The Washington Post

C h i n a’s
wa tch f u l eye

CCTV footage taken in Beijing uses the facial-

recognition system Face++. China, unburdened
by concerns about privacy or civil rights, is
integrating private cameras and security
cameras into a nationwide surveillance system.

Story by Simon Denyer

Photos by Gilles Sabrié
JANUARY 7, 2018

  

CHONGQING, China
For 40-year-old Mao Ya, the facial
recognition camera that allows
access to her apartment house is
simply a useful convenience.

“If I am carrying shopping bags in

both hands, I just have to look ahead
and the door swings open,” she said.
“And my 5-year-old daughter can
just look up at the camera and get in.
It’s good for kids because they often
lose their keys.”

But for the police, the cameras that

replaced the residents’ old entry
cards serve quite a different purpose.

Now they can see who’s coming and

going, and by combining artificial
intelligence with a huge national
bank of photos, the system in this
pilot project should enable police to
identify what one police report,
shared with The Washington Post,
called the “bad guys” who once might
have slipped by.

Facial recognition is the new hot tech

topic in China. Banks, airports,
hotels and even public toilets are all
trying to verify people’s identities by
analyzing their faces. But the police
and security state have been the
most enthusiastic about embracing
this new technology.
The pilot in Chongqing forms one
tiny part of an ambitious plan,
known as “Xue Liang,” which can be
translated as “Sharp Eyes.” The
intent is to connect the security
cameras that already scan roads,
shopping malls and transport hubs
with private cameras on compounds
and buildings, and integrate them
into one nationwide surveillance and
data-sharing platform.

It will use facial recognition and

artificial intelligence to analyze and
understand the mountain of
incoming video evidence; to track
suspects, spot suspicious behaviors
and even predict crime; to
coordinate the work of emergency
services; and to monitor the comings
and goings of the country’s 1.4 billion
people, official documents and
security industry reports show.

At the back end, these efforts merge

with a vast database of information
on every citizen, a “Police Cloud” that
aims to scoop up such data as
criminal and medical records, travel
bookings, online purchase and even
social media comments — and link it
to everyone’s identity card and face.

“ Surveillance
technologies are
giving the
government a
sense that it can
finally achieve the
level of control
over people's lives
that it aspires to.”
— Adrian Zenz, a German academic

A goal of all of these interlocking

efforts: to track where people are,
what they are up to, what they
believe and who they associate with
— and ultimately even to assign them
a single “social credit” score based on
whether the government and their
fellow citizens consider them
trustworthy.

At this housing complex in

Chongqing, “90 percent of the crime
is caused by the 10 percent of people
 who are not registered residents,” the
police report said. “With facial
recognition we can recognize
strangers, analyze their entry and
exit times, see who spends the night
here, and how many times. We can
identify suspicious people from
among the population.”

Adrian Zenz, a German academic

who has researched ethnic policy and
the security state in China’s western
province of Xinjiang, said the
government craves omnipotence
over a vast, complex and restive
population.

“Surveillance technologies are giving

the government a sense that it can
finally achieve the level of control
over people’s lives that it aspires to,”
he said.

China is pursuing an ambitious plan to make an omnipresent video surveillance network to track
where people are and what they're up to. The Post's Simon Denyer looks at the technology that will
make this possible.

In this effort, the Chinese

government is working hand-in-
glove with the country’s tech
industry, from established giants to
plucky start-ups staffed by graduates
from top American universities
and former employees of companies
like Google and Microsoft, who seem
cheerfully oblivious to concerns they
might be empowering a modern
surveillance state.

The name of the video project is

taken from the Communist slogan
“the masses have sharp eyes,” and is
a throwback to Mao Zedong’s
attempt to get every citizen spying on
one another. The goal, according to
tech industry executives working on
the project, is to shine a light into
every dark corner of China,
to eliminate the shadows where
crime thrives.

The Sharp Eyes project also aims

to mobilize the neighborhood
committees and snoopy residents
who have long been key informers:
now, state media reports, some can
turn on their televisions or mobile
phones to see security camera
footage, and report any suspicious
activity — a car without a license
plate, an argument turning violent —
directly to the police.

