The @CGPdc is an "independent, non-partisan American think tank working exclusively on issues at the intersection of U.S. foreign policy and Muslim geopolitics."
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It's just published a major report by @dtbyler on the tech of the war on Uyghurs and Kazakhs in China's #Xinjiang province; a devastating high-tech panopticon whose most visible element are concentration camps where 1M+ people were imprisoned.
cgpolicy.org/articles/the-g…
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cgpolicy.org/articles/the-g…
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But the whole story isn't the walled prisons: it's the entire region, which has been turned into an open air prison where technology tracks and controls predominantly Muslim Turkic people while allowing Han people to go about their business largely unhindered.
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This has been so effective that "within a single generation Muslim embodied practice and Turkic languages in Northwest China will cease to provide essential ways for Uighurs and Kazakhs to sustain their knowledge systems."
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The people who are "free" - that is, not interred in a concentration camp - were nevertheless forced to provide blood, DNA, fingerprint, iris and facial biometrics to the security apparatus. The penalty for noncompliance was imprisonment.
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Authorities set up a dense network of biometric scanning points throughout the region, points that Han people were typically waved through, while Turkic people had to stop and be scanned - more than 10 times/day.
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And while Xinjiang is its own unique horror, it has its roots in the US post-911 counterinsurgency theory (COIN), pioneered by US Army General Petraeus, and in the EU's "Countering Violent Extremism" (CVE) programs.
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These were the theoretical bases used as starting points by the Chinese architects of the Xinjiang project: it's "COIN and CVE with Chinese characteristic." Its motto: "teach like a school, be managed like the military, and be defended like a prison."
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China's technologists and private contractors laud their advantages over US counterparts, though, because "they have a space to experiment with these technologies without fear of legal or civil resistance, or without shareholders holding them responsible for failed systems."
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Technically, the companies supplying tools of oppression banned in America, but it's not enforced. Not only are their consumer products for sale in the US, but universities like MIT take funding from them, and commercial and academic scientists collaborate with them.
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Megvii created the vision systems used in the concentration camps: "The director of research at Megvii USA has published articles with current researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Stanford, Duke, Georgia Tech, Brown, and Rutgers."
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"He has also co-published with researchers at Facebook, Google, and Adobe, among others. In nearly all cases, the leaders of these sanctioned companies are deeply embedded in the U.S. research community and tech industry."
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Though the Chinese state denies human rights abuses in and out of the camps in Xinjiang, we have leaked primary sources that tell the tale.
Here's leaks detailing the plan for mass arrests and internments.
icij.org/investigations…
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Here's leaks detailing the plan for mass arrests and internments.
icij.org/investigations…
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Another round of leaks details the "No Mercy" plan for brutalizing Turkic minorities:
nytimes.com/interactive/20…
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nytimes.com/interactive/20…
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And here's a reverse engineering teardown of the app that Uyghurs and other Turkic people are forced to install on their phones:
hrw.org/video-photos/i…
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hrw.org/video-photos/i…
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Byler ends his report with a set of US policy recommendations for ending complicity with the program and putting pressure on the Chinese state and Chinese companies to end the human rights abuses in the region.
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1. Enforce existing sanctions and end the sales and operations by companies that collaborate with the Chinese state in Xinjiang.
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2. Apply "Magnitsky" sanctions against the leaders of the forced-labor program and conduct a full investigation into the use of unfree labor in products ranging from electronics to textiles.
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3. Pass a bill "to identify and extend sanctions on all companies and state entities involved in the forced labor system."
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4. Extend sanctions beyond the 17 companies currently listed to the 1,400+ tech firms "involved in the re-education system and hundreds of manufacturing companies."
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5. US and other western countries should "ban the collection and use of 'passive' or involuntary biometric information and data surveillance," establishing a global norm of biometric privacy.
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