Chinese authorities in the far western region of Xinjiang are detaining suspects flagged by predictive software that combines data on everything from security camera footage to health and banking records, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said yesterday.
A subsidiary of China Electronics Technology Group in 2016 announced that it would start working with the Xinjiang government to combat extremism by collating data on the behavior of citizens and flagging unusual activity to the authorities.
Some people targeted by the system have been detained or sent to “political education centers” as part of the region’s security campaign, according to the HRW report, which cites official announcements and two unidentified sources who have seen the program in operation.
“For the first time, we are able to demonstrate that the Chinese government’s use of big data and predictive policing not only blatantly violates privacy rights, but also enables officials to arbitrarily detain people,” said Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based researcher at HRW.
Reuters was unable to independently verify HRW’s claims. Neither the Xinjiang government nor the Chinese Ministry of Public Security responded to requests for comment.
A similar design of predictive security software is also being rolled out in other regions of China, but surveillance is more intrusive in Xinjiang and there are fewer protections for suspects due to government concerns about unrest, she said.
Waves of violence have rocked Xinjiang in recent years, largely fueled by tensions between the Han majority and the mostly Muslim Uighur minority who call the region home.
Although it is unclear whether the system explicitly targets Uighurs, forms to gather information for the program asked about religious practice and overseas travel, Wang said.
Official reports about the program say it has helped police catch criminals guilty of petty theft and illegal financial dealings, as well as to find Uighur officials who are disloyal to the Chinese Communist Party.
The “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” pushes lists of people of interest to the police for investigation by crunching data from closed-circuit television cameras, ID card checks and Wi-Fi connections of phones and computers, as well as health, banking and legal records.
These lists are meant to be acted upon by measures, including face-to-face visits within a day, state media reports say. The exact algorithm for weighting the various factors was unclear.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS