Massey working with Chinese firm blacklisted over human rights

NOVEMBER 26, 2019

As New Zealand joins nations criticising China for its detention and surveillance of Uighur Muslims, one of our universities is continuing to work with a Chinese firm blacklisted by the US for providing technology to help with the Uighur crackdown.

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However, there have been concerns about iFLYTEK for some time" in 2017, international NGO Human Rights Watch published a report on the company’s work with the Chinese government to develop a surveillance system that could automatically identify targeted voices in phone conversations, as part of wider efforts to build an expansive biometric database of its citizens.

Human Rights Watch said iFLYTEK’s technology had also been used by police bureaux in Xinjiang province, where a million or more Uighurs appear to have been detained in what resembles “a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy” according to a United Nations human rights panel.

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Universities around the world did not seem able to separate benign research from the related military or intelligence applications of the work, Joske said.

The researcher has delved into the ties between Western universities and Chinese organisations with links to the country’s military or police, and said there were widespread problems with a lack of awareness about the implications of collaboration.

“We know that Western universities have trained thousands of Chinese military scientists, Chinese nuclear scientists and Chinese defence industry employees…

“It’s especially a problem when we’re talking about relatively new areas of technology like speech recognition or artificial intelligence - in these fields, the specialists involved often aren’t used to considering some of the real applications of the technologies because they’ve only emerged in recent years.

“This has had the impact of meaning, for example, there are actually more concrete safeguards if you’re a lab rat in a biology department than if you’re a Uighur subject to surveillance technology being developed.”

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