China’s CCTV network took just 7 minutes to capture BBC reporter (2017)
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This is a little stretching. Most Chinese audience can’t or won’t watch BBC.
What should they do? Not run the story? It is of interest, it is scary to a lot of people. It does also warn people wanting to hide from it.
Should no one talk about this technology, or China's current capabilities? Do you think that would be better?
Based on some cursory search, it looks like it's another one of those local-government-pioneered pilot/experiments [1] like the credit score (except there are dozens of cities in that pilot).
The second tier city local government, trying to tout their achievements at the national level, then goes on a PR spree [2] (probably to earn points for the local party secretary). They even proudly market it as "Guiyang has 'Skynet' everywhere. No matter where you go, there are eyes on you,". I can totally visualize the locals thinking, who wouldn't think this is cool and an indication of Guiyang finally being ready to join the ranks of the civilized world.
Meanwhile, nobody at the local level thinks (or has enough international context to know) that this is a huge negative rather than an achievement from the western perspective. They probably can't even wrap their heads around why wouldn't everyone want this. Smelling the big story, in goes the BBC also, presenting this story as this state of the iron curtain, straight as constructed from Xi's directives.
The 2 sides of the story are just living in very different worlds.
[1] http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1093864.shtml [2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eoO1dqE...
To you and I, yes, but I don't think we can take for granted that everyone or even a majority of the West thinks that way these days. Especially if you told them it was to be used for immigration control.
We've already got the mass surveillance TV show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunted_(2015_TV_series)
Given the prohibition on building a database of gun owners, I wonder if we'll end up with a situation where everyone's face is recorded but the guns are blurred out to protect their rights.
And the state media has been touting for years that China is the safest country on earth that "you can buy skewers at midnight", that America is the example of a failed society.
They mostly likely are sincerely and proudly presenting this as a superiority over the tumultuous west.
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/06/28/hongkongers-identifyin...
The hongkongers are protesting, so in Hong Kong your minority is 100% of the residents.
Your statement is deceptive
1. https://www.hkupop.hku.hk/english/popexpress/ethnic/eidentit...
0. https://www.hkupop.hku.hk/english/popexpress/ethnic/eidentit...
1. XI Jinping, The Governance of China, p. 10
2. Ibid., p. 23
3. Ibid., p. 25
The chineese i’ve spoken to, that actually lived in china, first told you the official point of view, and then after the conversation kept going on, told you about things they didn’t like, then after some more time you realize all they want is leave china and come live in the west.
Yes, there will always be outliers, but in the case of China, where conformity is of utmost importance, they really are just absolute minorities in the 1.4B population.
If you've been following the developments of HK protests, a key indicator is that almost all of these "passive dissents" of the CCP you described turned against HKers just like average Chinese, they are bashing HKers and lapping up the info the party gave them.
Do these people love freedom or even democracy, yes, but they are also acting against it in the case of HK. This is the paradox, they love the "good aspects" of freedom and democracy but they also vehemently hate and reject the "bad ones" that inevitably come with it.
1. Democracy + Developed country standard of living, but Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Xinjiang, Tibet vote to become independent and do become independent countries.
2. Autocracy + Developing country standard of living, but mainland China unifies with Taiwan.
Then most mainlanders would pick the second option. Due to historical reasons, any scenario that risks tarnishing the borders of the idealized unified China incurs a hyperallergic reaction.
And selectively deployed at "public order" events: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/facial-recognition-tec...
Pretty much everyone prefers security over freedom in particular in the abscene of security, but also just in general. Take a look at countries that have freedom written on their flags and then count the CCTV cameras in London or the number of three letter agencies in the US.
The only difference is the fact that in China the role of the state in exercising this surveillance is out in the open and endorsed as a means of organising society and everywhere else it happens through the backdoor.
Or, as Mike Tyson put it: everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.
They've got a lot of experience doing this since the conservative government started applying it's will to the BBC after choosing the board of directors. Ther'es no longer a sense of "balanced" and "unbiased" news and it's glaringly obvious just by watching their news for a few weeks.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/mar/13/government-cho...
I would say in partial mitigation that the one bias the BBC probably does have is a bias towards the status quo.
Random thought: it would be interesting to compare news services that are and aren't blocked and see if the ones that haven't been blocked yet tend to be more positive on Beijing in their coverage.
