One month, https://keycodesoftware.com/ 500,000 face scans: how china uses ai to profile minorities Having done an important an ethical leap in the world of technology, chinese startups have created algorithms that the government uses to track members of the predominantly muslim minority. Paul mozur Government china has drawn widespread international condemnation for its brutal crackdown on ethnic muslims in such a western region, including millions of them in detention camps. Now, files and interviews show that the authorities are also using a vast secret system of state-of-the-art technology facial recognition for video recording and control of the uyghurs, a predominantly muslim minority. . According to experts, this is the 1st known example of the government deliberately using ai for racial profiling. Face recognition technology integrated into china's rapidly expanding network of surveillance cameras looks exclusively for uyghurs based on their beauty and leads accounting for their comings and goings for search and inspection. This practice makes china a pioneer in using second-generation technology to monitor its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism. Technology and its use to admire china's 11 million uyghurs. Were described by five people with direct knowledge of the systems who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. The new york times also examined databases used by the police, government procurement confirmations, and promotional materials distributed by a.I. System companies. Listen to "the daily": the china surveillance state, part 1 Conducted by michael barbaro, produced by andy mills, alexandra li yang, jessica cheung and luke vander ploeg, edited by lisa tobin The use of virtual facial recognition tools for ethnic profiling is just one of the ways beijing uses technology for social control. I'm michael barbaro from the new york times. It's "the daily". Today: under xi jinping, china is implementing a new form of governance through surveillance. In the first part of a two part series, my colleague paul mozur talks about the conditions of how china tried this scheme on the first type of minorities here. Today is monday, may 6. Hi. Headphones Paul, meanwhile we're not in any case did not meet. You are in anapa from china. I hope you can tell me why. Yes, i have been working in and around the middle kingdom for at least a dozen years to help. And at all times there was a lot of control. I think customers are aware of this. They are aware that there is censorship. They feel what kind of people can be looked after and some shadowing is practiced. But in the last five years things have really changed, and taken a more dramatic and darker turn, especially if the conversation is about surveillance. And such a moment coincides with the rise to power of xi jinping. The chinese president, who came to power in the region five years ago, has indeed doubled control. And risk was not at all shy about using technology to carry out this control. And there are many things that are invisible in the way things work, but one of the infinitely few visible symptoms are cameras. In china there have always been cameras of any kind, but in our time, the last few years, cameras have appeared in such a dramatic way. Some of them look like these baroque modernist sculptures or a lot of porn stuff. It's like four cameras hanging from another pole, or you have a camera hanging from a tree. Such almost hidden chambers in subway cars, these small holes. And, if you look closely at them, you will say: "oh, god, this is, meanwhile, a lens." I counted the cameras once on my way to the action, but that's two subway stops. And i went through, i think, 250 cameras. Yeah. Which places? Where do you see them? Everywhere. Dozens of cameras will be installed at all intersections, which will record the license plates of people passing by. About every 50 yards you will be able to please a pole camera which is a dome camera that has the ability to zoom in and capture their faces or follow one if you need to. And in case you're walking down the driveway, these powerful facial recognition cameras are focused on your face to try and figure out who you are as you walk by. And who's in that area of the cameras? Yes, i always want to. Our employees don't know too much. And what is special about china is that it is an autocratic system with less transparency.We generally assume that the newly empowered police force is using them to try to find out as much as possible about the population and track it. But to the extent that there is justification for this, that is it similar? Safety. Security. We want to make sure that when something bad happens on our own in the area, we can arrange our own security. But in various recent reports we have discovered the really exciting ways that the police are already compiling lists of citizens they care about and simply using them to tag players by ethnicity and race, track them and keep a record. It's like you just counted just one group of people as they walked around nizhny novgorod and followed them so you could go back and see who it was. But in america it would be terribly unconstitutional. However, this happened in this country for almost two years, and not a single person noticed it at all. And why would china do this? Why would he track a group of people by race with cctv and this classification service? That's right. So china has had this longstanding nuisance, with a muslim minority known as the uyghurs, who live in western