnapper 6y agoI think a list of all the PRC supporters and enablers should be maintained starting with Baidu execs so that each and every one of them can be prosecuted after China loses the third world war.
- gowld 6y agoWhy would they lose?
- throwaway4good 6y ago"Alison Killing conducted this reporting with a grant and further assistance from the Open Technology Fund." From wikipedia: "As of November 2019, the Open Technology Fund became an independent nonprofit corporation and a grantee of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.[7] Until its formation as an independent entity, it had operated as a program of Radio Free Asia." Radio Free Asia ... founded by the CIA and a today well oiled propaganda arm for whatever is on the US government's foreign policy agenda.
- yters 6y agoEven for sake of argument it is propaganda, why does that mean it is false?
- throwaway4good 6y agoIt means it is not independent journalism.
- yters 6y agois any journalism independent? and why does independence matter if the reporting is true?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jjcon 6y agoComing from an account created six hours ago it is kinda ironic you are suggesting they are a state actor with no refutation of the premises.
- throwaway4good 6y agoIt is public information.
- free_rms 6y agoThere are tons and tons of Chinese immigrants in our industry. It's not a stretch at all to assume that some read hacker news and are nationalistic. Assume good faith.
- Muslimmp 6y agoI liked trump initially but I've made up my mind to vote Biden this time solely so that he can import some of this muslim control techniques from china. Pompeo can go fuck himself for regularly criticising the only thing China is doing right.
- brundolf 6y agoVice also went undercover last year to get footage of Xinjiang in-person: https://youtu.be/v7AYyUqrMuQ https://youtu.be/v7AYyUqrMuQ
- abj 6y ago"Individuals cannot accept interviews without government approval." [12:06] Does anyone know if this is a law?
- thoughtstheseus 6y agoI’m not sure about giving but you need a license/approval before you can interview someone. Many western youtubers came under scrutiny for it.
- abj 6y agoAh that makes sense, thanks. I was wondering how other western youtubers had channels full of interviews.
- kube-system 6y agoA couple of the western Chinese vloggers I used to watch a lot recently fled China after they caught wind that the authorities were looking for them for 'illegal journalism'
- grugagag 6y agoThis vlogger, his youtube channel is Serpentza lived in China for more than 10 years now had no choice but to leave, otherwise he wouldn’ve been inprisoned or even worse: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWgqdfAomVI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWgqdfAomVI
- abj 6y agoThanks for the link, that's too bad. I remember watching his videos years ago. He seemed to really like living in China.
- FooBarWidget 6y agoThere are various levels of reporting in about what's happening in Xinjiang. I'm curious which ones of the following people here on HN believe are true. A. There is forced re-education, forced de-radicalization, and forced political assimilation (to fight separatism). Some camps are indeed for voluntary vocational education, others are for forced re-education. The number of people who are forced into camps, are a lot less than the alleged 1+ million. No killing/genocide; no erasure of Muslim religion, artefacts or buildings; any brutality in prisons are incidental rather than policy. All people who are forced into camps eventually leave them. B. Like A, except that there are no voluntary vocational camps: all camps are forced. All people leave them after a while. C. Like B, except that people aren't supposed to leave them. Masses of people are imprisoned indefinitely. The alleged 1+ million number is true. Erasure of Muslim religion and artefacts is true. Brutality within camps are true. But no killing/genocide. D. Full killing/genocide ala Nazi Auschwitz, on the full population, everywhere in China. E. None of the above. Would love to hear what you think is exactly going on. Which of the above do people here think is true?
- flerchin 6y agoSeems like something between B-D. Some people leave, some people don't, some people are murdered.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoI'd think a mix of A and C (massive amounts of both good and ill intent/practices, largely a question of who runs the particular camp). This is based on both living in China in 2009 and seeing the nature of the state apparatus at the time, and having a Uighur roommate in 2012 who spoke a bit about the political situation at that time.
- FooBarWidget 6y agoDoes anyone know why the above post gets downvoted, even though it's only inquiring people for opinions, and not even presenting its own opinion? What have I done wrong, and what should I have done differently?
