China’s authoritarian regime ruthlessly deploys the very latest in surveillance and artificial intelligence technology to monitor and control its 1.4 billion citizens. This is unsurprising since any totalitarian communist state must exert maximum control over its people in order to survive.
By Washington Examiner – Conn Carroll
Feb 5, 2022
What is less well known is the extent to which China is employing the same surveillance tools it has perfected watching its own people to spy on the rest of the world.
Over half of all surveillance cameras in the world are owned by the Chinese government and are used to spy on its citizens. Not only do these cameras use facial recognition to help track people’s every movement, but Chinese companies are required by law to share all data with the government, which is then used to produce a social credit score for each citizen. A Chinese citizen’s social credit score can go up or down depending on everything from how well they pay their bills on time to what they say about the government on social media.
China keeps an even tighter lid on the Uyghur population of Xinjiang. Uyghurs are only allowed to communicate digitally through the WeChat app, which is monitored by the government. The government has also installed spyware on all of their phones that tracks their every movement online.
All this spying would be less worrisome for everyone else in the world if China wasn’t also so busy exporting surveillance technology to the rest of the world.
The Chinese telecom company Huawei has sold “safe city” surveillance systems to 73 localities across 52 countries. These systems include Chinese-made cameras equipped with facial-recognition software to help authorities locate and capture wanted individuals. The vast majority of these systems were sold to oppressive regimes such as Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Russia. But China has also found buyers in European countries such as Serbia, Germany, and France, as well as Latin American nations such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia.
Any piece of hardware manufactured and sold by a Chinese company will have a backdoor built into it, allowing that Chinese company to monitor what the device sees and even empowering them to take control of the device. And remember, all Chinese companies are required by law to share all information with the Chinese government. Every one of these “safe cities” is nothing more than another node in China’s international surveillance system.
China is also collecting every bit of public data it can on targets of interest throughout the world, including everything you post to social media, like Twitter and Facebook. It uses this information to create databases of foreign targets that can then be used by government agencies, military, and police.
The purpose of China’s international surveillance state is no different than its domestic one. Both are designed to give the communist Chinese government maximum control over the people it interacts with.
The United States must do more to pressure other nations, especially our supposed allies, to reject Chinese-made surveillance and telecommunications equipment. That includes any deployment of 5G technology by Huawei. If we allow Chinese companies to build the world’s telecommunications infrastructure, then there will be no end to what they can’t see.
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Read More: Washington Examiner – China’s international surveillance state
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