The USA’s experience with this technology has been rather different. An investigation by the Government Accountability Office brought to light such serious deficiencies in the FBI’s facial recognition programme that in March 2017 there was a hearing on the matter in the House of Representatives. In 15 per cent of all cases, the FBI’s technology identified the wrong people when searching for criminals, with black women being the most likely group to be affected by these errors. Such false alarms have more serious consequences in the Chinese system than they might elsewhere, since the conviction rate is over 99.9 per cent. The state apparatus is always right, and where evidence is lacking, the police often provide the court with a forced confession elicited with threats or torture.
We can assume the system is still a long way from being all-encompassing: databases that often don’t communicate with each other; firms that overstate their achievements; technology that promises more that it can currently deliver. And yet all the overblown claims – that the cameras can identify someone at a distance of 15 kilometres, or that everyone can be identified within a second – still make sense. The all-seeing eye doesn’t have to be looking at you for the panopticon to function. All that matters is that you feel it – even if in reality, it isn’t there yet.
In China, the Skynet is just one part of a much more comprehensive ‘police cloud’, on which the organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW) has reported.114 The police cloud is a project from the Ministry of Public Security, which issued instructions for its use in 2015. Since then police forces in various provinces have been gathering all the data they can on hundreds of millions of citizens: medical histories, takeaway orders, courier deliveries, supermarket loyalty card numbers, methods of birth control, religious affiliations, online behaviour, flights and train journeys, GPS movement coordinates and biometric data, face, voice, fingerprints – plus the DNA of some forty million Chinese people, foremost among them the Uighurs in Xinjiang. The state press reported, for instance, that the police force in the city of Xuzhou in Jiangsu was buying information from private companies, including ‘navigation data on the internet, [and] the logistical, purchase and transaction records of major e-commerce companies,’115 but also the MAC addresses of the devices through which individual internet users could be identified. ‘Officers used to go house to house to gather information,’ the article says. ‘Today, the machines collect it tirelessly throughout the day.’116
‘Big data shows us the future,’ wrote Wang Yongqing (at the time General Secretary of the powerful Party Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission) in 2015, in the Central Party School’s paper Qiushi.117 The Party had to ‘assemble a complete collection of basic information about all places, things, issues and people, tracking trends in what they eat, how they live, where they travel and what they consume.’ All this would make ‘our early-warning system more scientific, our defence and control more effective, and our strikes more precise.’ Wang’s boss at the time, Politburo member Meng Jianzhu, called on the security services in autumn 2017 to remove all barriers to a broad exchange of data: as soon as possible, he said, the images from surveillance cameras everywhere in the country needed to flow into a single database.
Meng’s exhortation alludes to the age-old problem faced by large bureaucracies, especially in authoritarian systems: each subordinate authority reproduces the secrecy and lack of transparency of the apparatus in miniature, partitioning itself off from the authorities alongside it. The recurring complaint about isolated ‘data islands’ urgently needing to be joined up suggests that the head-office strategists had a tough job implementing their plans on the lower levels.
All the same: AI, said Li Meng, Deputy Minister for Science and Technology, in summer 2017, would help China ‘to know in advance who might be a terrorist, and who might be planning something bad.’ Prophesying future crimes used to be the stuff of science fiction novels and films, like Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report. In China, they’re trying to make it reality.
As early as 2016, the Shandong Legal Daily was reporting on a project being run by the police in the city of Dongying.118 The project is called ‘Mornings at Eight’ and is cited by the paper as an excellent example of how to use the police cloud creatively. Every morning at eight o’clock, the system sends a report to the mobile phones of the 1,300 participating police officers, detailing the ‘abnormalities and trends’ seen in their area. The algorithm, so the paper says, analyses the data from the previous day, including information from hotels, internet cafés, airlines – and from the police force itself. It scans all data on any newcomers to the district, for instance, including their hometown, ethnicity, previous convictions and online behaviour, harvested from internet cafés. ‘Every day at eight o’clock […] the system sends us targeted messages,’ the paper quoted a police officer as saying. ‘In particular, it alerts us to individuals who are involved in terrorism and in [undermining] social stability who’ve entered our jurisdictions.’
Itinerant labourers and ethnic minorities appear as people of interest in these alerts with particular frequency. The HRW report quotes a tender document from the Tianjin police, which says its police cloud can monitor ‘people of certain ethnicity,’ ‘people who have extreme thoughts’, ‘petitioners who are extremely [persistent]’, and ‘Uighurs from South Xinjiang.’ The system, according to this document, ‘says it can pinpoint the residences of these individuals and track their movements on maps.’
The question is: what is a crime? And who may find themselves attracting unwelcome attention in a country where someone like the late author and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo is viewed by the authorities as a mere ‘convicted criminal’?