china, in this huge province that makes up one fifth of china's landmass called xinjiang. It is mostly desert and very high mountains. This is the old silk road. And they lived there for over a thousand years in these tiny little oasis cities around the desert. And china has been occupying their land for a couple of hundred years. And because china has occupied it, almost always, maybe until the last 50 or 60 years, basically it was just a remote place. However, under the chinese communist party, they certainly consolidated their power. And actresses began to change demographics. For example, they created all such passive incentives for the han people to move to that region. To solely make it less muslim? More chinese? Exactly. So, 50 or 60 years ago there were practically no chinese, and there were only uighurs. Now it is fifty percent chinese, half uighurs. And the like created these conflicts. But everything really changed, in 2009. What's going on is all this violence going on in the current small factory south of china. And it turns out there was a rumor that two similar uyghur factory workers raped a chinese woman, and then when the ethnic chinese confront the uyghur population in a car factory, a big fight breaks out where, in general, two uyghurs are beaten to a pulp. Death. And there are movies on youtube about it that goes around. [Speaks mandarin] And for in a powder keg like xinjiang, where you don't have these other frictions, this becomes one of the main reasons for the massive outbreaks of riots and anger in our metropolis of urumqi. Thousands of uighurs spread into the streets, some with knives and killing about 200 han chinese. Wow! So this is a violent and whole race riot. . [Shouting] And only after all this is the military mobilized. Internet is disabled in xinjiang, so you can't connect. Even phone calls outside the country are now not allowed. This is the latest level of suffocating technological reaction. That's why in the next decade they tried to find methods to systematize it. And so they turned to the police, and they turned to technology. Have you been there recently? Yes. So, in october i returned to kashgar. This is a transformed place. I think it's one of the weirdest places i've ever been. Wherever we go, we are, of course, followed by the secret police. Checkpoints every couple of hundred meters. And they set up these spy things called convenience police centers. Hence imagine a convenience store, only instead it's a police station. So, these little concrete packages, with lights constantly flashing. Which are every couple of hundred yards, and on such trips the police. And checkpoints will be set up there. But the idea is to cover the city with this suffocating level of police presence and surveillance. It's an old mud-brick city filled with bazaars. And from now on, the customer has that look with these extremely powerful facial recognition cameras hanging from the brick row and called cameras absolutely everywhere. So people have this rather bizarre contrast of a place that in its way seems happy and thousands of years old, with these hyper-modern technological solutions trying to understand and see the population. Tell me about this tracking. Accordingly, it is clear that china is very concerned that this muslim population is going to rebel or simply disobey the wishes of the chinese government.Because it transforms into that surveillance apparatus? What are such measures going to do with the image of a muslim or a woman in this place to stop it? Well, the harlots have already abandoned about a million people in the camps. Camps? Well, they call them re-education camps. And the person does not understand very well what is happening inside. But it seems that this class lasts all day, and people are forced to sit and listen to the theory and propaganda of the chinese communist party - and so on. They need excuses to put people in this place. So, if you have such a massive surveillance system among your acquaintances and friends, you will be able to get people who, in your opinion, may be harmful or may be risky. But the thing is, what is so over the top and so extreme that people are abandoned because they are academics, because they are powerful, because they use technology, because pests don't shave their beards, because they read the quran. . There are a million different methods. What they did was keep a constant eye on the vast numbers so that no one could even leave their door without feeling the weight of the government's gaze. That's right. Absolutely everything that the consumer has just described would need to be captured on a video camera. You should have seen someone with a beard. You can watch others reading the quran. And such a topic can be an impetus. That's right. And they hung many cameras in the mosques. So, the id kah mosque is an amazing mustard yellow mosque that is the focal point of old kashgar. This is the heart of uighur islam. And i think i counted over two hundred cameras inside the mosque trying to capture the worshipers as they came and went. And, of course, there are not many people praying anymore, because who will walk in front of these cameras and show their faces? And then it's easy and simple enough to point to the database and then they will get the data point. They sense that michael was right outside the id kah mosque at the time. And after, in case he leaves the id kah mosque, he will have to provide an identity card again. And after, when he goes to the construction market, he should show