Inside the Chinese Government’s Growing Surveillance State

The Intercept Briefing

The Intercept

Politics, Unknown, Daily News, History, News

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Chinese government forcibly collects biometric markers like fingerprints, facial images, and DNA of Xinjiang residents, where 12 million Uyghurs live. In recent years, the country has expanded and improved its surveillance capabilities. This week on Intercepted: investigative reporter Mara Hvistendahl speaks with Josh Chin and Liza Lin, reporters for the Wall Street Journal, about their new book, “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control.” In their book, Chin and Lin break down the international implications of the Chinese government’s adoption of surveillance technology. Hvistendahl, Chin, and Lin discuss techno-dystopia in the pandemic era, what happens when there are no checks on algorithms, and how Western companies helped the Chinese government build the surveillance state from day one. join.theintercept.com/donate/now

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is intercepted.
0:30.0	I'm Mara Vistendall, a senior reporter with the intercept.
0:46.4	I spent eight years as a foreign correspondent in China, covering science and technology.
0:51.5	Well there, I began a report on the growth of the tech driven Chinese surveillance state.
0:56.6	I covered early efforts of facial recognition and iris recognition, along with the Chinese
1:01.4	government's foray into social engineering.
1:04.1	I left China in 2015.
1:07.2	In more recent years, things have taken an even darker turn in the country as artificial
1:12.1	intelligence has improved the efficiency of surveillance.
1:16.3	In Xinjiang, a territory in northwest China and home to 12 million Uyghurs, the government
1:22.4	forcibly collects biometric markers like fingerprints, facial images, and DNA.
1:28.5	Previously, the monitor Uyghurs in the region, police would pour over hours of video footage
1:33.4	and audio recordings.
1:35.7	Now, reporters Josh Chen and Lisa Lin write, quote,
1:39.5	the new systems used artificial intelligence to eliminate human inefficiencies.
1:44.8	They could suck in feeds from hundreds of cameras and microphones simultaneously and
1:49.3	as if through them to identify targets in a matter of minutes, sometimes even seconds.
1:55.1	The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recently said that the Chinese government's
1:59.7	actions amounted to quote,
2:02.1	serious human rights violations against the Uyghur people.
2:07.0	Since the start of the pandemic, the state has also used technology to control the movements
2:11.4	of people throughout China to an extreme degree, and sometimes for reasons that are more political
	...

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