To the eyes of the masses, in other

words, add the brains of the
country’s fast-growing tech industry.
At Megvii offices in Beijing, a designer prepares marketing material for a facial-recognition product.
The company's marketing manager has said Megvii's Face program has helped police make
thousands of arrests.

By 2020, China’s government aims

to make the video surveillance
network “omnipresent, fully
networked, always working and fully
controllable,” combining data mining
with sophisticated video and image
analysis, official documents show.

China is not alone in experimenting

with these new technologies. The
FBI’s Next Generation Identification
System uses facial recognition to
compare images from crime scenes
with a national database of mug
shots. Police forces across the United
States have been using algorithm-
based techniques for several years
to predict where crimes are likely to
occur.

Chicago police identified and a court

convicted a thief using facial-
recognition technology in 2014, and
Britain used a Japanese program
called NeoFace Watch to spot a
wanted man in a crowd in May.

The United States,

with around 62
million surveillance cameras in 2016,
actually has higher per
capita penetration rate than China,
with around 172 million, according to
Monica Wang, a senior analyst in
video surveillance and security at
research consultants IHS Markit in
Shanghai.

Yet it is China’s ambition that sets it

apart. Western law enforcement
agencies tend to use facial
recognition to identify criminal
suspects, not to track social activists
and dissidents, or to monitor entire
ethnic groups. China seeks to achieve
several interlocking goals: to
dominate the global artificial-
intelligence industry, to apply big
data to tighten its grip on every
aspect of society, and to maintain
 surveillance of its population more
effectively than ever before.

“Deep learning is poised to

revolutionize the video surveillance
industry,” Wang wrote in a recent
report. “Demand in China will grow
quickly, providing the engine for
future market growth.”

In the showrooms of three facial-

recognition start-ups in Chongqing
and Beijing, video feeds roll past on
big screens, with faces picked out
from crowds and matched to images
of wanted men and women. Street
cameras automatically classify
passersby according to gender,
clothes and even hair length, and
software allows people to be tracked
from one surveillance camera to the
next, by their faces alone.

LEFT: A CCTV camera is reflected on a window at the entrance of the Megvii showroom in Beijing.
RIGHT: A CCTV display using the facial-recognition system Face in Beijing.
“The bigger picture is to track
routine movement, and after you get
this information, to investigate
problematic behavior,” said Li
Xiafeng, director of research and
development at Cloudwalk, a
Chongqing-based firm. “If you know
gambling takes place in a location,
and someone goes there frequently,
they become suspicious.”

Gradually, a model of people’s

behavior takes shape. “Once you
identify a criminal or a suspect, then
you look at their connections with
other people,” he said. “If another
person has multiple connections,
they also become suspicious.”

The start-ups also showcase more

consumer-friendly applications of
their technology. Companies
like SenseTime, Megvii and
Cloudwalk provide the software that
powers mobile apps allowing people
to alter, “beautify” or transform their
faces for fun.

Much of their business also comes

from banks and financial companies
that are using facial recognition to
check identities, at ATMs or on
phones. Some airports in China
already employ facial recognition in
security checks, and hotels are doing
the same at check-in; a Chinese
version of Airbnb promises to use it
to verify guests’ identities, while
China’s version of Uber, Didi
Chuxing, is using it to verify those of
its drivers.

Some of the
applications have a
slightly gimmicky feel. A lecturer at a
Beijing university was said to be
using a face scanner to check if his
students were bored; a toilet roll
dispenser at a public facility outside
the Temple of Heaven in
Beijing reportedly scans faces to keep
people from stealing too much paper,
while a Kentucky Fried Chicken
restaurant in Hangzhou allows
customers to simply “smile to pay.”

Other ideas are struggling to move

beyond the pilot stage: a plan to
identify jaywalkers in Chongqing has
already been abandoned, while
residents have responded to facial-
recognition gates on some apartment
buildings in Chongqing and Beijing
by propping the doors open.

