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Massive Database Leak Exposes China's 'Digital Surveillance State' (eff.org)
Long-time Slashdot reader retroworks shared this EFF article:
Although relatively little news gets out of Xinjiang to the rest of the world, we've known for over a year that China has been testing facial-recognition tracking and alert systems across Xinjiang and mandating the collection of biometric data -- including DNA samples, voice samples, fingerprints, and iris scans -- from all residents between the ages of 12 and 65... Earlier this month, security researcher Victor Gevers found and disclosed an exposed database live-tracking the locations of about 2.6 million residents of Xinjiang, China, offering a window into what a digital surveillance state looks like in the 21st century...
Over a period of 24 hours, 6.7 million individual GPS coordinates were streamed to and collected by the database, linking individuals to various public camera streams and identification checkpoints associated with location tags such as "hotel," "mosque," and "police station." The GPS coordinates were all located within Xinjiang. This database is owned by the company SenseNets, a private AI company advertising facial recognition and crowd analysis technologies. A couple of days later, Gevers reported a second open database tracking the movement of millions of cars and pedestrians. Violations like jaywalking, speeding, and going through a red-light are detected, trigger the camera to take a photo, and ping a WeChat API, presumably to try and tie the event to an identity.
China may have a working surveillance program in Xinjiang, but it's a shockingly insecure security state. Anyone with an Internet connection had access to this massive honeypot of information... Even poorly-executed surveillance is massively expensive, and Beijing is no doubt telling the people of Xinjiang that these investments are being made in the name of their own security. But the truth, revealed only through security failures and careful security research, tells a different story: China's leaders seem to care little for the privacy, or the freedom, of millions of its citizens.
EFF also reports that a Chinese cybersecurity firm also recently discovered 468 exposed MongoDB servers on the internet, including databases containing detailed information about remote access consoles owned by China General Nuclear Power Group.
Meanwhile, ZDNet suggests that SenseNets may actually be "a government contractor, helping authorities track the Muslim minority, rather than a private company selling its product to another private entity. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain how SenseNets has access to ID card information and camera feeds from police stations and other government buildings."
Over a period of 24 hours, 6.7 million individual GPS coordinates were streamed to and collected by the database, linking individuals to various public camera streams and identification checkpoints associated with location tags such as "hotel," "mosque," and "police station." The GPS coordinates were all located within Xinjiang. This database is owned by the company SenseNets, a private AI company advertising facial recognition and crowd analysis technologies. A couple of days later, Gevers reported a second open database tracking the movement of millions of cars and pedestrians. Violations like jaywalking, speeding, and going through a red-light are detected, trigger the camera to take a photo, and ping a WeChat API, presumably to try and tie the event to an identity.
China may have a working surveillance program in Xinjiang, but it's a shockingly insecure security state. Anyone with an Internet connection had access to this massive honeypot of information... Even poorly-executed surveillance is massively expensive, and Beijing is no doubt telling the people of Xinjiang that these investments are being made in the name of their own security. But the truth, revealed only through security failures and careful security research, tells a different story: China's leaders seem to care little for the privacy, or the freedom, of millions of its citizens.
EFF also reports that a Chinese cybersecurity firm also recently discovered 468 exposed MongoDB servers on the internet, including databases containing detailed information about remote access consoles owned by China General Nuclear Power Group.
Meanwhile, ZDNet suggests that SenseNets may actually be "a government contractor, helping authorities track the Muslim minority, rather than a private company selling its product to another private entity. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain how SenseNets has access to ID card information and camera feeds from police stations and other government buildings."
of how China oppresses it's people in creepy ways. I'm actually a bit surprised this didn't make /..
One thing I haven't seen is so much as a peep about this from main stream media or a single politician. Calling out China's gov't is up there with showing a picture of Mohammad or pissing off Vladimir Putin in the list of "Shit you don't do".
What annoys me is seeing folks call for "Regime Change" in Venezuela and Iran while they ignore China (and Saudi Arabia while we're at it). Hell, Xi has basically declared himself emperor for life and Trump didn't just say it was OK, he said we should do that too. Not a peep I tells ya.
