China Rejects Claims Of Mass Surveillance And Mistreatment – Forbes

As a series of leaked cables reveal the extent of China's mass surveillance system, the country's British ambassador has claimed the documents are faked.

Concern has been rising for some time over the incarceration, indoctrination and maltreatment of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from the Muslim Uighur community, in the western region of Xinjiang.

And yesterday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released the official 'manual' for running the camps holding hundreds of thousands of Muslim Uighurs and other minorities, along with briefings on the AI-based data collection and analysis system used to select Xinjiang residents for detention.

The briefings relate to China's Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), which identifies 'suspicious persons' using AI. Data sources for this, according to Human Rights Watch, include checkpoints, closed-circuit cameras with facial recognition, wifi sniffers and even spyware installed in individual homes.

The information is available to police and other authorities via a mobile app. One leaked bulletin from 2017 revealed that during the preceding six days, 24,412 'suspicious' persons were flagged - and the vast majority detained as a result.

However, in statements released by the Chinese Embassy in London, Ambassador Liu Xiaoming disputed the authenticity of the material, saying: "I'm telling you the documents, the so-called documents you are talking about, is pure fabrication."

And while he acknowledged the existence of the camps and associated surveillance, he claimed that this was justified by a terrorist threat, stating that thousands of terrorist incidents happened in Xinjiang between the 1990s and 2016.

"If the same thing happened in the United Kingdom, would you - let me ask you this: if a certain region has rampant terrorist extremist activities, and people suffer severely and call for actions from the UK government, what are you going to do? Sit back and watch?" he asked.

This may have been a deliberate dig. While no other nation on earth has anywhere near the level of surveillance that China does, the UK has rather more than most - to the extent that in September last year, it was ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights.

It had been revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden that the UKs GCHQ intelligence agency was secretly intercepting and processing large quantities of private communications of ordinary citizens and sharing them with other countries' intelligence agencies, including the USs National Security Agency.

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China Rejects Claims Of Mass Surveillance And Mistreatment - Forbes