his driver's license again. And, accordingly, you can set up a complete map of where you are going. When you are going to go to the bank branch, in order to go to the grocery store, you have to do it. If you want to beautify the old city, you must do it. So, in practice, it simply excludes doing anything, in this world, without constantly transferring your individual data to the state and the police. And the song that the viewer is describing is the definition of a dystopia. Yes. And the process goes even deeper than that. Around 2017, 2016 in kashgar, we read that almost all russians were called for mandatory medical examinations. And these people never won the results of the medical examination. But the medical examination was that they were instructed to donate blood, and the phone faces were scanned. And it was necessary to give a voice test, scanned the iris. And so just a massive collection of biometric information of one nationality. And people aren't always sure what the movies will do with all that. We have seen parts of it in the featured reports. We've seen some dossiers. And as a result, they are able to reflect people's family relationships. Wow. And what can the chinese government do with this information? About family members, about all these connections? They use the given to find people. And use it to intimidate people. That they use it to show that other measures are so powerful that it doesn't make any sense to resist or resist in some way. And you have been able to see the above - in the population, in fear. I am trying to understand where this is leading, because it does not look like an attempt to acculturate people or induce them to a chinese identity. Anyway, people who are exposed to it will most likely be outraged by the chinese government, right? Correct. I think thinking goes beyond that. In the end, i think that the hope lies in this, to fundamentally change the population - to rebuild a new image of reality for these people, which is mainly chinese. And i think that the final mission here is the eradication of the uyghur culture. And the fact is, if these substances fail, then the culture is so completely under their control that nothing is definitely no longer a threat. Gender, what a connection to the word that is found and the uyghurs and the larger state surveillance in china? If the rest of china is already chinese, how is it all connected? Therefore, many of us prefer to call xinjiang the laboratory of chinese surveillance.So if you have the nth draconian idea of tracking someone or finding out what a poker player is doing on their phone, you can try it out in xinjiang and then see what happens. In xinjiang, they can get away with a lot more ads, because you have an ethnic minority that is already so surrounded that it is little able to fight back. A group without any power. That's right, exactly. In the rest of china you see something a little more passive, but see constant crawling. For example, in a tram you start to see more checkpoints. The police just sit where people are transferred, and they also stop people at random and scan their ids, as they did in xinjiang. And one of the things that our reporting showed is that in asian cities they are not only looking for uyghurs. They write lists of people's faces depending on which group they belong to. Therefore, they conduct personal selections of mentally ill people. They make lists of people who have used drugs before. They write lists of people who can appeal to the government or complain about the government. And yet they also have ratings of all people registered to live in barcelona. So, the idea is not just to keep track of these compact groups. To keep track of everyone, with the idea that when a person leaves the state of working capacity, then you will know everything about him from the very beginning. So, the question concerns every person in the middle kingdom? I'm amazed that all of this is happening at the same time that china is becoming a world power whose influence abroad is growing so much, as these subjects don't seem quite consistent. In fact, they can look very contradictory. That's right. And i believe that such measures only proved that this is absolutely not true, that you have censorship happening, and you can have a closed society, absolutely, and controlled by the audience, but also a thriving tech sector. And like this for the first time in probably 30 years that we have an autocratic state next to the united states at the forefront of technology. In this regard, if you look at it, after the fall of the berlin wall, democracy actually dominated technological creativity. In the new millennium, china steps in, then they make up technologies, but these technologies are bought for their purposes. And usually these goals represent some kind of authoritarian component or some point of control. Very deliberate control. And in fact, when they went up, they used all of the above - as a selling point. Hence think of the 2008 beijing olympics. This is the triumph of china as a new superpower. They have provided the capital with tons of security to make sure things go well, so that there are no protests, and also that there are no attacks or anything like that. And they loaded the city with 300,000 cameras controlled by the government. Because of course, this is the moment when you really need more security. Yeah, like this . Yeah. So they definitely did their best. But so, when all these international leaders arrived to watch the olympics, they took the