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Three years ago China’s leading maker of military electronics, CETC, came to Xinjiang with a vision: bring the tech of battlefield management to control and surveil all aspects of the lives of Uighurs. This is our attempt to walk through how it works. nytimes.com/2019/05/22/wor…
The back end of CETC’s military-style surveillance system looks a bit like Google maps. It shows Kashgar layered w/ the location of security incidents, police stations, cameras, officers. It pulls info from civilian informants. With a click police can zoom in and direct forces. 
When police detain someone at a checkpoint the system rates the severity of an incident, marks the identity of the detainee, and then also can summon police nearby, pull up their body cams, or display nearby surveillance footage from cameras.
The incident described above would happen at a checkpoint that looks Ike this. These toll-plaza sized gates collect data, not money, and form new borders for cities like Kashgar. At checkpoints Uighurs must get out of their cars and go through what looks like airport security.
Here’s a virtual advertisement for such a checkpoint at a CETC booth at an industry fair last year.
Inside Uighurs are confronted with a wall of gates. They must scan an ID and pose their face for a facial recognition system that verifies who they are. The tension as Uighurs lined up to go through was palpable. You could see the stress on their faces.
The checkpoints are the core of system. They blanket the city, creating a location record for police databases each time a person passes through. Millions of records are entered each day. Often lines form at the stops, which are a frustrating and scary part of city life now.
The key to these checkpoints are gadgets that collect the data. Many are mobile enough to sit on tables. The black square is for a Chinese ID card, which has a chip that can be read. The screen checks the face against the card. There are also hand scanners that can do the same.
The huge number of checkpoints means police can customize controls for each individual, according to Human Rights Watch. One person might not be allowed through the toll plaza to leave Kashgar. Another might get blocked once they leave their neighborhood. hrw.org/report/2019/05…
The Human Rights Watch report describes how police use an app to collect data for CETC’s platform, including cell phone ID numbers (IMEI), electricity usage patterns and “suspicious activities” like using your house’s backdoor. Below is the back end of that system.
When someone is stopped, the system pulls from its reservoir of data. A sample dossier shows education background, marriage status, address, contact info, I.D. number. From the checkpoints there’s info about locations visited and recent travel. It even displays family relations.
Click through to a new page and you get a branching chart of family members. Mapping out connections in a visually digestible way, the system linked the woman to a separate case and other people involved in the case.
Back at the map, officers can pull up video footage from cameras across the city with a click in case there’s a need to check out an incident.
In one marketing slide, CETC broke down just how much and what kind of data they have. In 2017, they claimed 10 petabytes on Kashgar’s citizens. The system’s catchy motto: “If someone exists, there will be traces, and if there are connections, there will be information.”
The CETC system is supported by others. Uighurs must download apps that scan their phones for content deemed problematic. A separate police system uses an Android app to track the ID’s of people purchasing everything from gasoline to sugar and cell phones.
Here’s a record of warnings about individuals sent via the police system that tracks purchases. It was in an academic paper about Kashgar’s security system with unredacted personal information, so I blacked out names and ID numbers.
CETC has close military ties, but also has lots of commercial plays. It’s a major investor in Hikvision, the camera company that sells across the world. It’s also Microsoft’s main partner for selling a secure Windows to Chinese government clients. news.microsoft.com/2015/09/23/mic…
For all the power of CETC’s system. The reality on the ground is more complicated. Police often aren’t trained well enough to use the tech. And the surveillance system applies mostly to Uighurs, making the tech the excuse to profile, harass, and target a single ethnic group.
What’s also amazing is how easy it would be to create such a system. There’s no miracle tech here, just a bunch of standard commercial stuff. With a smart group of engineers, the political will, and the policing presence, this could be recreated anywhere.
That shows how important the power of the Chinese state is in creating such a totalizing surveillance system. But it also shows how powerful readily available commercial technology has become and how easily it can be made into the basic ingredients of a police state.
