In a major ethical leap for the tech world, Chinese start-ups have built algorithms that the government uses to track members of a largely Muslim minority group.
The Chinese government has drawn wide international condemnation for its harsh crackdown on ethnic Muslims in its western region, including holding as many as a million of them in detention camps.
Now,
documents and interviews show that the authorities are also using a
vast, secret system of advanced facial recognition technology to track
and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said.
The
facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly
expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for
Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and
goings for search and review. The practice makes China a pioneer in
applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially
ushering in a new era of automated racism.
The technology and its use to keep tabs on China’s 11 million Uighurs were described by five people with direct knowledge of the systems, who requested anonymity because they feared retribution. The New York Times also reviewed
databases used by the police, government procurement documents and
advertising materials distributed by the A.I. companies that make the
systems.
Chinese authorities already maintain a vast surveillance net, including tracking people’s DNA,
in the western region of Xinjiang, which many Uighurs call home. But
the scope of the new systems, previously unreported, extends that
monitoring into many other corners of the country. Shoppers
lined up for identification checks outside the Kashgar Bazaar last
fall. Members of the largely Muslim Uighur minority have been under
Chinese surveillance and persecution for years.CreditPaul Mozur
Shoppers
lined up for identification checks outside the Kashgar Bazaar last
fall. Members of the largely Muslim Uighur minority have been under
Chinese surveillance and persecution for years.CreditPaul Mozur
The
police are now using facial recognition technology to target Uighurs in
wealthy eastern cities like Hangzhou and Wenzhou and across the coastal
province of Fujian, said two of the people. Law enforcement in the
central Chinese city of Sanmenxia, along the Yellow River, ran a system
that over the course of a month this year screened whether residents were Uighurs 500,000 times.
Police
documents show demand for such capabilities is spreading. Almost two
dozen police departments in 16 different provinces and regions across
China sought such technology beginning in 2018, according to procurement
documents. Law enforcement from the central province of Shaanxi, for
example, aimed to acquire a smart camera system last year that “should
support facial recognition to identify Uighur/non-Uighur attributes.”
Some police departments and technology companies described the practice as “minority identification,” though three of the people
said that phrase was a euphemism for a tool that sought to identify
Uighurs exclusively. Uighurs often look distinct from China’s majority
Han population, more closely resembling people from Central Asia. Such
differences make it easier for software to single them out.
For
decades, democracies have had a near monopoly on cutting-edge
technology. Today, a new generation of start-ups catering to Beijing’s
authoritarian needs are beginning to set the tone for emerging
technologies like artificial intelligence. Similar tools could automate
biases based on skin color and ethnicity elsewhere.
“Take the most risky application of this technology, and chances are good someone is going to try it,” said Clare Garvie,
an associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law.
“If you make a technology that can classify people by an ethnicity,
someone will use it to repress that ethnicity.”
From
a technology standpoint, using algorithms to label people based on race
or ethnicity has become relatively easy. Companies like I.B.M. advertise software that can sort people into broad groups.
But China has broken new ground by identifying one ethnic group for law enforcement purposes. One Chinese start-up, CloudWalk, outlined a sample experience in marketing its own surveillance systems. The technology, it said, could recognize “sensitive groups of people.”
A screen shot from the CloudWalk website details a possible use for its facial recognition technology. One of them: recognizing “sensitive groups of people.” A translation of marketing material for CloudWalk’s facial recognition technology.
“If
originally one Uighur lives in a neighborhood, and within 20 days six
Uighurs appear,” it said on its website, “it immediately sends alarms”
to law enforcement.
In practice, the systems are imperfect, two of the people said. Often, their accuracy depends on environmental factors like lighting and the positioning of cameras.
In
the United States and Europe, the debate in the artificial intelligence
community has focused on the unconscious biases of those designing the
technology. Recent tests showed facial recognition systems made by companies like I.B.M. and Amazonwere less accurate at identifying the features of darker-skinned people.
China’s efforts raise starker issues. While facial recognition
technology uses aspects like skin tone and face shapes to sort images
in photos or videos, it must be told by humans to categorize people
based on social definitions of race or ethnicity. Chinese police, with
the help of the start-ups, have done that.