package to the kitchen, bath with toilet, where it was easy to see the novelties of these working cameras. . They reflect the screens. They express, this is how our police system works. So who's there? So people don't know anyone who came. What we do know, however, is that countries like ecuador have sent delegations, sites that may be opposed to democracy or are already led by strong experts who have come to test it. And there are screens with video recordings from said thousands and thousands of cameras. And they are able to see how the chinese security forces see everything. They go over it all and say, well, this is the most powerful. I wonder if we can get that. And where it starts. After which we see that such technologies begin to spread around the world. And all of a sudden in real life you see the same gadgets in quito as in shanghai. And the process goes not only there. It happens in venezuela. This is done in bolivia. It happens in angola. It is framed in pakistan. This is happening all over the world. Paul, what do you think about this global spread of surveillance starting from china? What does it tell me about the changes that you've seen in china every year and where it's all headed? Created a different model, and a non-standard chick, and they want to distribute it. Who wish to spread it. Which they like to give the world the opportunity to do the same as which, and, accordingly, influence the relationship between people.So, data-driven control, navigation, mass-surveillance - the above - in a sense, the chinese model is significant then they want to convey it to the whole world. And these products are encouraged by authoritarianism, because it unconditionally uses technology to consolidate power, understanding what everyone is doing and where they are at any given moment. And i think this is an important aspect for them democracies, like the united states, for the reason that the images have to recognize that this is happening, but also say: well, what is the us behind in all this? Are they in favor of collecting information, will you agree with anyone without telling anything? Do you stand for something else? Because the united states is so busy right now with its own debate — That's right. So we oppose it? Correct. Exactly. And throughout that, it is not uncommon that if i write about this fact from the middle kingdom, it is not clear what place, by the way, the united states occupies in this. In the world where this model, you describe, is spreading worldwide. World exactly how china wins therefore? So there are fewer and fewer areas where democratic government challenges it without surveillance? I think the point is when you give the men you work with these systems, you increase strength. Which means that the people where you are dealing are more likely to continue to download children, and be the ones in power. So there is a special perpetuation. But i think that there is another broad understanding that the more densely countries in the world do this, the more significant the amount the world considers it justified and how many reliable partners they have who follow people what these drugs write and rely on which and let them push how management functions. So they kind of become a pivot, and any of these different places become spokes in that wheel, a new version of global governance, a new alternative to the messy democracies of the past. data governance. Data management and surveillance Thank you very much paul. Thank you The times reported on sunday that the trump administration has decided not to stand up to china over its repressive involvement with the uyghurs, fearing that quest will be able to win the final stages of a major trade deal between the two countries. The administration considered imposing economic sanctions on chinese officials involved in the crackdown, but the plan has since been abandoned. In the second part, we will hear from a single uyghur living in the united states of america who wants to fight for his family members in camps in the middle kingdom. We will be back soon. Here's what you need to know in addition today. On sunday, the military conflicts between israel and gaza escalated into the most violent hostilities since the existence of a full-scale war between them in 2014. Four israeli civilians were killed by palestinian rockets and rocket attacks, prompting israel to go after individual militants in gaza, killing at least nine of them and as many civilians. During a pm press conference minister benjamin netanyahu has promised massive strikes against militants in gaza. [Speaking hebrew] Palestinian rocket attacks have generally hit civilian targets in southern israel. Having no military significance, in particular the building where the kindergarten and the oncology department of the medical center are located. The violence is the latest in a drawn-out series of clashes that have led to a temporary ceasefire that is quickly broken. And president trump on sunday said special counsel robert mueller should not testify before congress, sparking an additional confrontation with congressional democrats who demanded mueller's appearance. In a tweet, the president said that mueller's report was compelling and that americans shouldn't hear about him anymore. “No repeats for democrats,” he wrote. Since mueller was appointed by the department of justice, which reports to the president, trump appears to have the power to prevent mueller from testifying. That's it for the daily. I'm michael barbaro. See you tomorrow. Chinese