The aim of all the data-gathering by the Chinese police, according to a 2014 notice from the ministry of public security, is to create an ‘early warning’ system that will alert them to any ‘abnormal behaviour’ by citizens. Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, says the authorities ‘are collecting and centralising ever more information about hundreds of millions of ordinary people, identifying persons who deviate from what they determine to be “normal thought”’. Ministry documents single out groups to be identified and targeted: not just drug addicts and people with criminal records, but also ‘petitioners, ‘those with mental health problems who tend to cause disturbances’ and ‘those who undermine stability’. In other words, people who, for one reason or another, are a thorn in the Party’s side. Or who might become one, even if they themselves don’t know it yet. Especially them, in fact.
To make absolutely sure that nothing goes wrong, the government is getting directly involved with some of the new companies. The Chinese state is the majority shareholder in the Hangzhou firm Hikvision, which began life in a state research institute and is now the largest manufacturer of video surveillance systems in the world. Today, Hikvision cameras have been installed in more than 150 countries, where they identify faces and number plates, and send an automatic alert when a driver is seen texting at the wheel. In the USA, prisons, airports, schools, private dwellings and military institutions are equipped with the Chinese firm’s systems. Even the US embassy in Kabul installed one.
Their use has caused much debate in both Washington and London. Critics point to the fact that Hikvision works closely with China’s Ministry of Public Security and its research institutions, while the company has frequently tried to draw a veil over its relationship with the Chinese regime. Its managing director, Chen Zongnian, is also the firm’s Party secretary, and in March 2018 he was a delegate to the National People’s Congress for the first time. Some suspect that Hikvision may have equipped its technology with a ‘back door’, which would allow China to access its internet-enabled cameras and channel their data to Chinese servers. So far, the existence of these back doors hasn’t been proven, but all the same, the US embassy in Kabul and a military base in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, have now removed all their Hikvision cameras.
The back door debate h
it the telecommunications company Huawei hard in early 2019: triggered by warnings from the USA, governments all over the Western world started discussing whether Huawei really should be used as a supplier for the coming 5G networks – the infrastructure of the future – or whether that was inviting the risk of Chinese espionage or even sabotage. In a series of interviews, the Huawei boss Ren Zhengfei assured everyone of his company’s independence from the Chinese government. Huawei will ‘never cause damage to a nation or an individual,’ he said. What he didn’t mention was that China’s new intelligence-service law from 2017 obliges all Chinese ‘organisations and citizens’ to ‘support, aid and cooperate with the work of the national secret service’.
This document was merely a move by the CCP to give a legal basis to something that had always happened, in a system that has never permitted companies to be independent in our sense of the word. ‘In China, state that Huawei strongly supports the Communist Party of China,’ says one internal notice from Ren to his executives, written in 2014 and quoted in the Financial Times. ‘Outside China, stress that Huawei always follows key international trends.’
Many other Chinese high-tech companies are penetrating overseas markets. In the province of Anhui, you can visit iFlytek, China’s number one in voice recognition. ‘Today, we lead China,’ says a banner in the lobby, ‘tomorrow, the world.’ Another banner reads: ‘Let the machines listen and speak, let them understand and analyse. Let us build a beautiful new world with artificial intelligence.’ Like Huawei, iFlytek follows both the laws of commerce and those of the police state. It manufactures intelligent speakers, similar to Amazon’s Alexa system. ‘Put it in your flat,’ says the guide in the showroom, ‘and it will hear everything, no matter where you are.’ It provides voice-control technology for cars made by VW and Mercedes. Our guide points to large photos of Xi Jinping, who made a personal visit to the firm. ‘We have the support of the government,’ says Pan Shuai, the head of overseas sales. When the US president Donald Trump visited Beijing, a video clip produced by the firm went viral: ‘I love China,’ says a real-looking Trump in fluent Chinese: ‘iFlytek is really super!’
China has 800 million internet users and 1.4 billion mobile phones. iFlytek works with all three of the major mobile operators, running their call centres – and according to the company’s own information, it has made its voice recognition software available to more than 370,000 apps free of charge. ‘Every day we have 4.5 billion users accessing our services,’ says Pan Shuai. ‘Our huge population gives us enormous advantages in data gathering.’ Of course, they don’t break any laws, he adds, but: ‘China is the Wild West right now. A test laboratory.’
And what about their cooperation with the policing ministry? Pan Shuai hesitates. ‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he says. But it’s on the company’s website – albeit only the Chinese-language version: iFlytek runs a laboratory for artificial intelligence and voice recognition jointly with the Ministry of Public Security. The company has developed keyword-spotting technology for public security and to aid national defence, the website says. They are also helping the authorities to compile a national speech-pattern and voice database.
iFlytek boss Liu Qingfeng is also a delegate to the National People’s Congress in Beijing, and in that capacity he used a 2014 speech to call on the authorities ‘to employ big data in the fight against terrorism as soon as possible, in the interests of national security, and to begin compiling a nationwide speech-pattern database at once’. The company’s website says that they’ve already helped the police to ‘solve crimes’ in the provinces of Gansu, Tibet and Xinjiang. Its voice-recognition systems have also proven successful in the Tibetan and Uighur languages. After a while, the sales manager Pan Shuai recalls the firm’s cooperation with the police. ‘Oh, right,’ he says, ‘that.’ Yes, it’s true, the company is also making its technology available to the police. ‘We help with telephone scams, for instance.’ The technology is already in widespread use in the telephone networks of Anhui, the company’s home province, according to a 2017 report on the Shanghai news website The Paper. It scans all calls in real time. ‘If our system recognises a criminal, it alerts the police automatically,’ Pan Shuai says proudly.
