Photo: The Fan Writer, Gauthier DELECROIX – 郭天

The Fan Writer, by Gauthier DELECROIX – 郭天 (CC BY 2.0)

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/photo-the-fan-writer-gauthier-delecroix-%e9%83%ad%e5%a4%a9/

New Reports Highlight Globalization of Surveillance Tech Industry

A new report from The Intercept’s Mara Hvistendahl uncovers how U.S. software giant Oracle worked with Chinese law enforcement to supply analytics software for China’s burgeoning surveillance state. At the same time, other reports have revealed how Chinese manufacturers of surveillance equipment are widely supplying governments and companies in the West. Although the international connections of surveillance tech companies are not new, the new revelations underscore how an industry built around mass surveillance has become increasingly normalized and global, despite deeply concerning questions about their ethical practices.

For The Intercept, Mara Hvistendahl described how Oracle marketed software to Chinese police that would allow them to mine disparate databases containing DNA, facial recognition images, vehicle registrations, and other data. Notably, Hvistendahl reported that Oracle did business with police in Xinjiang, both before and after the mass detention of Uyghurs there became widely known:

So explained a China-based Oracle engineer at a developer conference at the company’s California headquarters in 2018. Slides from the presentation, hosted on Oracle’s website, begin with a “case outline” listing four Oracle “product[s] used” by Liaoning police to “do criminal analysis and prediction.” […] The concluding slide states that the software helped police, whose datasets had been “incomprehensible,” more easily “trace the key people/objects/events” and “identify potential suspect[s]” — which in China often means dissidents.

[…] Oracle also boasted that its data security services were used by other Chinese police entities, according to the documents — including police in Xinjiang, the site of a genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic groups.

[…] Moore, the Oracle spokesperson, said the company has “limited transactions with authorized ZTE and Huawei entities and NO transactions with any restricted ZTE or Huawei entities.” She conceded that Oracle had “limited authorized transactions with Xinjiang Public Security Bureau from 2011-2019,” adding that Oracle has not done business with the police bureau since the U.S. imposed sanctions on it in 2019.

But for at least a year before Oracle says it ended its business with the police bureau, there was widespread global awareness of authorities in Xinjiang rounding up ethnic Uyghurs and other minorities and interning them in inhumane reeducation camps. The data collected by Xinjiang police included DNA samples, biometric information, and family planning histories, and it was shot through with ethnic, religious, and other forms of bias. [Source]

Oracle has accused me of obtaining “Chinese domain” documents from one of their competitors, so let me be clear on where I found these documents: https://t.co/vavs1N8M9P, using a little search engine called Google. 4/4 https://t.co/3nEf5YJBcF

— Mara Hvistendahl (@MaraHvistendahl) February 18, 2021

The extensive report is the latest investigation into prominent American tech companies’ work with Chinese law enforcement agencies to build out the country’s vast network of tech-driven surveillance. In November, The New York Times reported on the use of chips made by Intel and Nvidia to power supercomputers in Xinjiang, used to process vast quantities of surveillance footage. These reports suggest that the know-how of Western companies plays an important role in the surveillance pipeline, providing tech at the analytical level to process the vast data inflows collected by the state.

Chinese software companies have developed and deployed analytical software of their own. The Washington Post reported that Huawei has “Uyghur alarms” that use facial recognition scans to automatically notify police, while The New York Times reported that Alibaba and Kingsoft Cloud have also created facial recognition software that automatically flags Uyghurs.

Last month, another investigation for The Intercept by Yael Grauer reported on a database produced by Landasoft, a Chinese “private defense company,” which collates data from a variety of reporting apps used to monitor ethnic minorities in Xinjiang:

Landasoft has branded the software that appears to be behind the database as “iTap,” a big data system it markets publicly.

The database spans 52 gigabytes and contains close to 250 million rows of data. It is fed by and provides data back to various apps, roughly a dozen of which appear linked to the database. These include:

Jingwang Weishi, an app for monitoring files on a mobile phone, which police in China have reportedly forced Uyghurs to download.

Baixing Anquan, which roughly translates to “people’s safety app” or “public safety app” and appears to be used by both citizens and police, including to enable citizens to snitch on one another to the authorities. […] [Source]

This week, a study by U.K.-based tech firm Comparitech ranked China as the world’s worst offender in invasive biometric data collection.

