In a new report, @citizenlab finds that police in #China have been carrying out a large-scale iris scan collection campaign in the western Qinghai province. I talked to @emiledirks about how the campaign reflects #Beijing's biometric surveillance schemes: dw.com/zh/%E4%B8%AD%E…
"Building on Bitter Winter’s work, this report finds further evidence of police-led mass iris scan collection in Qinghai, a region with a population that is 49.4% non-Han, including Tibetans and Hui Muslims," the report said.
"Based on our analysis of these 53 reports, we estimate that between March 2019 and July 2022, police may have collected between roughly 1,248,075 and 1,452,035 iris scans, representing between one fifth (21.1%) and one quarter (25.6%) of Qinghai’s total population (5.9 million).
"The number of irises scanned would make mass iris scan collection in Qinghai the largest known program conducted in China relative to population, with the possible exception of an earlier program in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region."
"Police have given a number of justifications for mass iris scan collection, including fighting crime, finding missing people, and upgrading national ID cards."
Based on Citizen Lab's assessment, "the lack of a single justification for mass iris scan collection may reflect the fact that police could use the program for multiple purposes. Iris scan collection is part of long-standing police intelligence gathering programs."
"Through mass iris scan collection, Qinghai’s police are effectively treating entire communities as populated by potential threats to social stability."
According to @BitterWinterMag, police collected iris scans at police stations and at the homes of residents of Tsoshar , warning that refusal to cooperate would make it “difficult for them in the future to buy tickets for traveling and even withdraw money.”
"Bitter Winter’s report is also part of a well-documented record of state surveillance and repression in Qinghai. Much of this surveillance and repression has focused on the province’s Tibetans and other non-Han people who make up 49.4% of the province’s population."
"A nationwide “sweep the black” campaign against organized crime between 2018-2021 have been used since 2018 in Tibetan areas of Qinghai to punish people protesting corruption, ...
... demanding compensation for property damage by state developers, or complaining about land expropriation by local governments," wrote @emiledirks in the report.
The report finds that iris scan collection dates back at least to the mid-2010s in #China. Some of the earliest iris scan programs focused on the problem of missing children.
Open source information shows that one of the earliest known programs of police-led mass iris scan collection in China dates back to at least 2017 in #Xinjiang.
"In 2017, police in the regional capital Urumqi began building a local iris identity information database, which by January 2018 reportedly contained iris scans of 300,000 people, or roughly 13% of the city’s then-population of 2.2 million."
In 2019, #China's Ministry of Public Security released a "Construction Plan for National Criminal Investigation Information Specialized Application System’s Iris Identity Inspection Subsystem," calling for ...
... strengthening iris scan database construction for the purpose of “attacking crime and social management and control."
The plan also "specifies from whom iris scans are to be collected: target people, crackdown targets, and people who have broken the law and target people from Xinjiang."
@emiledirks told me that even though the mass collection of iris scans doesn't seem to be directly linked to a mass-DNA collection campaign in Tibet, which was documented in another @citizenlab report by him in September, ...
... he thinks the two campaigns are connected when being looked at broadly.
"It shows that one of the key aspects of policing under the Xi Jinping administration is expanding biometric surveillance beyond populations that used to be targeted for biometric data collection."
"It shows that one of the key aspects of policing under the Xi Jinping administration is expanding biometric surveillance beyond populations that used to be targeted for biometric data collection."
"With the programs in Qinghai or Tibet, police are collecting biometric data from entire communities. It’s not just people who have been identified as target populations, nor these people who are subjects or part of criminal investigations.
They are going out and collecting biometric information from the entire community. This is something quite unique under Xi’s administration," he told me.
Apart from city-level public security department conducting mass iris scan collection, a tech company, Super Red (北京万里红科技有限公司), is involved in this biometric surveillance program.
According to the report, "in November 2018, Tsoshar’s Public Security Bureau decided on the model of iris scan collection devices and by the following March had spent 5.21 million RMB on an iris identification system and iris database."
"At least a portion of the equipment was provided by Super Red, a company in which the Chinese Academy of Sciences holds a majority share."
According to the company’s website, Super Red’s iris identification inspection system can associate iris scans with an individual’s ID card or passport, and can be used to identify target people and issue an alert in order to take “preemptive control measures."
"In 2019, Super Red reportedly finished building a national-level iris database and more than 20 provincial-level iris databases, as well as connecting provincial-level databases with the national-level database."
@emiledirks told me that #China's Ministry of Public Security is very intrigued by the advances in surveillance technologies, so they are looking at things that are coming out of research institutes, universities or private companies,...
... and thinking “how can they get our hands on this” or “how can they apply this to meet our own particular domestic security goals.”
"Chinese tech companies are aware of this interest and are looking to create or market devices that would be of interest to the Ministry of Public Security," he said.
"Speaking generally, companies like Super Red have the technical expertise that maybe the police don’t possess. Maybe they are able to leverage that to sell equipment and technical expertise to the police ...
... and assist them with implementing this kind of biometric surveillance programs," he added.
According to Dirks, the sense of the involvement of Super Red in Qinghai’s iris scan collection is symptomatic of a larger trend in domestic security work in China, which is the collaboration between police and private or semi-private domestic tech companies on the other hand.
He adds that based on trends in recent years, it does seem like a lot of the most intense and widespread forms of police-led biometric data collection are in areas of #China that are populated heavily by non-Han populations.
"It’s not exactly clear to me why Qinghai specifically has been picked. One thing that’s the case though is that often times, a surveillance program that begins in one area of the country if they are successful, they would be expanded to other areas," he told me.
He adds that based on trends in recent years, it does seem like a lot of the most intense and widespread forms of police-led biometric data collection are in areas of #China that are populated heavily by non-Han populations.
"It’s possible that an iris scan collection program in Qinghai might spread to the rest of the province and potentially beyond Qinghai. Perhaps even to areas of the country that are not as heavily populated by non-Han communities," he added.
Link to another important report by Emile for Citizen Lab in September: citizenlab.ca/2022/09/mass-d…
Link to my article on Emile's report in September for @dw_chinese: dw.com/zh/%E5%8C%97%E…
And here's my full thread in English about Emile's report on the mass DNA collection campaign in Tibet:
https://twitter.com/WilliamYang120/status/1570418305999196161
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