That being said it is trusted a lot more than CCN & Foxnews which are the other two news sources that are on cable TV (neither are blocked at the moment).
I wouldn't really say that the BBC has a China-friendly stance. I would say that it tries to be more objective most of the time (which I agree with when compared to CCN & Fox News).
It sure would be interesting to someday learn about how all these decisions of what to block get made.
> Marketing at its best, they want everyone to be fully aware of
> their capabilities. Wouldn't be surprised if they were
> overstated, so as to keep citizens in check.
> When they don't need help, we won't gather their data and it remains only in our big database.
In the same sentence:
"We won't gather their data"
and
"The data that we gather remains in a database".
That angle is based on the idea that this data "may as well not exist" but it ignores the many issues with indiscriminate data collection: the data might leak, or management might change and invent undesirable "new" purposes for old data - which, within this theory, then begins to exist retroactively.
The government can collect any data it likes on everything, but any data it then looks at must be published to the world. Ie. The government gets no privacy when looking through its big database.
The simplest approach would be to livestream every screen owned by any government agency.
IOW: If it's a violation of civil rights for humans to process some data, then leaving that job to software is just automating civil rights violations.
It makes sense to me to fight both schemes, but they have different impact, different risk and might need different approaches.
That is evidently what they keep the data for. They want to be able to have the data to access it eventually. If they didn't want to access it eventually, they wouldn't keep it. That is why mass collections, that are stored, are wrong.
I mean, China's communist elites aren't putting together such an Orwellian monitoring system just to blindly hand it's keys to any civil servant for him to leverage it's power against the elite's interests.
After WW2 the University of Tokyo banned weapons research from happening in its research labs. I think we can be drawing more lines on research like this and take a stand against a lot of this.
These are governments that we are setting up to benefit ourselves, this seems far more in the interest of gov interests than citizens.
If they were strictly limited to criminal investigations and required a warrant to scan the images that might be a different story.
So of course “facial recognition” per say is not the problem. But in this particular example, we see how facial recognition combined with a couple hundred million surveillance cameras funneled into a massive government data processing pipeline can be extremely effectively used for persistent tracking and nearly instant geolocation of “suspects”.
I’m pretty sure we’ve seen how this movie ends. There’s a reason we don’t implant GPS trackers into babies at birth just because they might get lost one day.
Maybe China will use this technology to build a veritable Eden free from crime and lost puppies. Or maybe they are closing the grip on a dystopian nightmare. I think you have to be pretty naive to think it’s not looking startlingly like the latter.
What reason are you thinking? I wouldn't support it myself, but I don't usually represent public opinion.
GPS didn't really burst into the public imagination before 2007 and the iPhone; in a sense the technology is only about a decade old or so in the public sphere. Prior to 2000 the US government's official position was something like "this is a military technology".
As the cost of sensors and radio chips goes down, we might reach the point where we do put a GPS sensor on everybody. Law enforcement would love it and on the small scale it would probably save lives and reduce crime.
GPS chips are already cheap enough (single digit dollars), that it's an issue of policy\public perception, not cost
You make a critical point. Technology itself is always amoral. We are enamored by technology for technology sake, while we drifted away from our moral roots.
I was burgled recently and looking for cameras and alarm systems. I was asking the police who came to check the burglary and they explained that here (Spain) it is illegal to point cameras to anywhere ‘public’, so the situation you describe would be removed and fined here. My feeling at the time was that now I cannot protect my property adequately because I cannot detect people at my gate as that would also cover the street so I would only get to them when they are already in after they disabled the power. But after thinking about it, I do think it is a good thing.
Ofcourse law enforcement here can do more, however they seem quite limited as well compared to UK/US/CN.
The facial recognition, in this case, is the right place to intervene.
The argument can be made it's a good thing for more people to be arrested for BSfaster to get laws off the books, however, I fear authority will exploit select enforcement to it's fullest extent to ensure they can put a sufficient number of problematic individuals away without stirring up unrest.
It's important that enforcing the law be difficult, expensive, and imperfect.
Its true that thanks to profit motive, someone will build it.
Its just not going to be me.
Of course stopping all facial recognition doesn't suddenly make a totalitarian regime disappear. But having it makes some things way easier than it used to be.
For what? automatic tagging of faces in your photo library?