In response to their cooperation in human rights abuses in Xinjiang, the U.S. government has blacklisted several Chinese tech companies, banning them from importing American technology and vital components. But other Western nations have continued to do business with Chinese surveillance equipment suppliers, including those on U.S. blacklists. This week, Reuters’ Avi Asher-Schapiro reported that half of London’s boroughs have bought and deployed Chinese surveillance systems from suppliers previously linked to the abuse of Uyghurs:

At least 28 councils owned technology made by Hikvision, the world’s largest purveyor of video surveillance systems and vendor to Xinjiang police agencies, revealed data obtained by digital rights researcher Samuel Woodhams and seen exclusively by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

[…] All UK councils that bought Chinese technology said in their FOI responses they were not currently deploying facial recognition systems.

But several acknowledged owning additional hardware beyond cameras – including digital video recorders and network video recorders – that could be configured to carry out facial recognition or other analytical tasks, Woodhams said. [Source]

Businesses in the U.S. have also been exposed for continuing to buy Chinese surveillance equipment from companies on the U.S. blacklist. The Los Angeles Times’ Johana Bhuiyan reported that Amazon had a contract with security camera producer Dahua, which is on the U.S. government’s entity list and has produced facial recognition software that can detect the race of individuals and report to police when it identifies Uyghurs:

Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) sent a letter to Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos one day after the Los Angeles Times reported on Dahua product support documents that suggest the company’s technology can sort passersby by race, issue “real-time warnings for non-local Uighurs,” and track “Uighurs with hidden terrorist inclinations.”

Dahua is among the Chinese companies included on the Commerce Department‘s entity list for its ties to “human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression” against Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group. The U.S. doesn’t restrict American companies such as Amazon from buying from businesses on the entity list, though it urges caution. Companies on the entity list are barred from purchasing American products.

“If these allegations against Dahua are true, it would mean that Amazon willfully ignored guidance from the United States government and purchased equipment from an entity-listed company that is complicit in China’s atrocities against” the Uighurs, read the joint letter addressed to Bezos. “While buying equipment from Dahua Technology is not illegal, it does raise several questions for you, as the chief executive of Amazon.” [Source]

Contracts for surveillance software and equipment are not the only deals under scrutiny. Last week, The Financial Times’ Yuan Yang and Madhumita Murgia reported that a Chinese national laboratory for advanced policing, with offices in Beijing and Urumqi, is funding research in London:

The flagship lab, which does not have a physical presence but is a network of researchers, is owned by China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, a state-owned defence company that has longstanding partnerships with the Chinese police and military.

[…] The Financial Times contacted all of the grant recipients, but almost all either refused interviews or would only speak off the record about their projects, citing the political sensitivity of their work. The only willing interviewee was Professor Tao Cheng at University College London, who was also the only overseas grant recipient.

Ms Cheng’s lab, known as the UCL Space Time Lab, analyses large data sets to create hourly or daily crime prediction maps for clients including the UK’s Metropolitan Police. Ms Cheng confirmed that she had been given grant funding from the NEL, but said that her work is not yet involved in policing in China. [Source]

University of London AI lab–with funding from UK research council & research cooperation with London police– is feeding research into AI-social control lab in Xinjiang run by state company CETC. CETC's behind Xinjiang's mass surveillance big data system: https://t.co/v5F9xhLouS https://t.co/mUjIyQGXQU

— Maya Wang 王松莲 (@wang_maya) February 11, 2020

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/new-reports-highlight-globalization-of-surveillance-tech-industry/

Another Brick In the Wall: Music Site’s Blocking Further Closes Off Chinese Internet

Nobody was surprised when Clubhouse, the viral app on which Chinese users shared their unfiltered views with global audiences, was blocked in China. Users had widely anticipated that Clubhouse would have to die. But the sudden blocking of Bandcamp, an international independent music platform, shocked Chinese and international observers. Together with the recent raid on Renren Yingshi, the subtitling group that provided uncensored international film and television translations to the Chinese public, the block illustrates the significant ongoing constriction of space for unregulated cultural exchange. At Radii China, Jake Newby broke the news that the app was banned:

The music streaming platform, which has made headlines throughout the past year for its artist-centric model and in particular its excellent Bandcamp Fridays initiative, has become a popular outlet for Chinese indie bands in recent years. It’s no coincidence that RADII’s monthly round-ups of the best Chinese music have frequently been dominated by tracks sourced from the site.

