The New York Times's chilling multimedia package on China's use of "smart city" tech to create an open-air prison

One of my mottoes is that the important thing about tech isn't what it does, it's who it does it to, and who it does it for; this is especially important in discussions of "smart city" tech, which can easily be turned to systems of population-scale surveillance, control and oppression.

China's imprisonment of up to 1,000,000 ethnic minority Muslims in concentration camps in Xinjiang province is well known, but less-well-understood are the systems of oppressive technology that are being deployed outside of these prison camps: mandatory mobile malware that spies on every step you take, used in combination with DNA-level surveillance and other tools.

In a chilling, beautifully reported multimedia package, the New York Times's Chris Buckley, Paul Mozur and Austin Ramzy paint a picture of life in Kashgar, a historically significant city in Xinjiang where the majority of the population are drawn from predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities: Uighurs, Kazakhs, and Tajiks.

If Xinjiang is the living lab for oppressive technologies that China eventually rolls out across the whole country (and then sells to belt-and-road client states around Asia and Africa), then Kashgar is the lab for trialing new oppressive techniques before they are rolled out across Xinjiang.

The report paints a picture of a city forested with CCTVs, indoors and outdoors, where checkpoints every 100m are used to verify facial recognition biometrics and to spot-check that each person is running mandatory state malware on their mobile devices. The checkpoints are often staffed by Uighurs who are complicit in the oppression of their neighbors -- there just aren't enough Han Chinese in Xinjiang to accomplish this kind of artisanal, hand-crafted retail oppression. Read the rest