China is now using facial recognition cameras to monitor Uighur Muslims across the country, report claims
China is now
using facial recognition cameras to monitor Uighur Muslims across the country,
report claims
·
Authorities in China are using AI cameras to
track its Uighur Muslim minority
·
CCTV cameras have been programmed to look for
Uighurs based on appearance
·
Beijing has long been criticised for its
treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang
Facial recognition technology - integrated into China's
huge networks of surveillance cameras - has been programmed to look exclusively
for Uighurs based on their appearance and keep records of their movements
across China, according to the report on Sunday.
Beijing has already attracted widespread criticism for
its treatment of Uighurs in the northwest region of Xinjiang, where up to one
million members of mostly Muslim Turkic-speaking minority groups are held in
internment camps, according to estimates cited by a UN panel.
Police are now reportedly using artificial intelligence
(AI) technology to target Uighurs outside Xinjiang, including in wealthy cities
like Hangzhou and Wenzhou.
The newspaper claims one central city scanned whether
residents were Uighurs 500,000 times in one month alone.
Beijing announced a plan in 2017 to become the world
leader in the AI industry. But there have been concerns in the
international community that new smart technology is being used for heavy
police surveillance in recent years after violent inter-ethnic tensions.
The Times cites experts who say this is the first known
example of a government intentionally using AI for racial profiling, with
appetite for the new systems growing in cities across the country.
In the central province of Shaanxi, authorities
reportedly 'aimed to acquire a smart camera system last year that 'should
support facial recognition to identify Uighur/non-Uighur attributes'.'
The Times says China's Ministry of Public Security did
not respond to a faxed request for comment.
Xinjiang, which shares a border with several countries
including Pakistan and Afghanistan, has long suffered from violent unrest,
which China claims is orchestrated by an organised 'terrorist' movement seeking
the region's independence.
It has implemented a massive, high-tech security
crackdown, which it says has prevented any violent incidents in over two years.
But many Uighurs and Xinjiang experts say the violent
episodes stem largely from spontaneous outbursts of anger at Chinese cultural
and religious repression, and that Beijing plays up terrorism to justify tight
control of the resource-rich region.
While it previously denied the existence of the camps,
Beijing has moved towards acknowledging their existence - but insists they are
for 'vocational education' and are vital in the fight against separatist
sentiments and religious extremism.
It has also gone on a public relations blitz since last
October in a bid to counter a global outcry against the camps by inviting
diplomats and journalists to tour the centres.
Chinese authorities in the heavily Muslim region of
Xinjiang are believed to have ensnared tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of
Muslim Chinese - and even foreign citizens - in mass internment camps since
spring last year.
Such detention campaigns have swept across Xinjiang, a
territory half the area of India, leading to what a US commission on China said
is 'the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world
today'.
Chinese officials have largely avoided comment on the
camps, but some are quoted in state media as saying that ideological changes
are needed to fight separatism and Islamic extremism.
Radical Muslim Uighurs have killed hundreds in recent
years, and China considers the region a threat to peace in a country where the
majority is Han Chinese.
The internment programme aims to rewire the political
thinking of detainees, erase their Islamic beliefs and reshape their very
identities, it is claimed. The camps have expanded rapidly over the past year,
with almost no judicial process or legal paperwork.
Detainees who most vigorously criticise the people and
things they love are rewarded, and those who refuse to do so are punished with
solitary confinement, beatings and food deprivation.
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