Thread by @loyndsview

"Across #China, the police are buying technology that harnesses vast #surveillance data to predict #crime and #protest before they happen."

nytimes.com/2022/06/25/tec… #Panopticon #Bentham #startups

1/ "The latest generation of technology digs through the vast amounts of data collected on their daily activities to find patterns and aberrations, promising to predict crimes or protests before they happen."

2/ "It takes extensive evasive maneuvers to avoid the digital tripwires."

3/ "For the government, #socialstability is paramount and any threat to it must be eliminated. During his decade as China’s top leader, #XiJinping has hardened and centralized the #securitystate...."

4/ "... unleashing #technoauthoritarian policies to quell ethnic #unrest in the western region of #Xinjiang and enforce some of the world’s most severe coronavirus lockdowns. The space for #dissent, always limited, is rapidly disappearing."

5/ "The new approach to surveillance is partly based on data-driven policing software from the United States and Europe...."

6/ "Often people don’t know they’re being watched. The police face little outside scrutiny of the effectiveness of the technology or the actions they prompt. The Chinese authorities require no #warrants to collect #personalinformation."

7/ "At the most bleeding edge, the systems raise perennial #sciencefiction conundrums: How is it possible to know the #future has been accurately #predicted if the police intervene before it happens?"

8/ "In 2017, one of China’s best-known #entrepreneurs had a bold vision for the future: a computr systm that could #predict crimes.

...#YinQi, who founded #Megvii, an #AI #startup, told Chinese state media... the surveillnce systm could give the police a search engine for crime"

9/ "Similar technologies are already being put into use. In 2022, the police in #Tianjin bought software made by a Megvii competitor, #Hikvision, that aims to predict protests."

10/ "The authorities decide who goes on the lists, and there is often no process to notify people when they do. Once individuals are in a #database, they are rarely removed, said experts, who worried that the new technologies reinforce disparities...."

11/ "The technology has encoded power imbalances. Some bidding documents refer to a 'red list' of people whom the surveillance system must ignore."

12/ "One national procurement document said the function was for 'people who need #privacy protection or V.I.P. protection.' Another, from #Guangdong Province, got more specific, stipulating that the red list was for government officials."