We have a vast number of police departments mandating that their officers wear and use body cams in their field operations. There have been too many incidents where those cameras somehow get turned off during arrest operations where excess physicality is expected. And there is a new cop-in-the-field technique to avoid getting police videos into the public eye: cops with body cams use their smart phones to play copyrighted music during the operations they do not want disseminated to the public. Why? Because online platforms like Instagram have automatic filters to delete videos that do not have their copyrighted music cleared! Still, the technology is advancing, and the most pernicious efforts are best exemplified by China, where ethnic suppression – such as against the Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in Northwest China – is national policy.
As China builds surveillance technology to identify differing ethnic groups (like Uighurs), among many other new functionalities, it is also interesting to see which American companies and government agencies are actually purchasing these intrusion-enhanced cameras and analytics. One of the largest Chinese manufacturers of video surveillance, Dahua, is at the forefront of selling these systems. “Facial recognition software developed by China-based Dahua, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of video surveillance technology, purports to detect the race of individuals caught on camera and offers to alert police clients when it identifies members of the Turkic ethnic group Uighurs.
“Dahua, though among Chinese companies sanctioned by the U.S. government, has a growing presence in the country with sales and support offices in Irvine and Houston. Despite restrictions on its business within the country, the company struck a deal, reportedly valued at $10 million, with Amazon for 1,500 thermal cameras and there are 80 public contracts to purchase the company’s equipment in California alone…
“A user guide for a service targeted at law enforcement clients indicates the company’s technology can send a warning when it detects someone it identifies as Uighur; a consumer-facing product offers a feature to sort by race people who pass in front of its cameras.
“It’s unclear if these features have been deployed in real-world applications, which features are available in specific markets, and whether any of them are available in products sold to U.S. companies and agencies. Dahua did not respond to multiple requests for comment.” Johana Bhuiyan writing for the February 10th Los Angeles Times.
Though Dahua publicly denies this usage, “Additional screenshots from a consumer-facing Dahua platform for examining footage captured using company cameras show a ‘race’ filter available to some users. Other categories included in the company’s face recognition filters include age, gender, whether a person is wearing a mask and whether a man has a beard. These categories can be used to scan existing video footage and focus future recordings on people who meet the chosen criteria.” LA Times. As much as these features are chilling in the hands of over-zealous governmental law enforcement agencies, that these surveillance systems are readily available to private buyers is even more dangerous.
In an era where there are large American political factions based on white supremacy, where anti-immigrant sentiments have even expanded even to individuals who are clearly American citizens of other races and ethnicities, the capacity to detect “different” or “non-white” individuals in any group has to be deeply disturbing. “The consumer-facing race filter alarmed Daniel Lewkovitz, chief executive of Calamity Monitoring, an Australian security company. Lewkovitz said he found the function when using the platform, called SmartPSS, on his desktop computer to look through footage to help the police in a criminal matter. His company will stop working with Dahua because of human rights concerns, he said… ‘As soon as I became aware of it, I was absolutely appalled by it and I issued an instruction to my senior management that we are going to be moving away from this vendor,’ Lewkovitz said.
“Although being on the entity list doesn’t preclude Dahua from selling equipment to U.S. companies, the National Defense Authorization Act has since August prohibited the use of federal funds to enter into, extend or renew any contracts to purchase Dahua equipment. But at least one California contract to purchase Dahua equipment — the biggest in the state, according to public procurement data — used federal funding.
“According to purchase documents reviewed by The Times, Modesto City Schools paid $362,000 to buy and install 57 Dahua camera kits in buses in October. School district spokeswoman Becky Fortuna said the cameras were purchased using federal funds and were intended to enhance the district’s contact-tracing efforts on school buses.
“Fortuna said the district was not aware that Dahua was on the entity list or that there were bans on using federal funding to purchase Dahua equipment. The district is seeking advice on how to proceed with the existing camera systems it has installed, she said, but won’t be buying any more Dahua equipment.
“Considering the U.S. government has already censured numerous Chinese companies on human rights grounds, anyone doing business with companies such as Dahua — even if those deals are legally compliant — should take into account the genocide against the Uighurs, Arkin said… ‘China is buying those technology and those hardware [stet] to monitor us and destroy our lives,’ Arkin said.
“During his last trip to China in 2017, he said, he was interrogated by police on three occasions about his education in the U.S., whether he’s trying to raise awareness about Uighurs in China and whether he had spoken to any foreign officials. On one occasion, he said, police took pictures of his face from every angle, a blood sample, a voice recording and eyelash samples… ‘Face recognition is very dangerous,’ he said. ‘They took my photo from every angle so even if I wear a mask they can still catch me.’” LA Times. We know this is not going away.
While the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (applicable to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment) bans governmental unreasonable searches and seizures – a legal standard that could be used to contain government abuses – a more rigorous and expanded federal statutory schema might be needed to restrain private industry. But wait, there’s more. Does using and creating believable “fake replicas” of human faces speaking for malicious and manipulative purposes parallel the First Amendment exception that makes yelling “fire” (where there is no fire) in a theater a crime?
We know Hollywood can create “can’t tell the CGI face from a real one” with sophisticated AI software. They can make anybody (they can replicate) say or do anything, and it takes a real expert to know the difference. But in less than an hour, almost anyone with access to the Unreal Engine’s cloud based MetaHuman Creator app can create believable, lifelike digital people “at an unprecedented standard of quality, fidelity, and realism” according to the company. As did Epic with their Fortnite game. Put all these technologies together… and…
I’m Peter Dekom, and while China is a totalitarian regime and we live in an era of conspiracy theorists looking for “proof,” isn’t it time for the democracies of the world to set and maintain an entirely new set of enforceable global ethics and expectations?
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