A provincial government in China is reportedly creating a system that will use 3,000 surveillance cameras and facial-recognition software to monitor journalists and other people of interest.
IPVM reports that the government of Henan, one of the largest provinces in China, awarded a contract for this system to Neusoft in September. The system is also said to rely on machine learning technologies developed by Huawei, which tells IPVM that it “has no knowledge of the project mentioned in the IPVM report.” (Emphasis theirs.)
This surveillance project is said to classify journalists into three groups named after traffic lights: green is for reporters about whom Henan has the least concern, yellow is for those who generate some concern, and red is for those who cause the most concern. Henan reportedly plans to “deal with” or “punish” red-light journos.
Reuters says that Henan plans to use this system to surveil international students and other “suspicious people” as well as journalists. Henan appears to be alone in these efforts; Reuters says it “was unable to find any documents identifying journalists or foreigners as specific targets of surveillance systems in other parts of China.”
Details of this project were revealed in a 190-page tender document published by Henan’s provincial government in July. The document was reportedly deleted from the government website after IPVM and Reuters contacted Chinese government officials for comment on their reporting, but IPVM saved and shared a copy of it (PDF).
US retailers recently pulled some cameras from their shelves because their makers “have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups,” as the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security put it when it added them to the Entity List in 2019.
The revelation of this plan also follows increasing scrutiny of the use of facial-recognition software by oppressive regimes. (Not that any of that criticism stopped Russia from introducing a system called Face Pay to the Moscow metro.) Henan seems poised to provide yet another example of how these technologies can be abused.