Yet facial recognition is not going

away, and it promises to become a
potent tool for maintaining control of
Chinese society.

So far, the technology doesn’t quite

match the ambition: It is not
foolproof.

“There will be false positives for the

foreseeable future,” said Jim
Dempsey, executive director of UC
Berkeley’s Center for Law and
Technology. This raises two critical
questions, he said: Does a country’s
due process system protect people
from being falsely convicted on the
basis of facial-recognition
technology? And are the false
positives disproportionately skewed
toward certain minority groups, such
as Chinese Muslims?

In China, the tech companies claim

many times greater accuracy rates
than, for instance, the FBI, and
probably justifiably so, experts say:
after all, they have been able to draw
on a huge pool of photos from
government records to improve their
algorithms, without any pesky
concerns about privacy.
More than anything else, experts say,
deep learning technologies need
huge amounts of data to come up
with accurate algorithms. China has
more data than anywhere else in the
world and fewer constraints about
mining it from its citizens.

“Now we are purely data driven,”

said Xu Li, CEO of SenseTime. “It’s
easier in China to collect sufficient
training data. If we want to do new
innovations, China will have
advantages in data collection in a
legal way.”

Smart technology backed by artificial

intelligence will be a tool to assist the
police forces of the future. Chinese IT
and telecoms giant Huawei says its
Safe Cities technology has already
helped Kenya bring down urban
crime rates.

But who’s a criminal? In China,

documents for the Police Cloud
project unearthed by Human Rights
Watch list “petitioners” — people
who complain to the government
about perceived injustices — as
potential targets of surveillance,
along with anyone who “undermines
stability” or has “extreme thoughts.”
Other documents cite members of
ethnic minorities, specifically
Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang, as
subjects of scrutiny.
Crowds walk in a Beijing pedestrian underpass, near Tiananmen Square, that is monitored by three
CCTV cameras.

Maya Wang, a researcher at Human

Rights Watch, said what sets China
apart is “a complete lack of effective
privacy protections,” combined with
a system that is explicitly designed to
target individuals seen as “politically
threatening.”

“In other countries, we are often

concerned about the use of big data
for deepening existing policing bias
— for example, for targeting
historically disadvantaged groups
like African Americans in the U.S.
context — but for the Chinese
systems, the targeting of people of
certain ethnicity is a fundamental
function of the system,” she added.

In Muslim-majority Xinjiang, where

a spate of violent incidents has been
blamed on separatists or Islamist
radicals, facial-recognition cameras
have become ubiquitous at
roadblocks, outside gas stations,
airports, railway and bus stations,
and at residential and university
compounds and entrances to Muslim
neighborhoods, experts say. DNA
collection and iris scanning add extra
layers of sophistication.
At Megvii, marketing manager Zhang
Xin boasts that the company’s
Face++ program helped police arrest
4,000 people since the start of 2016,
including about 1,000 in Hangzhou,
where a major deployment of
cameras in hotels, subways and train
stations preceded that year’s G-20
summit.

Very likely among that number:

some of the dozens of dissidents,
petitioners and citizen journalists
who were detained in and around the
city at that time.

Frances Eve, a researcher for

Chinese Human Rights Defenders in
Hong Kong, argues that China’s tech
companies are complicit in human
rights abuses.

“It’s basically a crime in China to

advocate for human rights
protection,” she said. “The
government treats human rights
activists, lawyers and ethnic Uighurs
and Tibetans as criminals, and these
people are being caught, jailed and
possibly tortured as a result of this
technology.”
Shirley Feng contributed to this
report.

Read more

China’s plan to organize its society

relies on ‘big data’ to rate everyone

In China, Big Brother isn’t just

watching your every move. He’s
selling your personal data.

The walls are closing in: China finds

new ways to tighten Internet
controls

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Credits: Story by Simon Denyer. Photos by Gilles

Sabrié. Video by Joyce Lee. Graphics by Chris
Alcantara. Designed by Madalyne Bird.