Imagine you’re about to cross a street.
The light is red.
You look to the left, to the right,
no cars are coming and you’re in a hurry
so why not just cross quickly?
I mean, who’s watching, right?
In China, everyone is.
There was a time when China used
political indoctrination and a little red book to keep
its population in check but now the Internet
well, their Intranet
and big data are helping them create
a hyper-surveilled society eerily reminiscent of
dystopian novels.
You see, keeping track of 1.4 billion people
is no easy feat and in order to do so,
China has invested in various
surveillance technology projects.
You’ve probably heard of all the black-mirror-esque
tech-advances such as facial recognition glasses,
live CCTV recognition technology,
and all that Orwellian jazz.
Unfortunately, that’s not where all this stops.
You’re watching Explore Mode and today
we’re going inside China’s surveillance state.
Let’s start with their most popular ongoing
surveillance project,
the infamous Social Credit System.
It was first announced back in 2014 and,
according to state documents, is currently in its
‘planning period.’
It is set to be mandatory in all cities across
the country and become fully operational by 2020,
so pretty soon.
The system is meant to reinforce trust
between citizens, private companies
and government entities as well as
‘establish and complete a social credit system’ and
‘commend sincerity and punish insincerity.’
Simply put, China’s Social Credit System
rewards good behavior with points and punishes
bad behavior by deducting them.
The higher your score the more benefits
you get to enjoy,
the lower your score the more privileges you lose.
The system takes into consideration an individual's’
credit history, behavior, social contribution,
and even interpersonal relationships.
Chinese tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba
are both harvesting data that could be integrated
into this system.
According to a 2017 report by Quartz,
the two companies have launched an app-version
of the social credit system.
The apps evaluate consumers based on
their spending habits and interpersonal relationships.
Although the system hasn’t launched yet,
there have been pilot projects in several
different cities in China,
all of them operate in a different way.
According to Wired, China’s eastern city
of
Rongcheng gives all its citizens
1,000 points to start with.
Do a good deed and you get more points
as well as social recognition,
make a mistake and get points deducted
and privileges revoked.
According to reports by The Conversation and
ABC Australia, positive behavior in some cities
can be rewarded with free access to gym facilities,
shorter waiting times in hospitals,
and higher possibilities to enter prestigious universities.
On the other hand, behaviors listed as
punishable offenses including cheating in video games,
jaywalking, causing public disturbances,
or
even walking your dog without a leash
can have severe consequences.
According to a report from
the National Public Credit Information Center
obtained by the Associated Press, in 2018,
China banned citizens from buying flight tickets
17.5 million times
and barred them from purchasing train tickets
5.5 million times.
The report also states that 128 people were
banned from traveling due to unpaid taxes.
Individuals could be penalized by
blocking them from taking senior management roles or
legally representing a company
if they didn't have enough points.
The records show China applied this penalty
290,000 times.
Companies that were blacklisted for failing
to repay loans and promote false or misleading
advertising could face losing access
to bank loans or even be barred from importing goods.
But how do Chinese authorities
obtain all this information?
Well, that’s where The Golden Shield Project
and big data come in.
The Golden Shield Project is a database-driven
mass-surveillance initiative that first rolled out
in the early 2000s and continues to serve
as a foundation for all surveillance and
censorship efforts in China.
Through this database, China has access to
every citizen’s and entities’ records
facilitating the enforcement of
a social credit score system.
The now famous Great Firewall was one of the
first initiatives under The Golden Shield Project.
Fast forward to today and now the country
is developing and testing different surveillance
programs using cutting edge technology.
Earlier this year, researchers working with
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army developed
CCTV cameras embedded with artificial intelligence
to track the movements of civilians across the country.
According to New Scientist, the program dubbed
Ensemble Net was trained using clips from
CCTV footage and is supposedly
90 percent accurate.
The program will be able to scan body shapes
and facial features which will then be used
to search a database.
It will also be able to identify a person
even if they’re in disguise or
if their back is faced towards the camera.
CNet reports the AI-powered CCTV cameras have
already been used by Chinese authorities to
track down fugitives.
China plans to have over 600 million of these
AI-powered CCTV cameras by 2020,
according to Q Daily, a Chinese online publication.
But wait, there’s more.
Way more.
In July 2018, China rolled out
a new vehicular tracking system.
So, a system that would track cars and
the people driving them.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese
authorities claimed its main goal was to study
and improve congestion, thereby reducing pollution.
They also mentioned the technology could be used
to combat the rise of vehicular terrorist attacks.
Nothing to do with surveillance or anything…
right.
In October 2018 a similar program was deployed.
The South China Morning Post reported that
Chinese authorities were using facial recognition,
fingerprint analysis and temperature-taking thermal
scans on drivers who were crossing
the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge.
The technology will match the driver and
car with pre-registered immigration data.
Once cleared, the driver can move on.
The technology was developed by a company
called Intellifusion which claims it is
99.5 percent accurate.
