5-16-19 The 97% drop in refugee numbers escaping Tibet is due to new technology which has allowed China to build a nearly impassable digital and securitized border wall along its southern and western borders. In Tibet, and also in Xinjiang, the homeland of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims which has become a widely reported technological dystopia, the border is patrolled by drones, cameras and an interconnected system that allows soldiers to rapidly monitor – and apprehend – any Tibetan, Uyghur or Kazakh attempting to flee. The digital wall also prevents the vast majority from even trying….
Cities like Lhasa now have comprehensive networks of CCTV cameras and numerous checkpoints, allowing authorities to keep track of all those who enter and leave. More recently, police stations and CCTV cameras with facial recognition technology have spread to villages in the countryside, especially along the border.
“In Lhasa alone there are more than 600 convenience police stations,” said Tsultrim, who said increasing numbers of security staff are being sent to rural areas. “In recent year, more than 21,000 officials were sent to the countryside around [Tibet].” This is in addition to at least 12,000 security staff working primarily in urban areas.
In fact since 2008 the ability of Tibetans to even move across the country has worsened. Tibetans now need to get permission to visit, for example, Lhasa, and according to sources, numerous checkpoints exist around cities and at borders between neighboring districts and provinces. Surveillance and facial recognition technologies can also identify when Tibetans are outside of their home areas, further impeding their ability to reach the border….
More challenges await those Tibetans who finally reach the border. China Daily, a government newspaper, reported on the deployment of a Chinese-made integrated frontier monitoring system with advanced radars, acoustic monitoring devices, and drones. A spokesperson said that anyone trying to cross the border would be detected by the system, which automatically notifies soldiers.
China has also deployed GGJ-2 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that can operate at high altitude for up to 20 hours along both the Tibet and Xinjiang borders, designed to monitor and, if necessary, conduct offensive activities in regions where troops cannot be stationed. …
In just over a decade Tibet has been cut off from the world, both physically and digitally. The most visible sign of this digital apartheid is along the heavily controlled border. In late 2017 the Kerung border crossing between Nepal and Tibet re-opened, after being closed for more than two years due to damage caused by an earthquake in 2015. While the border remains open, Tibetans rarely cross. Instead traffic mostly consists of Chinese travelers and business-people entering Nepal. “Before 2008, there were lots of Tibetans escaping from Tibet to Nepal, but now its Chinese who are flourishing in Nepal,” said Dalha. On a recent visit to the area, he noted that many signs were in Chinese, and that several Nepali shopkeepers could speak basic Chinese. A crossing that once connected Tibet with South Asia now connects China with Nepal. https://codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/china-digital-wall-tibet/
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5-9-19 In early 2016 police began making routine checks on Atawula’s home. Her husband was regularly called to the police station. The police informed him they were suspicious of his WeChat activity--
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Moreover, it's worth noting that many of the companies that are deeply complicit in these activities have been quite actively expanding globally, including pursuing partnerships with Western companies and universities in the process.
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8-24-18 The MIT-SenseTime Alliance on Artificial Intelligence, a program within the MIT Quest for Intelligence, has announced funding for 27 projects involving about 50 principal investigators from departments and labs within engineering, science, architecture and planning, management, and the humanities and social sciences.
SenseTime, a leading artificial intelligence company founded by MIT alumnus Xiao’ou Tang PhD ’96, jointly created the alliance with MIT earlier this year to define the next frontier of human and machine intelligence. http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-sensetime-alliance-funds-projects-human-machine-intelligence-0824
( the next frontier after Xinjiang and Tibet, it seems).
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Xinjiang Tangli Technology Co., Ltd. develops artificial intelligence based security products. The company was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Urumqi, China. Xinjiang Tangli Technology Co., Ltd. operates as a former subsidiary of Shenzhen SenseTime Science Tech Limited. As of April 15, 2019, Xinjiang Tangli Technology Co., Ltd. operates as a subsidiary of Leon Technology Co., Ltd. https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=607759585
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4-16-19 SenseTime, China’s surveillance giant, has offered up a fig leaf. The company says it has exited a police technology venture in Xinjiang, a western region where government efforts to crush Muslim extremism have put over a million Uighurs in re-education camps. The deal may ease some PR risk before a mooted offshore flotation, but the $6 billion startup still sells facial recognition software to security forces. Monday’s move provides foreign backers like Fidelity International with only thin reputational cover.…
But SenseTime and its peers still sell tools that enable the some of the worst tendencies of Chinese officialdom. They will almost certainly export to questionable regimes abroad too. SenseTime’s investors get to wash Xinjiang off their hands, but there is sure to be plenty of dirt left over. -Pete Sweeny …
In July last year, SenseTime also shed its 49% stake in SenseNets, a facial recognition firm it had helped found in 2015.
Victor Gevers, co-founder of non-profit organisation GDI.Foundation, tweeted in February that an online database belonging to SenseNets containing names, ID card numbers, birth dates and location data was left unprotected for months. The exposed data also showed about 6.7 million location points linked to people, tagged with descriptions such as “mosque”, “hotel”, “internet cafe” and other places where surveillance cameras were likely to be found.
Instead of going on the offensive over the Gevers tweet, SenseNets has adopted a different approach and remained silent. A call to the company’s general phone number listed on its website was answered by a female representative who said the company does not have anyone in charge of media relations and there was no need for an interview. -South China Morning Post’s Li Tao
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4-18-19 Every year since 2015 China has ranked last in the annual Freedom on the Net Index.8 The CCP has made no secret of its desire to export its concepts of internet and information ‘sovereignty’,9 as well as cyber censorship,10 around the world.11 Consistent with that directive, this research shows that Chinese companies are playing a role in aiding surveillance and providing sophisticated public security technologies and expertise to authoritarian regimes and developing countries that face challenges to their political stability, governance and rule of law….
Sometimes, the relevance and significance of the CCP’s presence within technology companies is dismissed or trivialised as merely equivalent to the presence of government relations or human resources departments in Western corporations. However, the CCP’s expectations of these committees is clear.22 The CCP’s constitution states that a Party organisation ‘shall be formed in any enterprise … and any other primary-level work unit where there are three or more full party members’.23 Article 32 outlines their responsibilities, which include encouraging everyone in the company to ‘consciously resist unacceptable practices and resolutely fight against all violations of Party discipline or state law’. Article 33 states that Party committees inside state-owned enterprises are expected to ‘play a leadership role, set the right direction, keep in mind the big picture, ensure the implementation of Party policies and principles, and discuss and decide on major issues of their enterprise in accordance with regulations’.24…
The CCP recognises the threat posed by an open internet to its grip on power—and, conversely, the opportunities that dominance over global cyberspace could offer by extending that control.33
In a 2017 article published in one of the most important CCP journals, officials from the Cyber Administration of China (the top Chinese internet regulator) wrote about the need to develop controls so that ‘the Party’s ideas always become the strongest voice in cyberspace.’34 This includes enhancing the ‘global influence of internet companies like Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu [and] Huawei’ and striving ‘to push China’s proposition of internet governance toward becoming an international consensus’….
Many of the companies covered in this report collaborate with foreign universities on the same kinds of technologies they’re using to support surveillance and human rights abuses in China. For example, CETC—which has a research partnership with the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Manchester and the Graz Technical University in Austria—and its subsidiary Hikvision are deeply implicated in the crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang. CETC has been providing police in Xinjiang with a centralised policing system that draws in data from a vast array of sources, such as facial recognition cameras and databases of personal information. https://www.aspi.org.au/report/mapping-chinas-tech-giants
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