“It’s
something that seems shocking coming from the U.S., where there is most
likely racism built into our algorithmic decision making, but not in an
overt way like this,” said Jennifer Lynch, surveillance litigation
director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “There’s not a system
designed to identify someone as African-American, for example.”
The
Chinese A.I. companies behind the software include Yitu, Megvii,
SenseTime, and CloudWalk, which are each valued at more than $1 billion.
Another company, Hikvision, that sells cameras and software to process
the images, offered a minority recognition function, but began phasing
it out in 2018, according to one of the people.
The
companies’ valuations soared in 2018 as China’s Ministry of Public
Security, its top police agency, set aside billions of dollars under two
government plans, called Skynet and Sharp Eyes, to computerize surveillance, policing and intelligence collection.
In
a statement, a SenseTime spokeswoman said she checked with “relevant
teams,” who were not aware its technology was being used to profile.
Megvii said in a statement it was focused on “commercial not political
solutions,” adding, “we are concerned about the well-being and safety of
individual citizens, not about monitoring groups.” CloudWalk and Yitu
did not respond to requests for comment.
China’s Ministry of Public Security did not respond to a faxed request for comment.
Selling products with names like Fire Eye, Sky Eye and Dragonfly Eye,
the start-ups promise to use A.I. to analyze footage from China’s
surveillance cameras. The technology is not mature — in 2017 Yitu
promoted a one-in-three success rate when the police responded to its
alarms at a train station — and many of China’s cameras are not powerful
enough for facial recognition software to work effectively.
Yet
they help advance China’s architecture for social control. To make the
algorithms work, the police have put together face-image databases for
people with criminal records, mental illnesses, records of drug use, and
those who petitioned the government over grievances, according to two of the people
and procurement documents. A national database of criminals at large
includes about 300,000 faces, while a list of people with a history of
drug use in the city of Wenzhou totals 8,000 faces, they said.A security camera in a rebuilt section of the Old City in Kashgar, Xinjiang.CreditThomas Peter/Reuters
A security camera in a rebuilt section of the Old City in Kashgar, Xinjiang.
Using
a process called machine learning, engineers feed data to artificial
intelligence systems to train them to recognize patterns or traits. In
the case of the profiling, they would provide thousands of labeled
images of both Uighurs and non-Uighurs. That would help generate a
function to distinguish the ethnic group.
The
A.I. companies have taken money from major investors. Fidelity
International and Qualcomm Ventures were a part of a consortium that
invested $620 million
in SenseTime. Sequoia invested in Yitu. Megvii is backed by Sinovation
Ventures, the fund of the well-known Chinese tech investor Kai-Fu Lee.
A
Sinovation spokeswoman said the fund had recently sold a part of its
stake in Megvii and relinquished its seat on the board. Fidelity
declined to comment. Sequoia and Qualcomm did not respond to emailed
requests for comment.
Mr. Lee, a
booster of Chinese A.I., has argued that China has an advantage in
developing A.I. because its leaders are less fussed by “legal
intricacies” or “moral consensus.”
“We
are not passive spectators in the story of A.I. — we are the authors of
it,” Mr. Lee wrote last year. “That means the values underpinning our
visions of an A.I. future could well become self-fulfilling prophecies.”
He declined to comment on his fund’s investment in Megvii or its
practices.
Ethnic profiling within China’s tech industry isn’t a secret, the people said.
It has become so common that one of the people likened it to the
short-range wireless technology Bluetooth. Employees at Megvii were
warned about the sensitivity of discussing ethnic targeting publicly, another person said.
China has devoted major resources toward tracking Uighurs, citing
ethnic violence in Xinjiang and Uighur terrorist attacks elsewhere.
Beijing has thrown hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and others in
Xinjiang into re-education camps.
Government
procurement documents from the past two years also show demand has
spread. In the city of Yongzhou in southern Hunan Province, law
enforcement officials sought software to “characterize and search
whether or not someone is a Uighur,” according to one document.