One province in China is a few steps ahead of the rest of the country in its use of surveillance technology. It’s a region that now has a police station every hundred metres. In some districts you have to install a state-monitored GPS transmitter in your car, if you own one. You can only buy petrol once your face has been scanned at the petrol station and the system has declared you harmless. In every city, town and village, cameras follow your every move. If you’ve been identified as a potential troublemaker, then in some places the cameras will send an alert as soon as you stray more than 300 metres outside the ‘safe zone’ that has been designated for you. If you own a mobile phone, you must install the Jingwang (‘clean net’) app on it. This app has access to the content of your phone and, according to the government, is supposed to ‘prevent people from accessing terrorist information’. It detects all ‘damaging information’ and ‘illegal religious activity’ in the form of text messages, e-books, websites, images and videos, and automatically reports them to the authorities.
At the countless police checkpoints you have to pass through several times a day in this province, officers scan your face with their smartphones, then check your phone to see if you really have downloaded Jingwang. If you buy a kitchen knife, a QR-code assigned to you will be stamped on the blade at the point of sale.119 The authorities know how often you go to prayers, whether you have friends or relatives abroad, and whether you know anyone who has been to prison. All this is stored on your file, along with your finger prints, your blood group, scans of your iris and samples of your DNA, which the government takes at free health check-ups without informing you of what will happen to them. (The construction of the police force’s DNA database relies on technology provided by the American company Thermo Fisher, as the New York Times recently revealed.) The sum of all this information determines whether you are permitted to stay in hotels, rent a flat or get a job. Or whether you end up in one of the many re-education camps set up all over the province.
All this will apply to you if you’re a Muslim living in Xinjiang Province, which in all likelihood means you’re a Uighur. Your home province has always been in the cross-hairs of the security apparatus. You can expect to be reported to the police if you name your child Mohammed; if you fast during Ramadan, or if you invite too many people to your wedding. If you are too religious (which can just mean growing a beard), or if you have relatives abroad with whom you exchange emails or speak on the phone, there is a good chance you will end up in a re-education camp.
Starting in spring 2017, China took just one year to create a gulag, into which (according to research by the German sinologist Adrian Zenz) a million or more people have already vanished – without having committed any crime. ‘Today, it’s impossible to speak to a Uighur who doesn’t have at least one close relative or friend in a camp,’ Adrian Zenz told me. ‘Any contact with people in other countries is almost a guarantee you’ll be sent there.’ Not only has the Party turned Xinjiang into an enormous camp – it is also making the province into a testing ground for its AI gadgets. At the start of 2019 the Dutch security expert Victor Gevers discovered a dataset that the Shenzhen facial-recognition firm SenseNets had parked, unprotected, online. It contained surveillance data on more than 2.5 million Xinjiang residents, with their names and ID numbers. In a period of just 24 hours, these people – mostly Uighurs – had been logged at 6.7 million position points (mosque, internet café, hotel), evidently using data gathered from AI cameras.
Today Xinjiang is the ‘high-tech version of the Cultural Revolution,’ says Adrian Zenz. ‘The trend is towards automation, and predictive policing. Just as China is overtaking the USA, Xinjiang is already a long way ahead of the rest of China.’ Arrests are increasingly being carried out to fulfil quotas, claim
s Zenz. And in Xinjiang, the decision to arrest someone is increasingly made by technical systems; police officers don’t check each individual case. Zenz sees a clear strategy at work: ‘the aim is to make citizens rush to obey, to internalise the controls, to self-censor.’120
China’s high-tech giants are getting in on the action. Huawei, for example, which for some time now has made half its revenue abroad, and supplies, among others, Vodaphone and Deutsche Telekom. In May 2018, the company started working with the Xinjiang police. It has since been involved in an innovation laboratory for the ‘intelligent security industry’ being set up by the authorities in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. The stated aim of the regional government is to create an industrial park for high-tech surveillance technology – technology that can not only be put to use in the local area, but also exported to the countries involved in China’s ‘New Silk Road’ (or ‘Belt and Road Initiative’). After all, as the Urumqi government website explains, there is also a growing market in other countries for ‘anti-terror and stability maintenance products’.121 The site welcomes a ‘new soldier’ to the battle for ‘a peaceful Xinjiang’: Huawei will be a ‘close partner’ in ‘technological’ and ‘digitalised’ police work. According to the report, the Huawei executive present at the opening ceremony for the innovation laboratory, Tao Jingwen – who at that point also happened to be President of the Western European Region for Huawei – explained that the company wanted to ‘bring the digital world into every organisation, into every family and to every person’. Without doubt, ‘public security is the most important element in this strategy.’ Together with the province’s police force, they would ‘ring in a new era of smart police work.’ This is the same Huawei that talks so insistently abroad about its independence from the Communist Party.
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