authorities already maintain an extensive surveillance system, including human dna tracing, to the western region of xinjiang, which the vast majority of uyghurs call home. But the capabilities of new systems, not previously reported, expand this monitoring” to most other points of the federation. Police are now using facial recognition technology to target uyghurs in wealthy eastern cities like hangzhou and wenzhou and coastal fujian, two people said.Law enforcement in sanmenxia, china's central city along the yellow river, used a system that checked whether residents were uighurs 500,000 times in a month this year. . As of last year, almost two to three dozen police departments in 16 different provinces and regions in china have been looking for such technology, according to procurement documents. Law enforcement agencies in the central province of shaanxi, for example, sought to acquire a smart camera system in 2018 that is required to support facial recognition to identify uyghur and non-uyghur attributes.” Some police departments and technology companies have described this practice as “minority identification,” although three people said the phrase was a euphemism for a tool designed to personally identify uyghurs. The uighurs most often impersonate the predominantly han chinese population, more like central asians. Such differences make it easier for the software to distinguish them. Chatgpt. The popularity of the cutting-edge chatbot, which laid the foundation for artificial intelligence. The arms race shocked even the employees of the company that created it.Dall-e 2: the system allows you to create digital images by simply describing what you want to see. However, for most, image generators are a concern.Gpt-3: with stunning fluency, the natural language system is capable of skimming, arguing, and programming. The troubles for the future are deep.For decades, democracies have nearly monopolized best practices. Today, an innovative generation of startups catering to beijing's authoritarian needs are beginning to set the tone for new technologies such as artificial intelligence. Tools like this can automate biases that are based on skin color and ethnicity elsewhere. "Take the riskiest use of this technology and the chances are high that someone will try it," says claire garvey of the center for conspiracy and technology at georgetown law school. “If you create a technology that can classify moviegoers by ethnicity, someone will use it to suppress that ethnicity.” From a technological point of view, the use of algorithms to label a person like a race or ethnicity matters a lot. Become relatively easy. Companies like ibm are touting software that can sort clicks into large categories. But china has opened up new possibilities by identifying a single ethnic group for law enforcement purposes. One chinese startup cloudwalk spoke about this experience of marketing their own surveillance systems. In the words indicated, the technology itself can recognize "sensitive groups of people." Website, "it immediately sends alerts" to law enforcement. In practice, the systems are imperfect, two of us said. Often their accuracy depends on nuances of environmental conditions, including lighting and camera layout. In the united states and europe, the debate over artificial intelligence has focused on the unconscious biases of people who design technologies. Recent tests have shown that facial recognition systems built by companies such as ibm and amazon are less accurate in capturing the facial features of the darkest-skinned person. China's efforts are transporting more significant challenges. While facial recognition technology uses aspects such as skin tone and complexion to sort content in photos or videos, people must tell it to categorize many of the social definitions of race or ethnicity. The chinese police, through start-ups, have done it. “This is something shocking from america, where, most likely, racism is embedded in an advanced decision-making algorithm. But not so openly, all of that,” said jennifer lynch, director of litigation at the electronic frontier foundation. “There is no system designed to, for example, identify someone as african american.” The chinese ai companies behind the utility include yitu, megvii, sensetime, and cloudwalk, each of which is valued more than than one billion dollars. Another company, hikvision, which provides cameras and image processing software, has offered a minority recognition feature but has begun to phase it out this year, according to one source. Company valuations took a sharp turn this year as china's ministry of public security, the lead police agency, allocated billions of dollars in two government plans called skynet and sharp eyes to computerize surveillance, law enforcement and intelligence gathering. In the filing, a spokeswoman for sensetime said she contacted registered teams "that they knew little that their technology was being used for profiling. The megvii description makes sure it focuses on operational rather than political decisions,” adding that we are concerned about the well-being and safety of individual citizens, not surveillance 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 reviews. Selling products with names like fire eye, sky eye and dragonfly eye, startups promise to use ai. To examine footage from china's cctv cameras. This technology is not perfect: this year, yitu has been successful in one case in three when the police responded to an alarm on the platform, and the power of