Bandcamp’s disappearance behind the so-called “Great Firewall” — China’s system of controls on certain overseas websites and services — has been met with dismay by many in Chinese music circles, as the site had provided an important bridge between DIY labels and artists in the country and international audiences. In the short-term, many of those using the platform from within China will likely find a way around the block, but the longer-term impact should not be underestimated.

[…] Unfortunately, it seems the blocking of Bandcamp may throw up a barrier for artists hoping to reach international audiences who want to explore the extremely diverse, fascinating Chinese music scene. [Source]

At Vice News, Josh Terry wrote about Bandcamp’s relationship with Chinese rocker Li Zhi, who has had numerous songs, like “The Square,” banned in China:

It’s unclear exactly why the Chinese government may have chosen to block Bandcamp at this point in time. While China recently blocked the rising social media app Clubhouse, which Chinese citizens used to freely discuss politics and debate contentious issues, Bandcamp is not a forum for political dissent or protest in the usual sense—at least of any overt kind. In fact, as [Josh] Feola points out in a 2020 newsletter, “to legally release an album in mainland China, all lyrics must be submitted beforehand to a Department of Culture bureau for official approval.”

There are acts who have pushed the boundaries, and the Chinese Culture bureau has cracked down especially hard on hip-hop. One notable case is influential Chinese folk musician Li Zhi, a musician who, according to Radii China, was known for being a fierce defender of artist copyright and for suing companies for infringement; in 2019, after Sichuan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism canceled his tour due unspecified “misbehavior,” Radii China reports, his social media accounts were removed from platforms like Weibo and WeChat and his music was scrubbed from streaming services. (He is now living in exile from China).

[…] As Feola sees it, a ban on Bandcamp would probably be more a matter of the Chinese government wanting to make it harder for underground artists from mainland China to reach a global audience than worrying about Western media getting into the country. Big Chinese streaming services like QQ and other Tencent-owned platforms, after all, already have deals in place with companies like Sony, Warner Music, and Universal Music Group, which means that Chinese users have access to Western popular music. “If I had to wager a guess, I’d say [the ban] was more about protectionism than censorship,” Feola said. [Source]

Feola is a regular contributor to the Bandcamp Daily blog, where he has highlighted a wide range of music from China and elsewhere.

Almost all major fandoms in China – music, books, art, videogames and film – require VPN use now for any meaningful engagement with their mediums.

— Krish Raghav (@krishraghav) February 17, 2021

Our data confirms that the @Bandcamp website has been blocked in China. https://t.co/a2LxWDbale https://t.co/LIV0XneqS4 pic.twitter.com/Zqx6meziCV

— GreatFire.org (@GreatFireChina) February 17, 2021

Such a shame. The site is full of so much good Chinese music and has been so important in getting independent Chinese artists exposure in front of international audiences.

— Jake Newby (@JakeNewby) February 17, 2021

The earlier closure of Renren Yingshi was another recent blow to China’s independent cultural sphere. For nearly two decades, the subtitling group provided free, uncensored, translated Hollywood films and television shows to Chinese viewers. The likely end of the group sparked a large outcry on the Chinese internet. CDT Chinese’s Sensitive Word Series tracked censorship of netizen’s complaints about the raid on Renren. Censors on Weibo deleted screenshots of a 2011 People’s Daily article that praised the subtitling group as a model of the egalitarian knowledge-sharing ethos of the internet era. At The Wall Street Journal, Sha Hua reported on the end of Renren Yingshi and the future of uncensored television content in China:

The outsized reaction to the possible demise of Renren Yingshi, which roughly translates to “Everybody’s Film and TV,” illustrates the voracious appetite for uncensored foreign content that still exists in China, even as Mr. Xi feeds a nationalist fervor and inveighs against the influence of Western ideas. It has also provided a rare occasion for some Chinese citizens, mostly well-educated urbanites, to push back against censorship at a time of increasingly tightened media controls.

[…] “If Renren has committed a crime, then everybody has committed a crime,” several Chinese social-media users wrote in a play on the group’s name.

Pirated content has been a staple in China’s entertainment diet since the late 1990s, in part because of restrictions on the import of foreign films and censorship that many viewers blamed for rendering some shows unwatchable.

