>>9039346

China’s Sharp Eyes surveillance system puts the security focus on public shaming

Security becomes spectacle as surveillance system is rolled out in rural Chinese villages

Proponents say cameras are beating crime; human rights groups claim they threaten civil liberties

30 Oct, 2018

China has an estimated 176 million public and private surveillance cameras, including on every block in Beijing.

When a resident of Anxi village in China’s southwest Sichuan province set fire to a pile of rubbish two years ago, a loudspeaker barked his name and ordered him to put the blaze out. He extinguished the flames and scuttled away.

He had been caught on a surveillance camera, monitored around the clock on one of 16 screens in the village security control room.

“Everyone knew who the culprit was, so he would never dare to do that again,” said the local Communist Party secretary, Yin Xiuqin, 55.

The surveillance video in Anxi is also broadcast to cellphones and some televisions – placing busybodies on the front line of local security.

People know they are always being watched. Fear of shaming is the essence of Sharp Eyes – or Xue Liang – a project being tested in 50 towns as part of what will become a nationwide system." From:

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/2170834/chinas-sharp-eyes-surveillance-system-puts-security-focus-public

"The huge volume of image data collected by cameras deployed in China has also driven growth in the cloud-computing, storage and AI analysis segments. The world's No. 3 and China's biggest server maker Inspur is a key supplier of servers and data processing tools for the Xue Liang program, the company told Nikkei." from:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-s-sharp-eyes-offer-chance-to-take-surveillance-industry-global

>>9039585 China's global surveillance plan using google and microsoft:

Washington Post / Chicago Tribune Jan 7th 2018 "Xue Liang," which can be translated as "Sharp Eyes"….

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.

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…..

…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….

…

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."

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-china-facial-recognition-surveillance-20180107-story.html