About to break the law? Chinese cops are on to you with predictive policing

Rights group says 'predictive policing' platform combines feeds from surveillance cameras with personal information

Authorities in China’s troubled, heavily surveilled region of Xinjiang are deploying a platform that marshals the troves of data being collected to identify and pre-emptively detain potential troublemakers, according to a rights group.

Human Rights Watch said Tuesday the “predictive policing” platform combines feeds from surveillance cameras with other personal data such as phone use, travel records and religious orientation, and then analyzes the information to identify suspicious individuals.

China’s government has turned Xinjiang, a vast region on the border with Central Asia that thrums with ethnic tension, into a laboratory for cutting-edge surveillance and social control. High-definition cameras, security checkpoints equipped with facial recognition and police patrols armed with hand-held smartphone scanners blanket the region’s cities and villages.

The policing platform, which government procurement documents and official media refer to as the “Integrated Joint Operations Platform,” is key to integrating that array of information. Human Rights Watch said the technology is supplied by a subsidiary of state-owned military contractors China Electronics Technology Group Corp., or CETC. It spoke with people in Xinjiang who observed local officials use the platform to generate lists of individuals for police to investigate.

The Xinjiang government didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Repeated phone calls to CETC press representatives weren’t answered.

China’s government and police have deemed surveillance necessary to detect extremist beliefs among Muslims, mainly members of the Uighur ethnic group—some of whom have been linked to terrorist attacks inside and outside of Xinjiang.

Rights groups, and many Uighurs, point to both this heavy-handed policing and waves of Han Chinese immigration for exacerbating ethnic tensions and antigovernment violence in the province.

Maya Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the breadth of the collected data suggests the effort goes beyond rooting out terrorists.

“The concern over terrorism is there, but it’s encompassed in a much broader campaign to root out nonconformity with the state’s idea of how Uighurs should behave—which is to love the [Communist] Party and love the motherland,” she said.

Current and former residents of Xinjiang have said that thousands of Uighurs have been detained or sent to a network of newly built “political re-education centers” without trial in the past year. Xinjiang authorities haven’t responded to multiple questions about the detentions.

Public information about the policing platform is fragmented, leaving it unclear why certain types of data are collected and what factors lead to individuals being flagged as suspicious, Ms. Wang said.

Some of the data fed into the platform comes from teams of party members and civil servants sent to villages and towns to visit with Uighur families. In a report posted to an official website in August, a team from the Xinjiang branch of the state-controlled Chinese Academy of Sciences said it has used smartphones to record information on suspicious behavior, citing as one data point a failure to pay phone bills.

In December, The Wall Street Journal reported the story of a Uighur resident of Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, who said his ID card started setting off alarms when swiped at security checkpoints after he was called in over past-due mobile phone charges.

Some Uighur exiles and researchers describe an evaluation system based on a 100-point scale in which individuals are docked for biographical information authorities consider threatening.

Tahir Imin, a Uighur academic and journalist who fled Xinjiang for the U.S. last February, said a friend in Urumqi was detained in June after authorities docked his score for praying regularly, owning a passport and traveling to Turkey.

“If your score is below 70, you are considered an unsafe person and they contact the police, who then send you to a re-education camp,” Mr. Imin said.

Researchers affiliated with the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau published a paper in 2016 outlining a more sophisticated system that analyzes patterns of home electricity use to ferret out possible terrorist activity, though it isn’t clear whether that system is in use.

Police procurement orders posted online indicate that local governments began installing the platforms in the second half of 2016.

The Xinjiang government doesn’t provide information on the total amount of money it’s invested in the big-data system. But procurement orders seen online suggest the sum is large. In March, the city of Kashgar, a former Silk Road outpost in southwestern Xinjiang, spent more than $51 million on the purchase and installation of surveillance systems—including an integrated data platform.

Rights groups have said the combination of surveillance with heavy-handed policing is out of proportion to the threat posed by Uighur separatists—and that it ultimately may prove counterproductive.

“You now have heightened tensions in Xinjiang,” Ms. Wang said. “You have a population of people who understand that as a function of their ethnicity they are distrusted by authorities. Surely that doesn’t contribute to a true love of the government.”

—Clément Bürge contributed to this article.

Wall Street Journal