- 6y ago
- FooBarWidget 6y agoThere is a Canadian named Jerry Grey, who went on a bicycle ride in China. He literally rode hundreds of kilometers in Xinjiang, away from mainstream tourist attractions, to remote places he himself is interested in. He was able to do that without government supervision; all the government checkpoints let him pass without much scrutiny. What he reports on is very different from mainstream media reports. One of his blog posts: https://medium.com/@jerry_grey2002/abc-four-corners-tell-the-world-analysis-1529e8aaf316 https://medium.com/@jerry_grey2002/abc-four-corners-tell-the... Does anyone know why his report is so different, and why the government would just let him go whereever, unsupervised? Do people here believe that his report is genuine, or do people here believe that it's fake?
- askl56 6y agoAs someone who lives in SEA and used to live in China, he's able to move around because he lives in China and I assume has a long term visa and speaks Mandarin. And he is going with the blessing of the Chinese state media: https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/1275432124070297601?lang=en https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/12754321240702976... What he is saying does not seem remotely credible unless he has the evidence to back it up. I don't think he's completely making up that he's been to Xinjiang, but what he is writing is propaganda and should be treated as such.
- FooBarWidget 6y agoDidn't Global Times report on him long after he had already made the trip and blogged about it? Or are you saying: it's all one big scheme, planned way up front?
- askl56 6y agoGiven his Twitter feed looks like a Chinese diplomat's[1], I would assume he is part of the pro-Beijing influence network. I mean, why would someone dedicate 6 months of their life to convincing the world that something isn't happening which is reported on widely (even by some limited Chinese media)? I have no idea if he is scheming with the the government or if he is simply trying to curry favour, but if you are a gwai lo (westerner) in China and want to get ahead for any reason (visas, job whatever), this is precisely what you would do. Whether its voluntary propaganda or paid propaganda, it's still propaganda. edit: This is the kind of blatant propaganda I'm talking about: https://twitter.com/Jerry_grey2002/status/1298262507740520448 https://twitter.com/Jerry_grey2002/status/129826250774052044... [1] - https://twitter.com/Jerry_grey2002/status/1296697255072686081 https://twitter.com/Jerry_grey2002/status/129669725507268608...
- paganel 6y agoCurious how the YC involvement in China has panned out. I know they had divested somehow a couple of years ago, or at least they had started using another legal entity to do their bidding over there (maybe I'm mistaken on this). Also, it was my impression that people directly involved with YC at the time (such as Sam Altman) were pretty "blinded" by what was happening elsewhere in China and their were focusing instead only on the potential monetary gains. Granted, they weren't alone in this, as much bigger fish such as Apple, MS, FB and even Google wanted a piece of the tasty pie and as such were ready to make huge compromises to get to it. Even so, for me at least it was a little disappointing, YC could have afforded to act on principles alone, its owners/founders are already pretty rich, plus they're not listed so don't have to battle with the tyranny of the shareholders.
- tomhoward 6y agoYC announced the closure of YC China last year. https://blog.ycombinator.com/an-update-on-yc-china/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/an-update-on-yc-china/ There’s no “using another legal entity to do their bidding over there”. It’s just closed. That said, it’s not clear that it’s unequivocally morally superior to deny a service to all 1B+ Chinese people, many of whom could have been founders of great companies or customers/beneficiaries of those companies, just because of the actions of a government, particularly one that was not elected by those citizens. But that’s moot now. YC China has been closed.
- yorwba 6y agoAs the announcement mentions, Qi Lu continues to be active in the VC space with a new company, MiraclePlus, which calls itself "formerly YC China" on their website: https://www.miracleplus.com/ https://www.miracleplus.com/
- tomhoward 6y agoPresumably he calls it that because he’s using the same business strategy/model he was building for YC. But it seems quite clear that it’s not YC. The new entity is a standalone VC fund [1], and YC is a recipient of LP funds, not an LP in other VC funds. And besides, it would be hard for YC to keep any involvement quiet after making this kind of announcement. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1792939/000179293919000001/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1792939/000179293919...
- mzs 6y agoJournalist's thread that explains a bit more of how they did this: https://twitter.com/alisonkilling/status/1298933918620672000 https://twitter.com/alisonkilling/status/1298933918620672000 edit: was used in creating this two part story: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-internment-camps-xinjiang-uighurs-muslims https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/china-new-inter...