Because for me, that argument has a whiff of 'think of the children'. I don't think the NSA has done anything to make me safer, and I haven't seen any convincing proof to show they have done anything to help my safety.
At this point, what is actually accomplished by the US military getting even fancier ways of killing people? From how things are shaping up, even if things come to blows b/w US & China it won't be a shooting war. It's looking like it will be similar to the cold war: neither adversary can dare attack the other, so we end up with a series of proxy wars and nitpicking at the adversary.
Being able to track and find individuals, anywhere in the US where there is a camera, will significantly reduce crime. Cameras would cover a larger swath of territory, and we would be able to find potential terrorists, criminal suspects, missing people, human traffic victims, etc. far more effectively. We would likely be able to identify people acting like they were about to commit a violent crime too, but that’s just an assumption based off my experience.
Does large scale surveillance help with making individuals safer? I think the answer is obviously yes. I disagree with it because it has significant side effects, and doesn’t address the underlying problems CAUSING cultural violence and international crime.
When I bought a bike in China and asked about locks, the shop owner showed me, but mentioned that he didn't really see a need, he hadn't heard of a bike being stolen in a while, which he specifically attributed to pervasive surveillance. I bought a lock anyways, but was taken aback by how strong his perception was that he actually was weakly trying to dissuade me from buying a lock. And indeed I saw my fair share of unlocked bikes, although I also saw many that were also locked up, enough that I continued to always lock my bike.
And it gets to some really in-your-face levels. Some major cities in China have occasional electronic, public billboards posting somewhat redacted photos and partial ID info (first several digits of their ID card and their surname) of jaywalkers flagged by surveillance cameras, essentially naming and shaming in a very public way.
And anecdotally I also feel safer in many large cities in China compared to years prior. Drivers are a lot less crazy. In some, but definitely not all, large cities, traffic lights and crosswalks are essentially sacrosanct now with cameras automatically ticketing everywhere. As a pedestrian, cars will often preemptively stop for me at a crosswalk to let me pass. Pickpocketing seems far less of a concern. Most Chinese residents I see actually wear their backpacks on their backs now at tourist locations and on public transportation (as opposed to previously on their chest to prevent people stealing things from the back). It feels like night and day going to a smaller Chinese city where the old craziness of one or two decades ago still reigns (which is somewhat sad for other sentimental reasons).
Now this is both anecdotal and only based on perception. Even if there were statistics provided about this, they would probably come from the Chinese government which makes them suspect.
Is this scary how much power this concentrates in the government? Very much so. Is the Chinese government using this power to corral dissidents? Definitely. Does it make large sections of the Chinese population feel safer? I think so.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
I don't think it makes people feel safer with their freedom or their rights (property or otherwise), rather it makes people less anxious that people act outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour (e.g. act disorderly).
However, the problem here is that it is done by constant fear. Instead of educating people about why they should behave in a positive manner, they are coerced into behaving by fear. It's Clockwork Orange territory.
The general attitude of Chinese people that I speak to is that they are good but lots of other Chinese people are bad/don't follow rules. I constantly have Chinese people trying to protect me from other Chinese people that they are worried will try to take advantage of me.
It seems to be like breaking road rules. Everyone justifies themselves when they do it but other people are bad drivers when they break rules.
The general idea is that surveillance isn't for them but for other Chinese people which they are fine with.
There are exceptions, mainly among academics and politically-minded people who consciously feel a need to self-censor as well as some businesspeople who fear anticorruption purges by the central government fueled by power struggles within the party.
But for the most part, the people I've asked about the fact that the government can see everything, practices widespread censorship, and has a sordid history of disappearing dissidents just shrug and point to how much richer and safer China has become. This includes people who have spent a considerable time abroad in Western countries. Which perhaps from a Western perspective is even scarier than a population living in fear.
But this might just be the pessimist in me speaking.
> Does large scale surveillance help with making individuals safer? I think the answer is obviously yes.
Until regime change makes some previously legal activity or status verboten. Your government collecting harmless data on your religion starts to matter a lot more when the wehrmacht rolls into town... (I don't think this is a serious possibility for the US, but for countries with less robust judicial systems or militarily superior neighbors it's worth considering)
Oh wait - it doesn't. The reason these laws were mostly passed in the mid-1900s was because of the KKK.
