Beijing bets on facial recognition in a big drive for total surveillance
Democracy Dies in Darkness
China's watchful eye
Beijing bets on facial recognition in a big drive for
total surveillance
Story by Simon Denyer Photos JANUARY 7, 2018
CHONGQING, China
For 40-year-old Mao Ya, the facial recognition camera
that allows access to her apartment house is simply a useful convenience.
CCTV footage taken in Beijing uses the facial-recognition
system Face++. China, unburdened by concerns about privacy or civil rights, is
integrating private cameras and security cameras into a nationwide surveillance
system.
“If I am carrying shopping bags in both hands, I just
have to look ahead and the door swings open,” she said. “And my 5-year-old
daughter can just look up at the camera and get in. It’s good for kids because
they often lose their keys.”
But for the police, the cameras that replaced the
residents’ old entry cards serve quite a different purpose.
Now they can see who’s coming and going, and by combining
artificial intelligence with a huge national bank of photos, the system in this
pilot project should enable police to identify what one police report, shared
with The Washington Post, called the “bad guys” who once might have slipped by.
Facial recognition is the new hot tech topic in China.
Banks, airports, hotels and even public toilets are all trying to verify
people’s identities by analyzing their faces. But the police and security state
have been the most enthusiastic about embracing this new technology.
The pilot in Chongqing forms one tiny part of an
ambitious plan, known as “Xue Liang,” which can be translated as “Sharp Eyes.”
The intent is to connect the security cameras that already scan roads, shopping
malls and transport hubs with private cameras on compounds and buildings, and
integrate them into one nationwide surveillance and data-sharing platform.
It will use facial recognition and artificial
intelligence to analyze and understand the mountain of incoming video evidence;
to track suspects, spot suspicious behaviors and even predict crime; to
coordinate the work of emergency services; and to monitor the comings and
goings of the country’s 1.4 billion people, official documents and security
industry reports show.
At the back end, these efforts merge with a vast database
of information on every citizen, a “Police Cloud” that aims to scoop up such
data as criminal and medical records, travel bookings, online purchase and even
social media comments — and link it to everyone’s identity card and face.
Surveillance
technologies are giving the government a sense that it can finally achieve the
level of control over people's lives that it aspires to.
Adrian Zenz, a
German academic
A goal of all of these interlocking efforts: to track
where people are, what they are up to, what they believe and who they associate
with — and ultimately even to assign them a single “social credit” score based
on whether the government and their fellow citizens consider them trustworthy.
At this housing complex in Chongqing, “90 percent of the
crime is caused by the 10 percent of people who are not registered residents,”
the police report said. “With facial recognition we can recognize strangers,
analyze their entry and exit times, see who spends the night here, and how many
times. We can identify suspicious people from among the population.”
Adrian Zenz, a German academic who has researched ethnic
policy and the security state in China’s western province of Xinjiang, said the
government craves omnipotence over a vast, complex and restive population.
“Surveillance technologies are giving the government a
sense that it can finally achieve the level of control over people’s lives that
it aspires to,” he said.
In this effort, the Chinese government is working
hand-in-glove with the country’s tech industry, from established giants to
plucky start-ups staffed by graduates from top American universities and former
employees of companies like Google and Microsoft, who seem cheerfully oblivious
to concerns they might be empowering a modern surveillance state.
The name of the video project is taken from the Communist
slogan “the masses have sharp eyes,” and is a throwback to Mao Zedong’s attempt
to get every citizen spying on one another. The goal, according to tech
industry executives working on the project, is to shine a light into every dark
corner of China, to eliminate the shadows where crime thrives.
The Sharp Eyes project also aims to mobilize the
neighborhood committees and snoopy residents who have long been key informers:
now, state media reports, some can turn on their televisions or mobile phones
to see security camera footage, and report any suspicious activity — a car
without a license plate, an argument turning violent — directly to the police.
To the eyes of the masses, in other words, add the brains
of the country’s fast-growing tech industry.
At Megvii offices in Beijing, a designer prepares
marketing material for a facial-recognition product. The company's marketing
manager has said Megvii's Face program has helped police make thousands of
arrests.
By 2020, China’s government aims to make the video
surveillance network “omnipresent, fully networked, always working and fully
controllable,” combining data mining with sophisticated video and image
analysis, official documents show.
China is not alone in experimenting with these new
technologies. The FBI’s Next Generation Identification System uses facial
recognition to compare images from crime scenes with a national database of mug
shots. Police forces across the United States have been using algorithm-based
techniques for several years to predict where crimes are likely to occur.
Chicago police identified and a court convicted a thief
using facial-recognition technology in 2014, and Britain used a Japanese
program called NeoFace Watch to spot a wanted man in a crowd in May.
The United States, with around 62 million surveillance
cameras in 2016, actually has higher per capita penetration rate than China,
with around 172 million, according to Monica Wang, a senior analyst in video
surveillance and security at research consultants IHS Markit in Shanghai.
Yet it is China’s ambition that sets it apart. Western
law enforcement agencies tend to use facial recognition to identify criminal
suspects, not to track social activists and dissidents, or to monitor entire
ethnic groups. China seeks to achieve several interlocking goals: to dominate
the global artificial-intelligence industry, to apply big data to tighten its
grip on every aspect of society, and to maintain surveillance of its population
more effectively than ever before.
