China's "Sharp Eyes" Program Aims To Surveil 100% Of Public Space
China's "Sharp Eyes" Program Aims To Surveil 100% Of Public Space
BY TYLER DURDEN THURSDAY,
MAR 04, 2021 - 22:20 Authored by Dave
Gershgorn via OneZero.medium.com,
One of China’s largest and most pervasive surveillance networks
got its start in a small county about seven hours north of Shanghai.
In 2013, the local government in Pingyi County began installing
tens of thousands of security cameras across urban and rural areas — more than
28,500 in total by 2016. Even the smallest villages had at least six security
cameras installed, according to state media.
Those cameras weren’t just monitored by police and automated facial recognition algorithms. Through
special TV boxes installed in their homes, local residents could watch live
security footage and press a button to summon police if they saw anything
amiss. The security footage could also be viewed on
smartphones.
In 2015 the Chinese government announced that a similar program
would be rolled out across China, with a particular focus on remote and rural
towns. It was called the “Xueliang Project,” or Sharp Eyes, a reference to a
quote from communist China’s former revolutionary leader Mao Zedong who once
wrote that “the people have sharp eyes” when looking out for neighbors not
living up to communist values.
Sharp Eyes is one of a number of overlapping and intersecting
technological surveillance projects built by the Chinese government over the
last two decades. Projects like the Golden Shield Project, Safe Cities, SkyNet,
Smart Cities, and now Sharp Eyes mean that there are more than 200 million public and private
security cameras installed across China.
Every
five years, the Chinese government releases a plan outlining what it looks to
achieve in the next half-decade. China’s 2016 five-year
plan set a goal for Sharp Eyes to achieve 100% coverage of China’s public spaces in
2020. Though publicly available reports don’t indicate whether the program has
hit that goal — they suggest that the country has gotten very close.
China’s
modern surveillance scheme started in 2003, according
to Dahlia Peterson, research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for
Security and Emerging Technology, with the creation of the Golden Shield
Project.
The Golden Shield Project, run by the Ministry of Public
Security (MPS), is, in part, responsible for the country’s strict internet
censorship. But the program also included physical surveillance. The MPS
created databases that included 96% of China’s citizens, with one titled the
National Basic Population Information Database. That database includes
household registration information, called “hukou,” as well as information on past travels
and criminal history, according to a report from the Immigration and Refugee
Board of Canada.
Local population databases were also created, according to a paper published
in the American
Journal of Political Science. These local databases allowed for
blacklists, which barred the use of public transportation. Police would be
dispatched if someone who had been blacklisted tried to book a bus, train, or
airline ticket.
Following Golden Shield, China launched two other surveillance
projects focused on the installation of cameras. Safe Cities, launched in 2003,
focused on disaster warnings, traffic management, and public security. SkyNet
focused on installing cameras connected to facial recognition algorithms.
“Chinese
state-run media has claimed Skynet can scan the entire Chinese population in
one second with 99.8 percent accuracy, yet such claims ignore glaring technical
limitations,” Peterson wrote.
Observers should take these figures with a grain of salt:
Accurate and up-to-date information about China’s surveillance initiatives
isn’t easily available, and what is publicly known is mainly generated by academics
and journalists with some access to government officials or surveillance
equipment manufacturers. It’s also unclear which cameras are exclusively viewed
by village, city, and provincial governments, and which feed data back to the
central government.
Just like Golden Shield, the SkyNet program still exists today,
and benefits from 16 years of A.I. research, as well as the tech industry’s
boom. According to the New York Times, SkyNet data is used at
building complexes that use facial recognition to open security gates. The
photos from those security gates are then shared with local police to build a
database of the local population.
However,
these surveillance schemes are mostly targeted at cities, where funding and
population density makes centralized surveillance easier. Sharp Eyes, which is
focused on rural areas, is meant to offload work from potentially understaffed
police departments.