But today, unlike 1000 years ago, we're also a couple of button-pushes away from almost total species annihilation (the effects of a a possible nuclear winter are yet to be determined exactly), to say nothing of the countless genocides perpetrated during the 20th century and into the 21st or about the the two world wars.
(Not based in the US)
It's a strange arguments given that you can use it in this exact form to support a lot of unpopular measures. Like banning strong encryption.
On the other hand it's weird to jump straight to face recognition without making sure that you put some real effort into other less invasive methods, already proven to work by other western countries. Plenty of counties like France, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom have a substantial presence of people coming from vastly different cultures and crime rates are still up to 5x lower than the US.
There are plenty of measures to go through before jumping to face recognition. But I'd wager the actual goal of any country starting to rely heavily on such privacy invasive tech is not crime control, it's just control.
I don't think tracking people via facial recognition will significantly help, but some similar technologies might. Recognizing camouflaged tanks (or disturbed ground concealing mines, or flares vs engine exhaust, or...) would, though. And I don't think those techs are separable, if that makes any sense.
> At this point, what is actually accomplished by the US military getting even fancier ways of killing people? From how things are shaping up, even if things come to blows b/w US & China it won't be a shooting war. It's looking like it will be similar to the cold war: neither adversary can dare attack the other, so we end up with a series of proxy wars and nitpicking at the adversary.
And if you think that neither country will be able to afford to attack the other and thus stop preparing to be attacked... Well, that feels like it'll invite an attack. Not to mention that some of those proxy wars might end up being "Korea mk2" or "Taiwan", both of which would make conventional military expertise extremely valuable.
Now, obviously, there are intercontinental missiles, but why would anyone employ these against a nation if they would not consider that nation a threat? So the protector of the US can be the US itself - if it chooses to be.
And if the US was willing to cut itself off from the rest of the world, this might be relevant.
But I don't think that's the case.
> Now, obviously, there are intercontinental missiles, but why would anyone employ these against a nation if they would not consider that nation a threat?
Um. I can think of a ton of reasons? From "they're not a threat now but give them 5 years to retool and they'll be really fucking irritating to deal with" to "they keep providing military and tech support to countries on our borders we want to omnomnom" or even "this will help with domestic political issues".
"Don't bother hurting me, I'm defenceless" works when there's a cop standing over your shoulder. Not so much when you used to be the cop.
This is an interesting perspective. Facial recognition is routine among people, and generally not considered nefarious. Rather, it's important to know who people are for a large number of good reasons.
The "facial recognition is inherently evil" point of view probably realizes that it's almost always a bad thing for the government to know who you are. But oddly, ID numbers and birth certificates, which are the normal government equivalent of facial recognition, don't seem to draw similar criticism.
The only way to avoid face recognition would be to wear something like a burka or maybe a hoodie. Two things that have been attacked over the last couple of decades.
And it’s not just governemts doing face recognition, at least with thoses there’s some semblance of democratic oversight - private companies with this data are far more insidious.
You could say you are comparing a kitchen knife to an AK47.
It's similar to giving out your IP address to websites you visit vs. being tracked by an omniscient ad network embedded all over the web.
It is no longer possible to be "off the grid". And that's quite scary when you realize that every single adult has committed many crimes (however minor) in their life.
Deep learning and computer vision has progressed quite a bit in the past 2 years, mainly due to incremental algorithmic advances / improved engineering. Unlike fundamental advances, these can be scaled up with increased investments in a more predictable way.
Face++, the unicorn company mentioned in this article, is actually the product division owned by Megvii, a machine learning startup based in mainland China. They are planning to IPO soon (see: https://reut.rs/2L7zzGn ) to raise more funds from overseas investors (hence IPO'ing in Hong Kong).
There's some irony when a China-based computer vision startup working on facial recognition technology used in Xinjiang is filing for IPO in Hong Kong, rather than in mainland China.
The reporter is incentivised to be caught quickly to make a more compelling story.
I'm genuinely curious of what this leads to in China, because this tech is easy enough to deploy if you're willing and politically able. What I'm cynical about is that I don't think China is competent enough to safeguard the data it collects, or forever keep it out of the "wrong hands" like the last guy in the video claims.