In
two counties in Guizhou Province, the police listed a need for Uighur
classification. One asked for the ability to recognize Uighurs based on
identification photos at better than 97 percent accuracy. In the central
megacity of Chongqing and the region of Tibet, the police put out
tenders for similar software. And a procurement document for Hebei Province described how the police should be notified when multiple Uighurs booked the same flight on the same day.
A study in 2018 by the authorities described a use for other types of databases. Co-written by a Shanghai police official, the paper
said facial recognition systems installed near schools could screen for
people included in databases of the mentally ill or crime suspects.
One database generated by Yitu software and reviewed
by The Times showed how the police in the city of Sanmenxia used
software running on cameras to attempt to identify residents more than
500,000 times over about a month beginning in mid-February.
Included
in the code alongside tags like “rec_gender” and “rec_sunglasses” was
“rec_uygur,” which returned a 1 if the software believed it had found a
Uighur. Within the half million identifications the cameras attempted to
record, the software guessed it saw Uighurs 2,834 times. Images stored
alongside the entry would allow the police to double check.
Yitu
and its rivals have ambitions to expand overseas. Such a push could
easily put ethnic profiling software in the hands of other governments,
said Jonathan Frankle, an A.I. researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“I don’t think it’s overblown to treat this as an existential threat to democracy,” Mr. Frankle said. “Once a country adopts a model in this heavy authoritarian mode, it’s using data to enforce thought and rules in a much more deep-seated fashion than might have been achievable 70 years ago in the Soviet Union. To that extent, this is an urgent crisis we are slowly sleepwalking our way into.”An undercover police officer in Kashgar.
An undercover police officer in Kashgar.
Paul Mozur is a Shanghai-based technology reporter. He writes about Asia’s biggest tech companies, as well as cybersecurity, emerging internet cultures, censorship and the intersection of geopolitics and technology in Asia. He previously worked for The Wall Street Journal. @paulmozur
The 2019 measles media campaign is off to a great start!
We are excited to tell you about all the important pieces of our Measles Media Campaign but first, let’s cover the ground rules, and this will serve to help us understand the logic behind the measles campaign.
Pick a topic known for debate, CHECK.
Pick a topic without any clear winners in a debate. CHECK.
Spam it across the news & social media. CHECK.
Generate more content than anyone can handle. CHECK.
Wow, it’s on facebook, linkedin…
It helps vaccine companies, profit. CHECK.
Measles on the news – but WHY
Lots of excitement in the air the past few days, that’s because every major news company, the media companies that are “for profit” and owned by biased political parties. Those guys/gals are starting to dump measles stories to the top of their website.
From a digital marketing perspective, most people aren’t really talking about WHY this is happening and I’m sure there’s plenty of reasoning for or against, I just want to point out one tiny factoid.
Doctors, nurses, everyone at the hospital is a benefactor to success of this media campaign.
Now, you have a bunch of highly intelligent people, who are dependent on this money funnel to pay for X, Y, Z… And willing to debate.
Maybe I’m wrong, but you’re not hear for me to tell you I may be completely full of shit, but so are you, and you have to be crazy not to think you are a little full of shit.
That’s what these media companies are betting on too.
Everyone will become a know it all, and someone will think they know a little bit more, and take the time to enlighten them. Then someone else says something, and BOOM. We got a viral media campaign that is ONLY a sales funnel.
Wow, vaccines, healthcare, and news that pushes people to get more vaccines and healthcare…
Ahh, I need this vaccine after reading 10% of these media campaigns.
They hire a writer, the writer has been working on this post, and getting quotes from doctors, for months. Months before these stories got any air, why weren’t you concerned about measles? Because media wasn’t telling you that you needed to be concerned.
Wait wait… I want to get back to this logic…
If I look at this like a sales funnel,… Oh my, it is a sales funnel, and it has every quality and characteristic of a sales funnel but yet, we do not consider these topics to be a part of a sales pitch!
That seems ODD.
When I was building my tableau consulting company, the second time, I learned a lot about digital marketing and fake content used to drive traffic OR distract people from more important events…
Wow, a measles scare. CHECK.
OMG RUN FOR THE HILLS.