- jandrese 6y agoChina's social media army is out in force on that Twitter thread. Deflect, Deny, Discredit.
- knolax 6y agoEveryone that disagrees with you is a shill. What an enlightened mind you have. EDIT: reply to comment below. What's DRP? The existence of real shills doesn't give you free reign to cover your ears and yell shill any time you hear an opposing opinion (I've never seen the people who cry shill do so when it's someone that agrees with them). I could easily call you a shill but that doesn't get us anywhere. Focus on the merit of the argument.
- datameta 6y agoDo you deny that the DRP gov't is directly or indirectly paying many thousands of people to wage a vast information war on social media?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sangnoir 6y agoThat is correct, but the current HN guidelines state that if you suspect voting-rings or other manipulation, contact the mods out-of-band and they'll attend to it. Commenting about it and accusing people of shilling solely based on their opposition to your point of view degrades the conversation every single time. The mods have more data points to correlate and can remediate if necessary.
- mbar84 6y agoCan these findings be used to put some bounds on the number of prisoners?
- dirtyid 6y agoI'm surprised it hasn't been. Some initial reporting measured expansion of the camps by floor space which can be used to estimate internment numbers. One of the researcher is a licensed architect, this is 101 stuff in terms of occupancy/building use estimation. Source some commercial satellite service to take pictures and start counting. That said, if the intention of the system is to indoctrinate then we can expect most of the 11M Uyghurs to be imprisoned at some time. Really the question is concurrent numbers which makes for grabbing headlines. My personal guess is if competent geospatial analysis was conducted the actual detention capacity would be far lower than the commonly cited 1-3 million Zenz estimated extrapolated from his claims of 1,200 detention centres. This study, alleged to be comprehensive, found 260 (edit 315) camps in the entire region. At least it's a good start.
- fqye 6y agoIf they were actual camps, can someone explain why they were all empty? No cars, no trucks, no detainees, no guards at all? To supply and run a crowded camp, you need guards and logistics. Nothing there. Nowadays, researchers could easily obtain satellites images showing actual activities with all those clues. Just by looking at the images, it not possible to draw conclusion they were concentration camps. They could be barracks under construction and that would also explain why blanket at Baidu map. The report didn't explain its logic to conclude they were concentration camps. And they didn't even consider other possibilities at all. It is not serious research. Remember the satellite image analysis of Wuhan's hospitals' parking lots that was supposed to reveal the true scale of covid19 outbreak in Wuhan? High resolution images with all the details. Still lots of flaws and no one takes it seriously now. New York Times obtained some leaked confidential documents of China's Xinjiang policies. Nothing even close to concentration camp was revealed. It actually did CCP some favor.
- free_rms 6y agoIt's a tough issue because it's hard to give the Chinese government credit for lack of evidence when they're not letting journalists in in the first place. I looked into it a year ago and the strongest evidence I found at that point was two dudes drove around and took pictures of a bunch of facilities that looked like re-education camps. They guesstimated 100k-1M, one news article wrote "a million", then the rest of them started writing "millions", and hacker news commenters write "genocide".
- panpanna 6y agoDoes it matter if it was 100k or 1M??
- free_rms 6y agoIt matters it it's mandatory job and language training vs ethnic cleansing or genocide. There's evidence for the former, none for the latter. And a paternalistic "we'll end this unrest by educating them" attitude would be pretty on-brand for the Chinese Government. Also, yes, quantity matters. How many do we have in jail on bullshit charges? It would be nice to be less, right?
- gumby 6y agoThis was supposedly a problem with a stealth ship designed by Lockheed’s “skunkworks”: against the choppy noise of waves and swell, a blank spot (of no radar return) stood out dramatically.
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y agoCool! Do you have a link?
- pests 6y agoSkunkworks by Ben Rich has the stories and some photos.
- gumby 6y agoThat’s where I read this. I always wondered itpfbthat was really why it was cancelled (that’s why I wrote “supposedly”) or if Lockheed simply couldn’t make an adequate ship, being an aircraft company.
- liability 6y agoThis is about the Sea Shadow, right? Lockheed later got a contract for the Freedom class of litoral combat ships, with 10 of the planned 16 currently active and five more fitting out or under construction. Those are being built by a shipbuilding firm, not Lockheed directly.