For instance, an article written
by Chinese state media about the Sharp Eyes implementation in Pingyi notes that
the county has a population of 1 million people, and only about 300 police
officers.
What gets reported to police by the Sharp Eyes program isn’t
just limited to crime. One Pingyi resident in the state media article spoke of
reporting a collapsed manhole cover, while another mentioned that they had
suspected a multilevel marketing scheme happening in a nearby building. The MLM
organization was reported to the police, who allegedly broke it up with
warnings and fines.
According to Peterson, the Sharp Eyes project is implemented
differently depending on each city or town’s needs, but the general premise is
the same: The city or town is divided into a grid, and each square of the grid
acts as its own administrative unit. Citizens watch security footage from
within their grid, giving a sense of ownership over their immediate
surroundings. Municipal data can then be aggregated based on reports from each
square on the grid.
Cities
can also add new technology to the mix at their discretion. Though
the system primarily relies on facial recognition and locally broadcast CCTV,
the city of Harbin, for instance, published a notice that it was looking
for predictive policing technology to sweep a person’s bank transaction data,
location history, and social connections, as well as make a determination as to
whether they were a terrorist or violent.
Much of the funding for these various surveillance schemes comes
from the central government, but regional municipalities and cities also foot
the bill for local networks of cameras. At times, counties’ surveillance
spending far outstrips other municipal services. An analysis of more than
76,000 government procurement notices by ChinaFile showed that surveillance
spending has become a significant portion of many cities’ budgets. In 2018,
contracts from the city of Zhoukou showed that officials spent as much on
surveillance as they did on education, and spent more than twice as much money
on surveillance as on environmental protection programs.
In
some instances, Chinese citizens even crowdfund these surveillance measures. In
the Shandong province, residents of the small city of Linyi raised an additional
13 million yuan, or $2 million, to help support the full coverage of
video surveillance cameras.
This countrywide demand for surveillance technology has created
a gold rush for companies developing and selling surveillance technology. Many
of the companies selling camera hardware and video management software,
especially for locally streamed Sharp Eyes footage, aren’t well known outside
of China.
In a list translated by CSET’s Peterson, some of the top
companies supplying this technology are surveillance camera manufacturers VisionVera and UniView, as well as big data company Neusoft.
On its website,
Neusoft specifically calls out that it manages a database on a population of
1.3 billion, and integrates data from more than 20 government sectors, as well
as analyzes tens of millions of social videos.
Internationally known Chinese companies like Sensetime, Megvii,
Hikvision, and Dahua are far more prevalent in conversations about the
persecution of ethnic minorities. These companies have all been sanctioned by
the U.S. government based on their involvement with the human rights abuses in
Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has been accused of committing genocide against
the country’s Uighur ethnic minority. Reports from Xinjiang’s internment camps
are horrific,
with documented cases of rape, sterilization, or forced labor.
The
facial recognition system pitched to Xinjiang’s Shawan region to detect
religious minorities was developed by Megvii, which denies involvement in the
program. However, ChinaFile found contracts and state media
reports that suggest large parts
A recent report from
the LA
Times and surveillance industry watchdog IPVM also showed that
Dahua had also developed facial recognition to specifically detect Uighurs, a
Chinese ethnic minority widely persecuted in China’s Xinjiang province. A separate report from IPVM showed how
Huawei and Megvii cooperated in the development of a Uighur detection system in
2018.
China’s next five-year plan, which covers 2021 to
2025, places specific emphasis on giving social governance to local
municipalities via the grid system, as well as building out even more security
projects, to “strengthen construction of the prevention and control system for
public security.”
This means the future of China’s surveillance apparatus likely
looks a lot like Sharp Eyes: More power and social control given to local
governments, so neighbors watch neighbors.
The
government also emphasized the persecution of those it maintains as hostile and
separatists.
“We will also closely guard against, and crack down on, the
infiltration, sabotage, subversion and separatist activities of hostile
forces,” the plan says.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/chinas-sharp-eyes-program-aims-surveil-100-public-space
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