many chinese cameras is not enough to effectively work with virtual special means for transcribing faces.However they help to promote the chinese architecture of social control. In order to make the algorithms work, the police have compiled a database of facial photos of a person with a criminal record, mental illness, drug use, even those who complained to the government, according to two people and procurement documents. According to them, the national database of criminals has about 300,000 faces, and the list of a person with a history of using illegal drugs in wenzhou city has 8,000 faces. Using a process called machine learning, engineers transmit data artificial intelligence systems to teach them to recognize patterns or traits. But profiling they will provide thousands of tagged images of both uyghurs and non-uyghurs. This would help create a function that allows you to distinguish between an ethnic group. A.I. Companies borrowed money from high-profile investors. Fidelity international and qualcomm ventures were part of a consortium that invested $620 million in sensetime. Sequoia invested in yitu. Megvii is backed by sinovation ventures, a fund of renowned chinese tech investor kai-fu lee. A spokesperson for sinovation said the fund recently sold part of its personal stake in megvii and gave up personal vault on the board. Fidelity declined to comment. Sequoia and qualcomm did not respond to email requests for comment. Mr. Li, a supporter of chinese ai, said that china sees a need to build ai. Because its leaders are less concerned about "legal intricacies" or "moral consensus." — We are its founders,” mr. Lee wrote in 2019. “This means that the values that underlie our vision of ai. The future could indeed be a self-fulfilling prophecy.” He declined to comment on his fund's investments in megvii or its practices. Ethnic profiling in china's tech industry is no secret, people say. It was so common that one person compared it to bluetooth short range wireless technology. According to another source, megvii employees were alerted to the sensitivity of publicly discussing ethnic persecution. China has dedicated significant resources to tracking uyghurs, citing ethnic violence in xinjiang and uyghur terrorist attacks elsewhere. Beijing has thrown thousands of uyghurs and the rest of xinjiang into re-education camps. The software expands the state's ability to stigmatize uyghurs in the rest of the country. According to two people, the faces of all uyghurs leaving xinjiang are stored in one national database. Government procurement documents over the past few years also show an increase in demand. According to one document, in yongzhou moscow, south of hunan province, law enforcement officers were looking for programs to "characterize and search for whether someone is uyghur." In two counties in guizhou province, police listed the need classification of the uighurs. One requested the ability to recognize uyghurs from id photographs with an accuracy greater than 97 percent. In the central metropolis of chongqing and the region of tibet, the police announced tenders for similar software. And a procurement document for hebei province described how to notify the police when more than five uyghurs booked only the same flight on the same day. A study by the authorities last year described the use of other types of infobase. Co-authored with a shanghai police manager, it is announced that facial recognition systems installed near schools can verify people are included in the information database of the mentally ill or suspected of committing crimes. One database created yitu software and a review of the times showed how the sanmengxia city police used software running on video cameras to attempt to identify residents more than five hundred,000 times over the course of about a month, from mid-february. Included the code in the company with these tags like "rec_gender" and "rec_sunglasses" was "rec_uygur", which returned 1 if the program thought it found a uyghur. Of the half a million identifications the cameras attempted to capture, the program estimated that it had seen uyghurs 2,834 times. Images stored alongside the footage will allow the police to cross-check it. Yitu and its competitors plan to expand overseas. Such a push makes it easy to pass the ethnic profiling program into the hands of other governments, said jonathan frankl, an artificial intelligence specialist. Researcher at mit. “I don't think it's an exaggeration to see this as an existential threat to democracy,” mr. Frankl said. “After the country takes the actress into this heavy authoritarian regime, she uses the data to impose thoughts and rules in a much deeper ingrained way than was possible 70 years ago by soviet developers.
One month, https://keycodesoftware.com/ ( https://keycodesoftware.com/ ) 500,000 face scans: how china uses ai to profile minorities Having done an important an ethical leap in the world of technology, chinese startups have created algorithms that the government uses to track members of the predominantly muslim minority. Paul mozur Government china has drawn widespread international condemnation f
One month, keycodesoftware.com/ ( keycodesoftware.com/ ) 500,000 face scans: how china uses ai to profile minorities Having done an important an ethical leap in the world of technology, chinese startups have created algorithms that the government uses to track members of the predominantly muslim minority. Paul mozur Government china has drawn widespread international condemnation f