“Deep learning is poised to revolutionize the video
surveillance industry,” Wang wrote in a recent report. “Demand in China will
grow quickly, providing the engine for future market growth.”
“The bigger picture is to track routine movement, and
after you get this information, to investigate problematic behavior,” said Li
Xiafeng, director of research and development at Cloudwalk, a Chongqing-based
firm. “If you know gambling takes place in a location, and someone goes there
frequently, they become suspicious.”
Gradually, a model of people’s behavior takes shape.
“Once you identify a criminal or a suspect, then you look at their connections
with other people,” he said. “If another person has multiple connections, they
also become suspicious.”
The start-ups also showcase more consumer-friendly
applications of their technology. Companies like SenseTime, Megvii and
Cloudwalk provide the software that powers mobile apps allowing people to
alter, “beautify” or transform their faces for fun.
Much of their business also comes from banks and
financial companies that are using facial recognition to check identities, at
ATMs or on phones. Some airports in China already employ facial recognition in
security checks, and hotels are doing the same at check-in; a Chinese version
of Airbnb promises to use it to verify guests’ identities, while China’s
version of Uber, Didi Chuxing, is using it to verify those of its drivers.
Some of the applications have a slightly gimmicky feel. A
lecturer at a Beijing university was said to be using a face scanner to check
if his students were bored; a toilet roll dispenser at a public facility
outside the Temple of Heaven in Beijing reportedly scans faces to keep people
from stealing too much paper, while a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in
Hangzhou allows customers to simply “smile to pay.”
Other ideas are struggling to move beyond the pilot
stage: a plan to identify jaywalkers in Chongqing has already been abandoned,
while residents have responded to facial-recognition gates on some apartment
buildings in Chongqing and Beijing by propping the doors open.
Yet facial recognition is not going away, and it promises
to become a potent tool for maintaining control of Chinese society.
So far, the technology doesn’t quite match the ambition:
It is not foolproof.
“There will be false positives for the foreseeable
future,” said Jim Dempsey, executive director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Law
and Technology. This raises two critical questions, he said: Does a country’s
due process system protect people from being falsely convicted on the basis of
facial-recognition technology? And are the false positives disproportionately
skewed toward certain minority groups, such as Chinese Muslims?
In China, the tech companies claim many times greater
accuracy rates than, for instance, the FBI, and probably justifiably so,
experts say: after all, they have been able to draw on a huge pool of photos
from government records to improve their algorithms, without any pesky concerns
about privacy.
More than anything else, experts say, deep learning
technologies need huge amounts of data to come up with accurate algorithms.
China has more data than anywhere else in the world and fewer constraints about
mining it from its citizens.
“Now we are purely data driven,” said Xu Li, CEO of
SenseTime. “It’s easier in China to collect sufficient training data. If we
want to do new innovations, China will have advantages in data collection in a
legal way.”
Smart technology backed by artificial intelligence will
be a tool to assist the police forces of the future. Chinese IT and telecoms
giant Huawei says its Safe Cities technology has already helped Kenya bring
down urban crime rates.
But who’s a criminal? In China, documents for the Police
Cloud project unearthed by Human Rights Watch list “petitioners” — people who
complain to the government about perceived injustices — as potential targets of
surveillance, along with anyone who “undermines stability” or has “extreme
thoughts.” Other documents cite members of ethnic minorities, specifically
Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang, as subjects of scrutiny.
Maya Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said what
sets China apart is “a complete lack of effective privacy protections,”
combined with a system that is explicitly designed to target individuals seen
as “politically threatening.”
“In other countries, we are often concerned about the use
of big data for deepening existing policing bias — for example, for targeting
historically disadvantaged groups like African Americans in the U.S. context —
but for the Chinese systems, the targeting of people of certain ethnicity is a
fundamental function of the system,” she added.
In Muslim-majority Xinjiang, where a spate of violent
incidents has been blamed on separatists or Islamist radicals,
facial-recognition cameras have become ubiquitous at roadblocks, outside gas
stations, airports, railway and bus stations, and at residential and university
compounds and entrances to Muslim neighborhoods, experts say. DNA collection
and iris scanning add extra layers of sophistication.
At Megvii, marketing manager Zhang Xin boasts that the
company’s Face++ program helped police arrest 4,000 people since the start of
2016, including about 1,000 in Hangzhou, where a major deployment of cameras in
hotels, subways and train stations preceded that year’s G-20 summit.
Very likely among that number: some of the dozens of
dissidents, petitioners and citizen journalists who were detained in and around
the city at that time.
Frances Eve, a researcher for Chinese Human Rights
Defenders in Hong Kong, argues that China’s tech companies are complicit in
human rights abuses.
“It’s basically a crime in China to advocate for human
rights protection,” she said. “The government treats human rights activists,
lawyers and ethnic Uighurs and Tibetans as criminals, and these people are
being caught, jailed and possibly tortured as a result of this technology.”
Shirley Feng contributed to this report.
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