Citing Chinese media, Reuters reported the
facial recognition technology would also be
used to warn yawning drivers for safety.
If they are found yawning three times
an alarm will go off.
Most recently, Chinese police from the cities of
Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing are testing
a new surveillance technology
that analyzes live videos and stores data
of how a person walks.
According to the South China Morning Post,
the program can detect someone’s walk from
50 meters away regardless of whether
theyare facing the camera.
It does this by creating silhouettes of people
in videos and studying their body contour,
their arm movement while walking,
whether they have a toe-in or toe-out gait,
among other elements.
All these components allow them to identify
each person’s unique ‘walking style.’
To all you smarty-pants out there,
developing a fake limp or covering up your legs
won’t stop the AI system from recognizing you.
Huang Yongzhen, chief executive of Watrix
told the SCMP, ‘covering your legs would
reduce the recognition score
but we analyze all of a person’s body
when evaluating walking style.’
These forms of extreme surveillance are now
being used against minorities who are not
only being aggressively monitored
but also forcefully enslaved.
China is trying to force the country’s predominantly
Muslim Uighurs to become more subservient
to the party.
The government has detained up to
a million people in “re-education” camps,
according to the New York Times.
Fortune reports that part of the surveillance effort is to
collect biometric data such as
iris scans, fingerprints, voice scans, and DNA.
Human right groups and Uighur activists say
a comprehensive DNA database could be used
to chase down Uighurs who resist conforming
to the campaign.
According to China’s official propaganda agency Xinhua,
nearly 36 million people in Xinjiang
took part in the so-called “Physicals for All” program
from 2016 to 2017.
On top of that, Chinese authorities seem to
possess the technology to track the live location
of millions of Uighurs.
On February 14 a Dutch security researcher
called Victor Gevers found a Chinese database
that had been left open on the internet for months, r
eports ZDNet.
The database belongs to a Chinese video-based crowd
analysis and facial recognition technology
company called SenseNets.
Gevers told ZDNet that the leaked database
contained sensitive and detailed information
on roughly 2.6 million users including
their names, IDs, gender, nationality, home addresses,
age, and even their employer.
Each user was also linked to a list of GPS coordinates
and locations where that user had been seen.
The database also had a list of ‘trackers’ connected to
GPS coordinates.
These trackers seem to be the locations of
CCTV cameras.
Some of them were tagged with names that specified
where they were located like ‘mosque’ or ‘restaurant’.
And if you thought local authorities were exempt
from scrutiny, well you thought wrong.
China has also developed an anti-corruption AI system
appropriately called ‘Zero Trust’,
made specifically to identify corrupt public officials.
The South China Morning Post reported
it was developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences
and the Chinese Communist Party’s
internal control institutions to monitor, evaluate
or intervene in the work and personal life of
public servants.
Zero Trust can cross-reference more than 150 protected
databases in central and local government systems.
It is designed to detect property transfers,
infrastructure construction, land purchases,
and house demolitions, according to one researcher
involved with the program.
The system was built to detect unusual increases
in bank savings, new car purchases or
bidding for government contracts under the name of
the official or one of his or her family or friends.
It then calculates a probability for those
actions to be corrupt and if authorities need
to be alerted.
Zero Trust was only rolled out in 30 counties
and cities but managed to catch 8,721
government officials engaging in embezzlement,
abuse of power, misuse of government funds
and nepotism.
Only some were sentenced to jail time, however,
most were allowed to keep their jobs after
receiving a warning or minor punishment.
The system seems to be working quite well.
However, public officials in certain counties
are not too keen on being monitored.
According to the SCMP report, some officials
in Xiushui County are questioning the AI’s
right of access to sensitive databases.
The irony is not lost on us.
Clearly, Chinese institutions and companies
are doing a lot to harvest all the data
they want but there’s also help coming from the outside.
Since 2014, China has been investing in building
its own Silicon Valley.
One of its goals is to transform Guizhou,
a mountainous province in southwest China
into a hub for Big Data
and so far, it’s succeeding.
In 2018, Apple Inc. announced a big move.
According to The Verge, it would be opening
a new database center for its Chinese iCloud
in Guizhou as well as begin hosting its
iCloud encryption keys in China, instead of the US,
were it had been operating.
All this along with a USD $1 billion investment,
according to a report from Xinhua Net.
they also reported that Amazon and Microsoft
signed similar deals.
It is clear why this raises privacy concerns
considering all data would have to be reviewed
by Chinese officials before transferring abroad.
Evidently, China’s surveillance revolution
is in full force and it will not stop anytime soon.
The New York Times reports that by 2020
China’s streets will be monitored by roughly 300 million
cameras and China’s law enforcement plans to spend
an extra $30 billion dollars in surveillance technology.
All these efforts are sold to the Chinese population
as an investment for their future
and safety for the nation
but who is actually paying the price?
Thanks for watching this episode of Explore Mode.
All the links to our sources in the description box below.
So take a look if you want to do a little of
your own exploring.
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