China’s Paper Tiger Surveillance State

source: thediplomat.com

The CCP’s pervasive surveillance apparatus is a sign not of strength, but of fragility.

China is the quintessential surveillance state: cameras perch on every street corner and bots monitor every corner of the internet. Chinese officials believe these measures will enable them to anticipate and preempt threats to the regime. But might Beijing’s growing reliance on surveillance actually weaken the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s hold on power?

China’s surveillance network is expansive and pervasive. Chongqing, for example, holds the dubious distinction of being the “most surveilled city in the world,” with roughly one camera for every six of its 30 million residents. Facial recognition systems identify those captured on camera, instantly recording their ethnicity and party membership. The state wastes no opportunity to gather biometric data, weaponizing it against Uyghurs and others suspected of disloyalty. And on WeChat – the Chinese equivalent of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Apple Pay combined – government monitors are ever-present. At the cutting edge, Chinese officials are testing artificial intelligence-powered analytics, which purport to predict unrest before it occurs.

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Powerful Video and Radar Surveillance Helps Protect United States’ Northern Border

source: ifsecglobal.com

An increasing number of remote video surveillance towers using AI and radar are being deployed to help counter illegal activity on the US-Canada border, as Ron Alalouff reports.

There’s been a great deal of publicity and controversy around the United States’ southern border with Mexico over the past few years – wall or no wall – but far less attention has been paid to its northern border with Canada. Yet an increase in illegal cross-border activities has led to the installation of a series of remote surveillance towers, bristling with powerful cameras and associated hardware.

An example of these remote video surveillance systems (RVSS) is along a 360-mile stretch of border surrounded by vast expanses of water – from Buffalo in New York to Detroit and Port Huron in Michigan – an area awash with thousands of pleasure craft, numerous marinas and hidden canals and channels.

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There Are Spying Eyes Everywhere—and Now They Share a Brain

source: wired.com

Security cameras. License plate readers. Smartphone trackers. Drones. We’re being watched 24/7. What happens when all those data streams fuse into one?

ONE AFTERNOON IN the fall of 2019, in a grand old office building near the Arc de Triomphe, I was buzzed through an unmarked door into a showroom for the future of surveillance. The space on the other side was dark and sleek, with a look somewhere between an Apple Store and a doomsday bunker. Along one wall, a grid of electronic devices glinted in the moody downlighting—automated license plate readers, Wi-Fi-enabled locks, boxy data processing units. I was here to meet Giovanni Gaccione, who runs the public safety division of a security technology company called Genetec. Headquartered in Montreal, the firm operates four of these “Experience Centers” around the world, where it peddles intelligence products to government officials. Genetec’s main sell here was software, and Gaccione had agreed to show me how it worked.

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In a Topsy-Turvy Pandemic World, China Offers Its Version of Freedom

source:  nytimes.com

Surveillance and censorship bolster Beijing’s uncompromising grip on power. But in the country’s cities and streets, people have resumed normal lives.

Sci-fi Surveillance: Europe’s Secretive Push Into Biometric Technology

source: theguardian.com

EU science funding is being spent on developing new tools for policing and security. But who decides how far we need to submit to artificial intelligence?.

atrick Breyer didn’t expect to have to take the European commission to court. The softly spoken German MEP was startled when in July 2019 he read about a new technology to detect from facial “micro-expressions” when somebody is lying while answering questions.

Even more startling was that the EU was funding research into this virtual mindreader through a project called iBorderCtrl, for potential use in policing Europe’s borders. In the article that Breyer read, a reporter described taking a test on the border between Serbia and Hungary. She told the truth, but the AI border guard said she had lied.

A member of the European parliament’s civil liberties committee and one of four MEPs for the Pirate party, Breyer realised that iBorderCtrl’s ethical and privacy implications were immense. He feared that if such technology – or as he now calls it, “pseudo-scientific security hocus pocus” – was available to those in charge of policing borders, then people of colour, women, elderly people, children and people with disabilities could be more likely than others to be falsely reported as liars.

Using EU transparency laws, he requested more information from the European commission on the ethics and legality of the project. Its response was jarring: access denied, in the name of protecting trade secrets.

So Breyer sued. He wants the European court of justice to rule that there is an overriding public interest in releasing the documents. “The European Union is funding illegal technology that violates fundamental rights and is unethical,” Breyer claimed.

Breyer’s case, which is expected to come before the court in the new year, has far-reaching implications. Billions of euros in public funding flow annually to researching controversial security technologies, and at least €1.3bn more will be released over the next seven years.

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China already has the world’s largest surveillance network; it deploys over half of all surveillance cameras in use around the world. Now, a new report shows just how fast that system is expanding.

ChinaFile, which operates as a nonprofit organization and works with a network of China-focused analysts and researchers, published the stand-alone State of Surveillance report after reviewing 76,000 publicly available government procurement orders of surveillance technologies from 2004 to May 2020. The report provides a comprehensive look at the scale of China’s surveillance program; Beijing does not widely publicize such information through other means.

The report showcases China’s yearslong push to become a global surveillance superpower.

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