- handedness 6y agoThere's a long-standing concern that stealth aircraft appear as a void against background radiation: https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2020/07/10/russia-received-technology-revealing-invisible-stealth-aircraft/ https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2020/07/10/russia-received-tec... More info: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30100/no-passive-radar-isnt-stealth-ending-magic-people https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/30100/no-passive-radar...
- petre 6y ago
- partiallypro 6y agoI'm still baffled that some people, even here, think this is all made up propaganda from the West. Despite tons and tons of evidence. Kind of reminds me of how it must have been with people in denial about the early Nazi concentration camps, and Holodomor. I'm not saying this is as brutal as what the Nazis did (at least as far as we know,) just drawing parallels to the pure denialism or marking it up as pure exaggeration.
- mkoubaa 6y agoThe Nazis ran out of food at some point. It doesn't take a powerful imagination to think what the CCP would do if it ran out of some essential resource.
- D8761D3C 6y agothe wheel turns around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
- fqye 6y agoBecause history told us that public consensus and official conclusion could be lies. Remember the reason that the US invaded Iraq?
- warbaker 6y agoNot sure how you can equate these two. Iraq invasion was driven by faulty intelligence gathered in secret by a spy organization. Here, we have millions of eye witnesses and tons of corroborating evidence.
- fqye 6y ago> Here, we have millions of eye witnesses and tons of corroborating evidence. The fact that this report is up to questioning shows that it isn't true. If you read this report thoroughly, you can find out it just shows there are this sort of buildings in Xinjiang but no logic or proof that they are concentration camps and there is no evidence at least in the report that the buildings are in use.
- knolax 6y ago> In total there were 5 million masked tiles across Xinjiang. They seemed to cover any area of even the slightest strategic importance — military bases and training grounds, prisons, power plants, but also mines and some commercial and industrial facilities. There were far too many locations for us to sort through, so we narrowed it down by focusing on the areas around cities and towns and major roads. Translation: we looked at satellite photos of random buildings and determined that they were "camps" because of unspecified "hallmarks". This is literally a Buzzfeed article. One of the people they cite once tried to do something similar by claiming an 800 year old mosque was demolished when it was actually the building next door built in the 90s(by his own admission[0]). In fact it seems they seemed to have been expanding/renovating the mosque[1][2]. [0] https://medium.com/@shawnwzhang/clarification-of-keriya-etika-mosques-current-situations-9678a6975a51 https://medium.com/@shawnwzhang/clarification-of-keriya-etik... [1] https://miro.medium.com/max/1106/1*_OL9z1ndMVuqZQ7_XxwYLQ.png https://miro.medium.com/max/1106/1*_OL9z1ndMVuqZQ7_XxwYLQ.pn... [2] https://geopoliticsalert.com/keriya-aitika-mosque https://geopoliticsalert.com/keriya-aitika-mosque
- jandrese 6y agoThey correlated areas with known camps first.
- knolax 6y ago> Of the six camps that we used in our feasibility study, five had blank tiles at their location at zoom level 18 in Baidu, They "correlated" that out of 6 "camps" 5 of them had missing tiles, which gives you the chance of a blanked out tile give a "camp", but not the chance of a "camp" given blanked out tile.
- icedata 6y agoI noticed this myself on Baidu maps a couple of years ago. Browsing around Xinjiang with a friend, we discovered a weird conical structure constructed of tiles. Also found lots of roadblocks in the region (those weren't hidden).
- m3kw9 6y agoWouldn’t they also blank out other random spots to be less obvious?
- totetsu 6y agoAfter watching the old NHK/CCTV Silk Road documentary, I really wanted to visit this region. Humans suck when we let our ideology be stronger than our humanity. http://www.infocobuild.com/books-and-films/social-science/silk-road/episode-08.html http://www.infocobuild.com/books-and-films/social-science/si...
- davidzweig 6y agoMaybe someone can put the coordinates on a github repo so they are accessible in China?
- silexia 6y agoWow, enslaving millions...
- newen 6y agoApparently they are apartment complexes.. https://twitter.com/_tchiek/status/1299386623390617601?s=20 https://twitter.com/_tchiek/status/1299386623390617601?s=20 Love how easily propaganda and misinformation spreads.