{"id":192213,"date":"2016-03-09T19:07:47","date_gmt":"2016-03-10T03:07:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=192213"},"modified":"2021-09-14T20:35:59","modified_gmt":"2021-09-15T03:35:59","slug":"china-tries-hand-pre-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2016\/03\/china-tries-hand-pre-crime\/","title":{"rendered":"China Developing “Predictive Policing” Data Platform"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several recent articles describe Chinese government plans for predictive policing software to help authorities identify potential terrorists and subversives, and prevent attacks and protests before they occur<\/strong><\/a>. The pre-crime data platform in construction will harness and analyze citizens’ behavioral data\u2014such as online activity, financial transactions, travel patterns, and acquaintances\u2014to predict which individuals are at risk of\u00a0committing terrorism. This follows last year’s plans for a nationwide “social credit” database ranking citizens on their trustworthiness<\/a>.\u00a0Shai Oster at Bloomberg reports:<\/p>\n

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China\u2019s effort to flush out threats to stability is expanding into an area that used to exist only in dystopian sci-fi: pre-crime. The Communist Party has directed one of the country\u2019s largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur. \u201cIt\u2019s very crucial to examine the cause after an act of terror,\u201d Wu Manqing, the chief engineer for the military contractor, told reporters at a conference in December. \u201cBut what is more important is to predict the upcoming activities.\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]\u00a0Much of the project is shrouded in secrecy. The Ministry of State Security, which oversees counterintelligence and political security, doesn\u2019t even have its own website, let alone answer phone calls. Only Wu, the engineer at China Electronics Technology, would speak on the record. He hinted at the scope of the data collection effort when he said the software would be able to draw portraits of suspects by cross-referencing information from bank accounts, jobs, hobbies, consumption patterns, and footage from surveillance cameras.<\/p>\n

The program would flag unusual behavior, such as a resident of a poor village who suddenly has a lot of money in her bank account or someone with no overseas relatives who makes frequent calls to foreigners. According to Wu, these could be indicators that a person is a terrorist. \u201cWe don\u2019t call it a big data platform,\u201d he said, \u201cbut a united information environment.\u201d In China, once a suspect is targeted, police can freeze bank accounts and compel companies to hand over records of his communications. [Source<\/a><\/strong>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At Ars Technica,\u00a0Sean Gallagher\u00a0writes that the massive data collection effort going into the project is aided by\u00a0new anti-terror legislation passed in December<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0which could\u00a0compel foreign tech companies to assist Chinese authorities in data acquisition<\/a>. Also last year\u00a0a draft cybersecurity law was unveiled which would allow authorities to tighten online information controls<\/a> in the name of national security.<\/p>\n

The Chinese government has plenty of data to feed into such systems. China invested heavily in building its surveillance capabilities in major cities over the past five years, with spending on “domestic security and stability” surpassing China’s defense budget\u2014and turning the country into the biggest market for security technology. And in December, China’s government gained a new tool in surveillance: anti-terrorism laws giving the government even more surveillance powers and requiring any technology companies doing business in China to provide assistance in that surveillance.<\/p>\n

The law states that companies \u201cshall provide technical interfaces, decryption and other technical support and assistance to public security and state security agencies when they are following the law to avert and investigate terrorist\u00a0activities\u201d\u2014in other words, the sort of “golden key” that FBI Director James Comey has lobbied for in the US. For obvious reasons, the Chinese government is particularly interested in the outcome of the current legal confrontation between the FBI and Apple over the iPhone used by Syed Farook. [Source<\/a><\/strong>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Defense One’s Patrick Tucker looks at some of the latest developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence that have been made in China<\/a><\/strong> as part of its data collection drive:<\/p>\n

[…C]ollecting massive amounts of data leads inevitably to the question of how to analyze it at scale. China is fast becoming a world leader in the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence for national security. Chinese scientists recently unveiled two papers at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and each points to the future of Chinese research into predictive\u00a0policing.<\/p>\n

One explains how to more easily recognize faces by compressing a Deep Neural Network, or DNN<\/span>, down to a smaller size. \u201cThe expensive computation of DNNs make their deployment difficult on mobile and embedded devices,\u201d it says. Read that to mean: here\u2019s a mathematical formula for getting embedded cameras to recognize faces without calling up a distant\u00a0database.<\/p>\n

The second paper proposes software to predict the likelihood of a \u201cpublic security event\u201d in different Chinese provinces within the next month. Defense One<\/em> was able to obtain a short demonstration of the system. Some of the \u201cevents\u201d include the legitimately terrifying\u00a0\u201ccampus attack\u201d or \u201cbus explosion\u201d to the more mundane sounding, \u201cstrike event\u201d or \u201cgather event,\u201d (the researchers say this was the \u201cgather\u201d incident in question.) all on a scale of severity from 1 to 5. To build it, the researchers relied on a dataset of more than 12,324 disruptive occurrences that took place across different provinces going back to\u00a01998. [Source<\/a><\/strong>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Data security and privacy issues also exist\u00a0concerning\u00a0popular Chinese web and mobile applications. In a recently\u00a0released report, researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab provide an in-depth analysis of how the Baidu Browser mobile application\u00a0manages user data<\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0The report identifies various security issues that puts users at risk of exposing their personal data, including web search terms and hardware identification. Below are key findings from the report:<\/p>\n

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Key Findings<\/span><\/p>\n