[…] “Taking down Renren, the biggest and most influential [fan subtitling] group, sends a signal to other groups like them,” said Yu Meng, a legal expert and co-founder of the journal China Justice Observer. [Source]

At The Economist, Sue-Lin Wong reflected on what the end of Renren Yingshi means for China’s Hollywood fans:

[…] Demand for Renren Yingshi’s offerings was fuelled by tight supply. China is one of four regions without Netflix: the others are North Korea, Syria and Crimea. Even though it is one of the fastest growing film markets, China approves only a few foreign films for screening in cinemas each year. It is possible to watch some foreign shows on officially approved streaming sites. But they are heavily censored—so much so in the case of “Game of Thrones” that the plot is hard to follow. Such restrictions helped to turn translation-group services into big operations. Police in Shanghai said Renren Yingshi had produced more than 20,000 television shows for its 8m registered users.

Renren Yingshi’s popularity is evident in the debate that still surrounds it on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform. Posts with hashtags relating to the clampdown have garnered more than a billion views. In one of them, Yan Feng of Fudan University in Shanghai said the subtitling effort had been one of Chinese history’s great translation projects, on a par with a drive to render Western literature into Chinese in the 19th century. Uncensored foreign films and shows will remain accessible to Chinese viewers with foreign-language skills and software that can scale the great firewall. But most people are unlikely to try, not least because the government disapproves. Netizens have been sharing the poetic Chinese term, lindong jiangzhi. It is one that subtitling enthusiasts have used to translate a phrase made famous by “Game of Thrones”: winter is coming. [Source]

Other teams translated shows from Korean, Japanese, French, Spanish, Thai & Hindi to Chinese. Or focused on specific celebrities – Benedict Cumberbatch had his own subtitling group that translated his shows, interviews, plays, poetry readings, speeches into Chinese 3/3

— Sue-Lin Wong 黄淑琳 (@suelinwong) February 19, 2021

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/another-brick-in-the-wall-music-sites-blocking-further-closes-off-chinese-internet/

Photo: Shenzhen, by Thomas_Yung

Photo: Shenzhen, by Thomas_Yung (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/photo-shenzhen-by-thomas_yung/

The Philadelphia Inquirer – China steps up online controls with new rule for bloggers

source https://www.inquirer.com/wires/ap/correction-china-online-crackdown-story-20210218.html#new_tab

Mind Matters – For Five Days There Was Free Expression in China

source https://mindmatters.ai/2021/02/for-five-days-there-was-free-expression-in-china/#new_tab

CDT Weekly, February 12-18: Ilham Tohti, Xinjiang, and Why Clubhouse Had to Die

Welcome to the second edition of CDT’s weekly roundup, also available as an email newsletter through Substack. With these updates, we aim to provide an overview of new content across CDT’s English and Chinese sites, as well as the bilingual China Digital Space wiki, and related content elsewhere.

The highlight of our translation content this week was a long essay from 2009 by journalist and website founder Huang Zhangjin, describing his friendship and discussions with Uyghur intellectual Ilham Tohti after the latter’s detention in the wake of violent unrest in Urumqi in 2009. The essay was reposted on Matters last week following discussion of the ongoing mass detentions in Xinjiang on Clubhouse and Weibo.

Some of the views attributed to Ilham in Huang’s paraphrased recollections may be unpalatable: he approvingly quotes Liu Xiaobo’s views on the benefits of Western colonialism, and implicitly disparages the industriousness of people from other developing regions. But the essay clearly conveys Ilham’s vision of an alternative path for Xinjiang within the People’s Republic, far from the aggressive suppression that has intensified under Xi Jinping, or the alleged separatism for which Ilham was sentenced to life in prison in 2014.

Ilham insisted that Uyghur’s pursuit of equality and freedom must not be separated from Han people’s advancement of freedom and democracy. The two must be closely integrated. The situation of the Uyghurs was a result of the lack of democracy and freedom in China as a whole. Uyghurs can gain freedom and democracy only if Han people can also achieve them. […]

[…] After the Sichuan Earthquake in 2008, I rushed back to Beijing. Ilham had been glued to the TV. With his stubborn optimism and his Uyghur perspective, he’d often come up with things that I had overlooked. I remembered seeing him exclaim, with tears in his eyes, “Sichuan people are extraordinary. Compared to Westerners, Chinese people—Han people—you live under such lousy governance, as lowly as wild grass, as numb as animals. But just look at the Sichuan people after the earthquake, the sheer tenacity and perseverance. That’s truly extraordinary, the exuberant vitality and staunch willpower. Are there any other people who could have done better than the Han people? Who can conquer them? You know why so many Uyghurs in Xinjiang are donating blood and supplies? They are so moved! Wow, such people ought not to, and will not, live like this forever. Alas, with a people like this, the country has hope.”