I know it's all about money (oil and cheap labor), but damn it pisses me off. Not the hypocrisy (pay a man that much and he doesn't care if you call him a hypocrite), but how they always get away with it.
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Conservatists in China actually Maoists. The people that they worry about are the ones that push for liberal reforms. The terms conservative and liberal are relative to what is in place already.
I cannot believe that so few of you care about this. It's completely beyond my comprehension.
Actually there are a lot of people who care and and the ones that don't seem to care are not incomprehensible. Just stupid.
Most people don't have the time to fight to try to roll back the security state. It is very easy to slide into complacency and shrug it all off (for now) with two bromides: 1) I'm a law abiding citizen so I have nothing to hide and 2) it is just bits in a computer somewhere that no human will look at anyway.
I know from your post that you know why this shouldn't be acceptable but the vast majority of people crave security. They want the government to take care of them and be a force for "good" against the "bad" guys. To them this is just the police being better, higher-tech police.
I'll bet that anyone reading this could not recite all the titles of the movies, TV shows, thriller novels they have seen where the hero caught the bad guy with some high-tech data system run by the government. Something that would totally appall the founding fathers of the U.S. who created laws against anyone opening your mail.
I'm not saying we can fix China (as you point out we haven't exactly done gangbusters "helping" Venezuela) but we can give them a nudge in the right direction. That's what diplomacy is for. As it is we're ignoring that responsibility for the sake of a fast buck.
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China is just too big to take on, so they can do as they please. And hey, if China can do it, then maybe politicians elsewhere can use that tech to keep the plebes under their thumb, so why pick that fight? There'll be useful cheap surveillance tech to buy later.
I think we (as in the people living in ostensibly free countries) need to be very wary of what sort of surveillance tech gets rolled out and right now China is leading the pack in sheer scale and pervasiveness. "Our" politicians like what they see, so don't expect them to make a stink, especially not since China's so big and so easily ticked off. "We" shouldn't count on "our" politicians here, we should count on ourselves.
It's not just Trump. Your elected presidents have been doing the meddling elsewhere thing for the last 80 years or so, and before that you lot already had a habit of doing stupid stuff first, not thinking later. So stop your politician-du-jour-bashing. The maga-hat-man isn't nearly as interesting as you think he is. He'll be gone in at most six years. It's the tech that's the problem. If it's here it won't go away ever, and it's coming to your general location too, and soon.
The terms conservative and liberal are relative to what is in place already.
Indeed. I learned this in 1991, when the attempt by hard-core communists to seize power in Russia was widely described as a "right wing" coup.
Wrong bullhorn.
Apathy is not the issue here. Cynicism is not the issue here.
The Chinese authorities have an outright death wish for the individual freedoms of China's many citizens.
At the time of his death in 2013, Hugo Chavez was worth an estimated $1 billion, in known assets. His family is estimated to be worth almost another $1 billion more.
While that's not a lot of money compared to the economy of Venezuela as a whole, don't pretend for a moment that Chavez and his family (and all their friends) didn't make out like bandits during their time in power.
rsilvergun opined:
Chavez took the oil money and used it to modernize his country instead of pocketing it all for himself. That's up there with George Washington turning down the position of King of America for WTF moments in the history of leadership. And yeah, I'm sure Chavez did a lot of awful things to get in and stay in his position. Venezuela was a hell hole before the oil money, but the fact that he didn't just keep it all for himself and his cronies (they way the Sauds do) deserves praise.
I think comparing Hugo Chavez with George Washington is just a little off the mark.
And to say he "modernized" Venezuela is equally wrong. (The Telegraph article I linked to mentions in passing that the streets of the town in which Chavez was born are still paved with dirt, for instance.) What he did do is to subsidize he country's poor - especially their costs for food and fuel - using state oil revenues, which won him their love and undying support. It's probably fair to claim that he was less corrupt than the House of Saud, but, then again, that's not really saying much.
Chavez was a very clever authoritatian. Maduro is simply a thug - and a particularly dimwitted thug, at that ...
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