
Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in Xinjiang - metaphysics
https://www.ft.com/content/9ed9362e-31f7-11e9-bb0c-42459962a812
======
itissid
This is so sad: [https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-
report/muslims-...](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-
report/muslims-camps-china/)

~~~
wuschel
Indeed, what a brave New world.

People do not forget abuse on such a level, and collective trauma does not go
away overnight. I am sure there will be more sadness in the future, when
people will discuss effects of the repressive policies on the Uigurs.

------
wizardforhire
I’m sure China thinks this is a really great idea, but seriously, what a waste
of resources. This goes against the very existential reason for organizing
into complex societies in the first place, and second if the powers at be were
students of philosophy and especially history they would know that this kind
of behavior never ends well for the ruling class.

~~~
jpalomaki
I don’t think we have seen anything like this in history. In past it was
different, because your possibilities for collecting and processing
information were much more limited. Also the security apparatus had to employ
huge number of people, making it harder to control and less reliable.

~~~
evrydayhustling
Agree that we've never seen anything like current surveillance capabilities,
but there have been big jumps before. For example, IBM famously supplied
equipment that made it possible for WW2 Germany (did I dodge Godwin's law?) to
collate evidence of ethnicity at a scale not known before, with disastrous
results [1].

I think that to some, surveillance often looks like a way to get the
efficiency of distributed decision making while keeping central control (which
has definitely been the philosophy behind China's economic experiments of the
past 30y). But historically, it has arced towards enforcing centralized
organization for reasons that have nothing to do with the efficiency of the
tech involved - and that pattern has proven both bad for a population and
self-defeating for regimes.

[1] [http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-
ibm.html](http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html)

------
lainga
That's roughly 10% of the population (23M). At its peak, the Stasi in the DDR
had files on about 30% of the East German population.

~~~
pizza
The population of East Germany was 18 million in 1950 and 16 million in 1990.
On the same order of magnitude. But I think it would be much easier for China
to keep tabs on millions nowadays than the Stasi back then.

~~~
anoncoward111
Completely agree. If I was sadistic enough, a few web scrapers and .csv files
and some workers on fiverr could keep enough tabs on millions of people so as
to be scary.

------
partiallypro
This is just what leaked, they are undoubtedly tracking a lot more people than
this.

------
itissid
My friend from China explained to me that the surveillance of people is as
much top down as much as its bottom up.

\- At every village level they have "informants" for the communist party who
inform their higher ups regularly about village level activity. They are
financially supported with healthcare and education subsidies and so it makes
sense for everyone to join in and inform, especially the poor.

\- At the city level they have more ways to collect information about people
like companies feeding data bases, people interacting with the internet and
retail.

He explained that the idea is even if 10% of the population is brain washed
they can keep tabs on the 90% and when shit hits the fan they want to be in
the know. After Tiananmen they have followed a formula: Keep enough people
happy and conforming with economic prosperity and get ahead of the curb for
restive remainder.

~~~
nabla9
China also tolerates civil unrest and civil disobedience as long as it's not
directly challenging the authority of central government. Official name for it
is "mass incidents" or "mass frustration".

There are almost 200,000 of these incidents every year. Several of them grow
into large demonstrations with barricades, sit-ins, and rioting. They are
usually reactions against come companies, local government, land seizures, or
some corrupt individuals.

As long as people don't demand changing of the system, government often gives
in at least a little. People can be changed, more investigations, some
government actions can be cancelled.

It's clever way to bend without breaking. Allow people to show their
frustration against things that are wrong but control tightly what kind of
targets are allowed.

~~~
bigmonads
China could probably go much further. In America, you're shut down and
surveilled for demanding systemic changes to the system (just try to build a
movement in the United States for a change of government; see where that gets
you). Much of that surveillance is automatic, and fed into police threat
scores and FBI databases based off of online conversations (like this one) and
other information (including financials, purchase history, social circle,
etc).

Now, in the United States, if you want to disrupt some other kind of
corruption (say, farming industry practices around the treatment of animals) -
this will get you on terrorist watchlists, and the FBI will infiltrate and
seek the arrests of that behavior as well, enforcing the strict relationship
that wealthy families have in the enforcement of American societal structure.

