From The Washington Post
China has turned Xinjiang into a zone of repression — and a frightening window into the future
By the Washington Post's Editorial Board
AT A minimum, the minority Muslim Uighur population of Xinjiang province in China is about 11 million people, and probably significantly higher. So consider the scope of surveillance over Uighurs in light of a recent database leak that indicated about 2.5 million people in Xinjiang are being tracked by cameras and other devices, generating more than 6.6 million GPS coordinates in one 24-hour period, much of it tagged with locations such as “mosque” and “hotel.”...
According to Xiao Qiang, director of the Counter-Power Lab at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information, Xinjiang is a window on the future of China, a “frontline” test-bed for data-driven surveillance that could then be spread well beyond. Mr. Xiao wrote in the Journal of Democracy last month that China under President Xi Jinping is attempting to marshal the powers of artificial intelligence to process all kinds of surveillance data, including facial recognition, and systems that can monitor gender, clothing, gait and height of passersby, as well as voice recognition, and creating a DNA database...
China’s goal is to use these technologies to suppress dissent, and to predict and snuff out any challenge to the ruling Communist Party’s grip on power. In Xinjiang, surveillance is part of a policy of cultural genocide. In addition to the camps and cameras, Mr. Xiao says the government has issued guidelines to collect DNA samples from all Xinjiang residents between ages 12 and 65...
Xiao Qiang is a research scientist at the UC Berkeley School of Information.