But wait, the logic is… you want to talk about something, and have a solution.
You built a blog post, and you funnel me through the FEAR, and explain the solution…
And you’re telling me you’re 100% disconnected from ANY profit…
Sounds like a funnel, a profit funnel, a spammy profit funnel that looks like bullshit.
Today, Measles is on LinkedIn, Facebook, and many more social platforms. Below, you won’t find a path forward, rather it’s talking about, WHY Measles media is on your feed and logically talking through the profit funnel everyone seems to be missing.
Why is Measues on my linkedin today…
It’s because the vaccine company is going to earn more money than the 99% of you will ever understand. Period. The end. Nothing more.
Stop pretending.
99% of the population, who are not insanely rich, are the only people talking about this topic right now. So, wake up fam.
As you you may or may not understand or know, today, the top 1% of the population controls all of the wealth in the world, and they also control media. 90% of media is owned by 6 companies, the illusion of choice is obvious but that’s if you don’t care to study who owns what.
Most people don’t care to see where media companies align politically, and that’s why citizens united just purchased the presidency right from under our noses. Not my nose, my nose was running around trying to tell everyone what’s happening, the lies being told, but no one wanted to listen. Yet, here we are, talking about a topic people are all willing to be the local village expert or idiot.
Not done talking politics just yet…
You might think, “oh man, Obama was dope, I miss Obama today..” But did you know Obama allowed citizens united to happen? Do you care that the top 1% can legally buy the election?
They literally buy votes, legally.
And are causing a lot of the fear you will see today, and tomorrow. Measles will come and go like the wind, and tomorrow it will be another big problem that doesn’t speak of the corruption… Sad…
Sad mostly because if you actually googled how to cure the measles, you would laugh your ass off.
If you google about measles, you can easily find the cure, it is as easy as relaxing, resting, drinking water, and taking vitamins.
Googling it, you find false narratives like…
The number of measles cases in the United States has significantly dropped in recent decades due to immunizations. However, the disease has not been completely eliminated. In fact, there were 189 cases of measles in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The truth is not immunizations, that can’t be the truth because there is no way of studying causations with correlations, which is the exact argument people use to say non-vaccine people are wrong!
The truth is – technology, education, knowledge and facts evolve.
Fear, is created. Similar to vaccines. Created for a reason, to profit.
Vaccines are profitable if people fear the disease. Ergo, fear it.
A vaccine can not contribute to the drop in measles, only opinionated people can say that and they are also going to argue the exact same thing if you try to prove them wrong so – stop. Just stop right now.
Both parties, are arguing the exact same logic, and it’s another peanut butter and jelly topic.
Measles got you raging?
You’re not sick, you’re human, you passionate about the topic and have something to say…
But… I have to tell you what just happened – before you haul off and pay the man…
How about you wash your damn hands when you go out, and stop falling victim to profit media campaigns.
Did you share the story? Did you get blocked by a friend yet? You probably have seen a few arguments happen today because of the measles media campaign.
You’re falling victim to Fear media.
You probably didn’t know the political campaign of Trump took a MAJOR impact the past few days, weeks, months, literally badges are kicking down doors…
They need to distract their core following, and they know their following. They know they are anti vaccinators and they will be very busy with this story instead of reading about…
Chances are, no one will read it, it’s long and talks about how the Trump campaign logically used illegal activities to do stuff but if you can’t read it, why should I give you a cliff note, it’s likely one of the most important things to happen in politics and it has received literally no news since it happened because in our country, politics controls the news, and everyone will share this vaccine scare instead! If you’re one of those low lives who isn’t a billionaire and thinks media isn’t biased political pieces of crap, then you did not pay attention to the elections or US history.
That’s the end game for Trump campaign, push media that doesn’t negatively impact his campaign and distracts his following from keeping up the online troll factory of “you’re the problem, not me.”
Seems smart really, if you break it down… Trump’s core followers are anti-VX people, and so was Trump, during his campaign. So this particular topic, having a massive media sprawl, and no one wants to point out the elephant in the room?
Measles cure is the same as if you had a flu or cold, so why is media acting like it’s the end of time? Ah right, profit and distractions.