~~~
nabla9
This is a false equivalence. Your second paragraph is just conspiracy theory.
"It's all same" is cynical and unintelligent attitude.

~~~
arminiusreturns
I'm so absolutely tired of people dismissing very real concerns and positions
of people with the term "conspiracy theory"! First of all, gp isn't wrong,
those things do happen in America and we have had plenty of proof leak over
the years to back that up. Second, the entire history of the world is chock-
full of conspiracy, so to dismiss points so blithely and naively as "
conspiracy theory" indicates a lack of knowledge of history. Third, has
everyone just forgotten that the term itself was pushed post JFK assassination
as a psyop tool by the CIA to discredit anyone who questioned the Warren
commission?

If it weren't for Snowden many of us who had been ranting about the NSA would
still be getting dismissed with off-hand remarks of "conspiracy theorist" with
a condescending undertone. Yet even as those of us warning about these issues
move on to tell people about the next thing, we get the same thing. Even
worse, after being proved right by Wikileaks or Snowden etc, those same people
are still making excuses for their failure to heed those warnings. For
example, I can't tell you how frustrating it is to start talking about NSA and
to get "yeah we'll, we knew about echelon, it wasn't a surprise" type
comments. Yes, those of us paying attention knew, but the problem is that we
all got dismissed by smugly idiotic people with phrases like "crackpot
conspiracy theorist"...

~~~
nabla9
"Those things do happen" is not proper counterargument. I'm aware that they
happen and I'm worried.

They just don't happen in the same scale and they don't have as bad
consequences for people.

~~~
PavlovsCat
There is a huge difference between " _that 's not true, it's a conspiracy
theory_", and " _oh sure it does happen, but at a different scale and with
less bad consequences [not that I would want to suffer the worst consequences
in either scenario]_ ".

> "Those things do happen" is not proper counterargument.

To "that's a conspiracy theory" it actually is, and though I still agree that
it's a red herring to talk about the US when China is brought up (and China or
Russia or human nature when the US is brought up), it's not a "conspiracy
theory" at all.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-
insight/2013/j...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-
insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism)

> It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of
> intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance
> operations against political activists, particularly those linked to
> environmental and social justice protest groups.

> Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a
> "systematic effort" by the agency "to surveil and disrupt peaceful
> demonstrations" linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership
> for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).

> Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI,
> the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to
> produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community." A PCJF
> spokesperson remarked that the documents show "federal agencies functioning
> as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

------
sumo89
This is just part of the reason mass tracking is bad, you never know who is
going to end up with the data.

~~~
chrischen
What do you mean? Simply because they have it means it's bad, regardless of
what they do with it? Seems you've already formulated an opinion.

~~~
coldtea
Well, one thing can be bad in itself.

Breach of privacy is bad in itself. Thats not the parent's "formulated
opinion", it's something well discussed, with extended arguments, that many
people agree on.

So it doesn't matter "what they're going to do with it".

The same way your spouse going over and tracking your internet searches and
mails is bad, no matter if they don't do anything with it.

(This of course holds for the whole world states that do that shit, not just
China).

~~~
chrischen
There is no universal "evil" or "band". Everything is context sensitive.

Is killing evil? In some contexts, yes, in others no.

The issue is a lack of context in affairs on the other side of the world, in a
culture and the lives one has no knowledge about. To levy moral supremacy over
others without an attempt at context is what starts wars and disagreements.

Take this thought experiment on the importance of understanding context: If i
walk into a room and levy my supreme morality by shooting you in the face
because i Just saw you shoot a man would be a crime, because perhaps I did not
witness the context from 5 minutes earlier of that man shooting another man
(which is why you shot him in the face, and ultimately why I shot you). Who's
right? Who's wrong?

------
MR4D
Most people look at Orwell’s “1984” as a warning; China seems to be using it
as a How-to manual.

