Jun 23, 2022 07:00:00

Bidding documents reveal that the Chinese government is introducing a large number of facial recognition cameras and building a DNA database to monitor the public

China is refining its system of monitoring people using technology, and so far, a system that allows the

general public to monitor neighbors and a monitoring system that targets foreign journalists and international students are being built. The New York Times, an American daily newspaper, has investigated more than 100,000 government bidding documents and released a report summarizing the actual situation of such Chinese national surveillance technology.

China's Expanding Surveillance State: Takeaways From a NYT Investigation --The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/21/world/asia/china-surveillance-investigation.html

Under Chinese law, when a government agency contracts with a private company, it is obligatory to keep and publish bid records that explain product requirements, purposes, budget scale, etc., but in reality, many of them are difficult to search on web pages. It is said that they are scattered. The New York Times had an exclusive share of bid records collected by the digital magazine ' ChinaFile ' published by the Asia Society , a non-profit organization on Asia, and analyzed China's surveillance system.

The contents reported by the New York Times are as follows.

◆ Police are strategically deploying cameras to maximize the efficiency of facial recognition cameras
Analysts estimate that more than half of the approximately 1 billion surveillance cameras in the world are in China. In many of the bid documents analyzed by the New York Times, Chinese police have indicated their intention to install cameras in places that meet people's needs such as dining, travel, shopping and entertainment, as well as private housing, karaoke and hotels. He wanted to install a face recognition camera in the area as well.

In one case, police in Fuzhou City, Fujian Province, wanted to install a camera in the lobby of a franchise hotel at the American hotel brand Days Inn . The hotel's front desk manager told The New York Times that the camera doesn't have facial recognition and doesn't even provide video to the police network. Fuzhou police also installed a camera at the Sheraton Hotel , and found that the hotel provided the video in 2019 at the request of the local government.

The data taken by these cameras will be supplied to powerful analysis software that can determine race, gender, and the presence or absence of glasses and masks, and will be stored in an aggregated state on the government server. According to the bid document of Fujian Province, it is estimated that 2.5 billion facial images are stored in the police, and it can be seen that they have a very large amount of data.

Authorities use telephone trackers to connect people's digital and real life
Chinese authorities are using Wi-Fi sniffers that intercept device traffic and

IMSI catchers that impersonate mobile phone base stations to collect information on smartphones, and are linking their digital footprint to their physical location.

Phone trackers may also use weak security practices to extract personal information. Beijing officials demanded that users of popular social media apps be collected in a 2017 bid on phone trackers, as well as a 'Uyghur and Chinese dictionary app' in a province in Guangdong. I also found that I was buying a phone tracker to detect. Having the Uighur dictionary app installed indicates that the user is likely to be a Uighur tribe being cracked down in China.

According to the New York Times, Chinese authorities have dramatically expanded phone trackers over the past seven years, with all 31 provinces and regions in mainland China deploying phone trackers at the time of writing.

◆ DNA, iris scans, and voiceprints are collected from people unrelated to crime
Chinese police want to attach a sound recorder to a facial recognition camera to collect audio as well as video. Police in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, said in a bid document that they needed a device that could record audio from the camera at least about 90 meters in radius. Police claim that the recorded voice will be analyzed by software for voiceprint analysis and added to the database, and this data can be combined with facial recognition to speed up suspect identification.

Police have also purchased equipment to build large iris scans and DNA databases in the name of tracking criminals defined by the vague term 'political dissidents.' In the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, a database that can hold up to 30 million iris samples was built around 2017, and similar databases have been built in various parts of China since then.

Also, in 2014, an attempt to build a male DNA database started in Henan Province, and at the time of article creation, DNA databases have been built in 25 provinces and regions. By tracking the Y chromosome inherited by men, police can go back several generations along the paternal family. DNA databases are being built in other countries, but many of them are aimed at supporting criminal investigations, while China is unique in that it aims to collect as many samples as possible. Points out.

◆ The government aims to build a comprehensive citizen profile by combining multiple data
Chinese authorities have a realistic view of their technical limitations, and the Ministry of Public Security's bid document states that China's video surveillance system does not have sufficient analytical capabilities. The biggest problem identified by the Ministry of Public Security was 'data is not centralized', and the bidding document showed that the government wanted products and services that integrate multiple data. ..

From the internal presentation of

Megvii , a Chinese company that builds image recognition and deep learning software, obtained by the New York Times, Megvii integrates various data on humans, data on human movement, clothes, vehicles, mobile devices. Software that can display social connections etc. was shown. Megvii said in a statement to the New York Times that Megvii's purpose is to make the community more secure, not to monitor specific groups or individuals. However, these products have already been used by Chinese police, and officials nationwide were able to access the data.

The Ministry of Public Security of China, five local police stations, and the local government secretariat did not respond to inquiries from the New York Times.