Measles resembles a common flu/cold, and can be cured the exact same way too.
It’s not the 1700’s – we will not see a major loss because of the measles.
It’s not a complex problem and we have solved it without media campaigns for 100’s of years, it wasn’t until recently that companies realized they could profit from vaccines and also control the media in a way that makes it seem like it’s legit news. Because when you look at it, it’s a legit reporter, doing their job, to report and read a teleprompter. If you think they are in control of their output, you are probably working through a lot of cognitive dissonance, I feel for you, I too have my own problems with cognitive dissonance.
We will see a lot of media because they can afford it, every hour someone is scared, running to the doctor to get a vaccine that spend MONEY.
That MONEY is going into the hands of big pharma. That’s all that’s happening.
Vaccine talk is where you get the crazy people who are passionate about the topics, openly speaking about the data and research they have gained from hours if not YEARS of research.
SO WHY THE F*** do we care about measles?
Because people are getting RETIREMENT rich, with this one tiny media sprint.
If you’re re-sharing, or talking about it, you’re a part of a few people buying a yacht.
DON’T PRETEND THIS NEWS IS NEWS.
OH really? This is news? Something you can cure, by googling it…
So this entire BLURB isn’t going to increase the stock price of some big pharma company, and they don’t have their hand in the pockets of every person in the industry?
Sure, these companies don’t have lobbyists, they are non-profit, looking out for their customers, they care about checks and balances and would NEVER hire someone to keep them out of trouble and would never want national press about measles.
Why would they hide dangerous information about children being harmed, that’s not great news!!!
Okay, sure, I forgot vaccines are completely free and have no negative side effects.
I’m sure health professionals love this kind of bullshit. Getting billionaires more billions because they pump a little bit of news, when they could be focusing on the political corruption, they could be focusing on homeless ness, they could be focusing on anything else but instead they are focusing on the measles and the majority of everyone you know, helped surface that “for profit” media campaign.
They helped by sharing a sales funnel, packed into a very argumentative conversation.
Hospitals love telling people what to do…
Just as much as they love telling women to avoid birthing centers and forcing them through their pregnancy, just so you can push a bunch of chemicals into their child.
After having a kid, learning about the business of being born, and also studying up on vaccines. It was easy to learn that a lot of these ad campaigns are only to generate profit, to piss people off and make them share, chat, comment, like, argue, debate, and that’s why every single ARTICLE is covered from head to toe with ad space.
That’s not to keep the lights on, that’s because they are going to earn millions off of a story that should have no impact to our news/media but because it drives millions of people to the hospital, to drive tens of millions of dollars back to the vaccine company, who really benefits when we come together and can’t find a simple thing to agree on.
That’s the key though, these companies don’t want us to agree, they don’t want us to come together with a factual opinion about anything because facts do not profit, facts do not sell news papers, facts do NOT move the needle in media.
So what’s next?
Regrettably, we are all programmed to be trigger happy because of all of the corruption that’s right in our face, factual information is available in simple API’s, but who knows how to work those things?
So now, we are all quick to jump into witch hunts, and spend hours of time helping billionaires get more rich.
I noticed one key thing in all the arguments about vaccine/non-vx… they are people, arguing with people, and none of them are billionaires.
The arguing is driving more traffic, more fear, and less facts into the problems we are facing, which is pretty clear… profit fueled media campaigns.
Hey LinkedIn.com?
Less corrupt media, PLEASE.
Clean up your act.
This has nothing to do with anyones professional career and because it’s completely corrupt and for profit, I feel LinkedIn is in on the money if it’s able to break through their trending media feed.
Which stands to say, they are in on the take too.
Which isn’t surprising, their core founders like getting on their political tower, only to be cut down at the knee by people with less to benefit by political parties.
If LinkedIN.com is now a source of bullshit, where will the average professional navigate towards?
Facebook is trending down, snapchat just had another huge PR push to save their stock price, and here we are with linkedin.com, starting to cover the twisted media stream built to help vaccine companies earn more stupid money off of misguided people.
Where do you stand on this topic? Do you see the connections?