Ilham laments that “those Han people who shout about freedom and democracy don’t care about us. […] Why is it that some Han intellectuals always suspect Uyghurs of engaging in ethnic separatism whenever we speak about ethnic equality?” The essay also brings out some shades of disagreement between his own views and those of more sympathetic Han, particularly the writer Wang Lixiong, whose pessimistic outlook Ilham found disturbing. Wang famously commented following Ilham’s prosecution in 2014 that “the only conclusion is dark: it’s that they don’t want moderate Uighurs. Because if you have moderate Uighurs, then why aren’t you talking to them? So they wanted to get rid of him and then you can say to the West that there are no moderates and we’re fighting terrorists.”

Another translation since our last newsletter was a deleted WeChat post on the blocking of audio-based chatroom app Clubhouse, discussed in last week’s newsletter, titled “Why Did Clubhouse Have to Die?” Author “Zi Ge” praised the platform’s empathy-promoting focus on direct spoken communication, and its “harmonious and rational atmosphere for dialogue,” but argued that these very qualities are what made it intolerable to the authorities: “Because in the eyes of the relevant department, rationality means the beginning of reflection, and freedom and loss of control are synonymous. These facts both carry enormous potential energy, posing a grave threat to stability.”

Zi Ge anticipated the arrival of “castrated” homegrown Clubhouse clones monitored automatically for sensitive words in real time. The underlying audio technology for Clubhouse itself, they noted, is provided by another company, Agora, based in Shanghai. A team at the Stanford Internet Observatory examined that connection’s technical and legal implications, having “determined that a user’s unique Clubhouse ID number and chatroom ID are transmitted in plaintext, and Agora would likely have access to users’ raw audio, potentially providing access to the Chinese government. In at least one instance, SIO observed room metadata being relayed to servers we believe to be hosted in the PRC, and audio to servers managed by Chinese entities […].” SIO’s Alex Stamos, previously Chief Security Officer at Facebook, commented on Twitter:

We found Chinese servers being used even for conversations that only involved Americans.

At this time, I can't recommend that individuals who might find themselves adverse to the security services of the PRC to use Clubhouse for sensitive conversations. pic.twitter.com/a7Q1EGUOY9

— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) February 16, 2021

Stamos also posted the company’s response to SIO’s findings, which included a promise to “prevent Clubhouse clients from ever transmitting pings to Chinese servers” within 72 hours, and subsequently to have these changes independently reviewed. SIO noted that “we have not verified any of Clubhouse’s statements.” Zheping Huang also looked at the precarious afterlife of Clubhouse in China at Bloomberg on Wednesday, while Rest of World’s Andrew Deck and Sultan Quadri explored recent spikes in the app’s popularity in Hong Kong, Japan, Indian, and Nigeria.

CDT joined Clubhouse last week, and on Sunday our Chinese team hosted what became a four-and-a-half-hour Q&A session with Eric Liu, a former censor at Weibo and Leshi. Questions focused heavily on the underlying reasoning and mechanisms of censorship on Chinese social media, and the viability of strategies like using non-standard dialects for evading it. Another insider view came this week from Shen Lu at Protocol, who translated an account by a censor at TikTok parent company Bytedance.

On the news front, CDT English covered:

• … campaigns for a boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over the mass detentions in Xinjiang, and recent coverage of related efforts to “Sinicize” minority cultures elsewhere in China.
• … the results of a WHO team’s Chinese field research into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, and suspicions of political interference.
• … the reappearance of blackface in CCTV’s annual Spring Festival Gala, also discussed this week by Human Rights Watch’s Yaqiu Wang at MSNBC.

Highlights from CDT Chinese include dissenting views on the Spring Festival Gala; more on Clubhouse and its blocking; and mourning in Wuhan a year on from its historic lockdown at the start of the pandemic, including official media’s appropriation of citizens buying flowers for the dead, and restrictions imposed after the location of whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang’s grave was posted online.

source https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2021/02/cdt-weekly-february-12-18-ilham-tohti-xinjiang-and-why-clubhouse-had-to-die/