By Saffiyah Khalique
Your commercial awareness dose.
This week The Washington Post received a document signed by Huawei representatives, which showed that the company had been working with a facial recognition start-up, Megvii to test an artificial intelligence camera system that could scan faces to identify a person’s age, sex and ethnicity from a crowd of people. This raises concerns about its usage with the Chinese government’s ethnic cleansing of the Muslim-minority, Uyghur people of the Xinjiang region.
A test report found that it could trigger an “Uyghur alarm,” putting these individuals at risk from the police in China. This revelation is incredibly dangerous as it is targeting a subsect of the population that has been targeted, detained and abused over the last three years in the government’s crackdown on the Uyghur people. This has included the mass surveillance on the population, detention and forced sterilisation of Uyghurs.
IPVM, a research company that found the document The Post received, said the document showed how normalised this kind of discriminatory technology has become. John Honovich, the founder of IVPM said to The Post: “This is not one isolated company. This is systematic, a lot of thought when into making sure this ‘Uighur alarm’ works.” Both companies acknowledge the existence of the document but deny its usage to targeting or labelling ethnic groups. The Chinese government said the systems are part of the countries technological advancement in tools to keep people safe.
However, human rights advocates point to them as China’s move to identify dissenters in society and silence them. China’s surveillance is not limited just to the persecution of the Uyghur minority, as a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch explains, stating that “the persecution of minorities is obviously not exclusive to China. . . . And these systems would lend themselves to countries that want to criminalize minorities.”
AI researchers are worried about the normalisation of the development of these kinds of technology and its possibility to spread across the world. This is dangerous and worrying news for the individual right to freedom of expression, as governments could employ this technology to quash dissenters, silent protest and hide human rights abuses. There are also issues of the tech itself being discriminatory. As some of the debates among AI researchers raise issues around the system concluding inaccurate results because its performance would vary on factors such as image quality, and lighting. As well as ethnic diversity, it cannot be determined so easily.
In response to the Chinese government’s tech explorations, the U.S. government has placed sanctions on several tech companies last year, including Megvii and Huawei. Yesterday, Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Representative Jim McGovern sent letters to Intel Corp and Nvidia Corp asking for information on the sale of computer chips, which have allegedly been used by China to conduct mass surveillance on Uyghurs.
It is not only the Chinese government exploring this surveillance tech, so are several EU companies. An Amnesty International investigation from September found that three companies based in France, Sweden and the Netherlands sold digital surveillance systems, including facial recognition tech and network cameras, to key players in the Chinese mass surveillance machine. Amnesty found that some of the techs were exclusively being used in part of the mass surveillance systems used against the Uyghurs and other Muslim groups in the country.
They found that Swedish company Axis Communications celebrates its involvement in expanding the Chinese surveillance state on its website. They specialise in remote monitoring and have supplied its technology to China in documents from 2012-2019. The existence of this kind of discriminatory technology is incredibly worrying for a free society. But it is also the normalisation of its development that is dangerous due to its implications on freedom of expression and rights to privacy.
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