An internal document that provides details about China’s artificial-intelligence surveillance regime claims that Huawei has tested facial recognition software that could send automated “Uighur alarms” to government authorities when its camera systems identify the faces of members of the oppressed minority group.
A document signed by Huawei representatives - discovered by the research organization IPVM and shared exclusively with a newspaper - shows that the telecommunications firm worked in 2018 with the facial recognition start-up Megvii to test an artificial-intelligence camera system that could scan faces in a crowd and estimate each person’s age, sex and ethnicity.
If the system detected the face of a member of the mostly Muslim minority group, as per the test report, it could trigger a “Uighur alarm” - potentially flagging them for police in China, where members of the group have been detained en masse as part of a brutal government crackdown.
Such technology has in recent years gained an expanding role among police departments in China, human rights activists say. But the document sheds new light on how Huawei, the world’s biggest maker of telecommunications equipment, has also contributed to its development, providing the servers, cameras, cloud-computing infrastructure and other tools undergirding the systems’ technological might.
John Honovich, the founder of IPVM, a Pennsylvania-based company that reviews and investigates video-surveillance equipment, said the document showed how “terrifying” and “totally normalized” such discriminatory technology has become.
“This is not one isolated company. This is systematic,” Honovich said. “A lot of thought went into making sure this ‘Uighur alarm’ works.”
Huawei and Megvii have announced three surveillance systems using both companies’ technology in the past couple years. The Post could not immediately confirm if the system with the “Uighur alarm” tested in 2018 was one of the three currently for sale.
Both companies have acknowledged the document is real. Shortly after this story published Tuesday morning, Huawei spokesman Glenn Schloss said the report “is simply a test and it has not seen real-world application. Huawei only supplies general-purpose products for this kind of testing. We do not provide custom algorithms or applications.”
Chinese officials have said such systems reflect the country’s technological advancement, and that their expanded use can help government responders and keep people safe. But to international rights advocates, they are a sign of China’s dream of social control — a way to identify unfavorable members of society and squash public dissent. China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Artificial-intelligence researchers and human rights advocates said they worry the technology’s development and normalization could lead to its spread around the world, as government authorities elsewhere push for a fast and automated way to detect members of ethnic groups they’ve deemed undesirable or a danger to their political control.
Discrimination against Uighurs has long been prevalent in the majority-Han Chinese population. In the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, authorities have cited sporadic acts of terrorism as justification for a harsh crackdown starting in 2015 that has drawn condemnation from the United States and other Western nations. Scholars’ estimate more than 1 million Uighurs have been detained in reeducation camps, with some claims of torture.
U.S. national security adviser Robert O’Brien called the repressive treatment of minority groups in Xinjiang “something close to” genocide, in an online event hosted by the Aspen Institute in October.
Under international pressure, Xinjiang authorities announced last December that all reeducation “students” had graduated, though some Uighurs have since reported that they were forced to agree to work in factories or risk a return to detention. Xinjiang authorities say all residents work of their own free will.
Import of certain products from China has been banned by the US government on the basis that they could have been made by forced labor in Xinjiang.
One of the Huawei-Megvii systems offered for sale after the “Uighur alarm” test, in June 2019, is advertised as saving local governments digital storage space by saving images in a single place.
Two other systems, said to use Megvii’s surveillance software and Huawei’s Atlas AI computing platform, were announced for sale in September. Both were described as “localization” of the products using Huawei chips and listed for sale “only by invitation.”
Marketing materials for one of those systems say it was used by authorities in China’s southern Guizhou province to catch a criminal.