It's hard enough for US government agencies to protect data that should be privileged (police often run illegitimate checks on license plates), I can't imagine China can prevent its various factions from abusing this power.
It'd be ironic, but the incompetencies of their bureaucracy could actually lead to their own downfall by way of this technology (their mass surveillance apparatus) somehow getting coopted by dissidents. There's a misconception that China somehow has an iron grip over its people because it's authoritarian, but if that were true they'd have weeded out corruption.
You know how you can tell that a person walking in the distance is your friend, even though you can't see their face at that distance? Yeah, so can algorithms.
These cameras do not explain how they got there. Who profits from it? Whoever likes the situation that put criminals in that place.
Then there's no need to treat poverty anymore because they'll be dying in a corner as intended, instead of stealing food.
Unfortunately, in modern society, or really since the human condition has existed, we address symptoms and short-term fixes not root cause analysis and long term fixes.
Criminals don't usually want to be criminals, but sometimes that life is alternatively better. For instance, cartels in Mexico or mafias in general sometimes offer a better quality of life and protection that regular citizens don't get, so it is an attracting force.
We could fight cartels with guns and enforcers, leading to ramped up violence all around and making a health issue a dangerous violent criminal one that decreases harm reduction and increases addiction, production issues and safety issues.
Or to get at the root cause, we could fight cartels by ending the drug war taking away their massive hundreds of billions of annual black market funds, which gives them power of nation states over decades, and shift that to the legal market to help regulate and make recreational/health uses safer with harm reduction and addition support, as well as providing economic plans to give people a positive legal market choice.
Unfortunately we choose wrong largely because of propaganda by the military and prison industrial complexes and the incessant pressing haphazard decisions to blame, fight and go to war with the human condition when health/medical/personal freedom matters are criminalized.
We go to war on everything as a solution to peace and quality of life... surveillance state comes from that same corrupted/short-term thinking place.
The surveillance state has been going on for decades now in all major countries, there probably isn't much actual detective or investigative work even being done anymore, nor a case by case analysis for justification of these methods, just massive privacy breaches and lots of data noise. Smart criminals and corporate espionage will learn how to use that lack of investigative skill and manipulate the surveillance data, or gain access to it to it and dominate.
From ancient time, the law in most dynasties strongly discourages self-defense because it's unjudgeable most of the cases. And it also could be a tool of murdering. Modern China pretty much inherited this tradition. Although the self-defense is defined in the law just like most countries, in practice it's way too strict almost like non-existence for tens of years.
Until last year, a famous case[0] causes massive debate across the country, and finally justified as self-defense. The main reason behind this is the massive surveillance network makes legal apartments confident enough to judge.
[0]: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201809/03/WS5b8c877ea310add14...
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-san-francis...
I wonder how this compares to the UK per capita considering how massive China is.
Publicly operated cameras in the UK would be about 150k, most on public transport
http://qrcctv.co.uk/cctv/cctv-facts
That is far less per capita - 1 in 400. However including private operated ones could bring it upto 4m, or 1 in 16.
[0] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/most-spied-on-cities-in-...
Partly I think that huge DNA databases, biometric databases and millions and millions of cameras would be wonderful for catching criminals. On the other hand, the opportunities for abuse are too many to number. Has anyone written anything interesting on where/how to draw the line?
I think the book titled '1984' touched on this subject a little
If I would be in reach of a public surveillance camera, I would certainly try to sabotage it. Maybe roast the sensor because I happen to have a bright flashlight in my pocket. Damn, I guess I have become a criminal now...
A trivial search shows otherwise:
1.in the UK where the Russian operatives were caught in Salisbury trying to murder a real-life dissident
2. in the UK, where the police have dedicated units of 'super-recognisers' that review CCTV footage and solved many a crime.
[1] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7182071/cctv-russian-spy-poiso... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/11/super-recogn... [2]
China can handle thousands. Tens of thousands becomes a real problem. More than that and it’s impossible without serious damage.
HK would never be governable again after a bloody crackdown of that scale. It would either descend into hell and come out worth nothing, or it could spread into the mainland.
Both are unlikely events - I think China is simply waiting it out and ramping up the pressure. Visuals of army training and troop transports are having the desired effect.
I think the likely next steps would be to cut services and if that doesn’t work some rationing/price inflation of food and water. Start making the poor resent the rich, and ramp up the propaganda.