------
onetimemanytime
China views this is a matter of NatSec. Right or wrong they view it this way
and states spare nothing at this. The extremely bad news is that China has
virtually unlimited resources, in money, tech and manpower. And no one can
stop them. Not via war, not via UN. Even if they hire a minder for every 2-3
Muslims the Chinese Gov will probably do it. But tech has made their job very
easy.

My guess is that they think that by flooding the place with Han Chinese and
making their (Muslims) lives miserable, they will break them.

~~~
anoncoward111
And they probably will, sadly. It just takes time. If you remove their
cultural identity through mixing of cultures, erasure of "non-sanctioned"
cultures, then over time it will happen.

When displaying your non-Han-ness becomes something that will lead to you
being imprisoned or denied jobs/housing/food, gradually all that will remain
is Han.

~~~
bortacans
There are definitely other, more humane ways to make the indigenous population
join the melting pot. China should really look at how Hawaiians were
integrated. aside from the initial war, there wasn’t that much bloodshed.

------
whydoineedthis
Why did that take a data breach? I already assumed they were tracking 300+mm
of thier population.

~~~
mediocrejoker
Are you asking why reputable news organizations don't publish assumptions?

------
bruxis
Without the paywall: [https://outline.com/bMxgSG](https://outline.com/bMxgSG)

------
goombastic
Article is paywalled.

~~~
Strom
Not with a Google referrer. Simple way to get it is to search for the FT
article title. FT is nice enough to include it on their paywall. _Subscribe to
the FT to read: "Data leak reveals China is tracking almost 2.6m people in
Xinjiang"_.

------
gcb0
can't read an article behind a paypal.

but how is this facial data collection any different than Facebook's?

~~~
ardy42
> but how is this facial data collection any different than Facebook's?

Does Facebook have cameras everywhere that feed facial recognition and
location data into a database that correlates it with government-id
information?

No, Facebook does not. That is how it is different.

~~~
gcb0
likle anyone walks on a sidewalk in california!

facebook have everyone around you uploading photos. google and amazon have
microphones in your house and houses you visit. considering the social
settings on both countries it is the same coverage.

~~~
ardy42
>>> but how is this facial data collection any different than Facebook's?

> facebook have everyone around you uploading photos. google and amazon have
> microphones in your house and houses you visit. considering the social
> settings on both countries it is the same coverage.

The _main_ differences here aren't technical (such as camera coverage per
person), but political. China is installing facial recognition cameras to non-
consensually monitor an unwilling minority population in order to subjugate
and eventually forcibly assimilate it. Facebook does facial recognition on
images voluntarily given to it to further some creepy ad-pushing. _Those are
very different things_.

~~~
gcb0
most people on FB never signed up for it. they have my phone number and social
graph because my acquaintances let the app upload their contact list, and same
for photos.

also, can you say that facebook, advertising and thinktanks are not political
in the US?

------
baybal2
Americans are afraid of being invaded by Chinese _army_ , while completely
omitting the fact that both Chinese police and 3 letter services _have few
times bigger budgets_ (literally, MPS has around 3 times bigger budget than
regular land forces,) more men, better training (armed police officers don't
spend 50% of their time reading Marx, unlike army officers,) and, in some
times, better equipment including heavy weaponry (in China, armed police
forces, and "men in black" each have few armoured divisions, and are rumoured
to have own heli force)

So, in the end, if West is to be afraid of Chinese invasion, they should be
afraid of Chinese armed police, not the regular army.

~~~
cromwellian
Given the US has nuclear weapons, I doubt they’re afraid of invasion. There
can’t really be a conventional war between nuclear powers. Any future
conflicts will be proxy wars.

~~~
noir_lord
Agreed.

The point of course in having both conventional and nuclear weapons is so that
your range of responses is wider than between nothing and a mushroom cloud.

------
felipelemos
By the social contract theory you give up some freedom to have a better
quality of life.

I.e. I prefer to give up my freedom to kill others at will if everyone around
me would do the same.

