Sascha Lobo on the Xinjiang Police Files: The monstrous human sieve

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Surveillance Camera in Beijing (2019): »Maintaining Stability«

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ROMAN PILIPEY / EPO-EFE

55 percent.

A number in which global politics and its consequences are hidden.

It was the share of natural gas imported by Germany in 2021 that came from Russia.

The consequences can be seen in the Ukraine policy: Germany is seen as hesitant by many international partners.

In the background is always the country's dependence on Russian gas, which has at least been reduced by the work of the current federal government.

Another number: 37.4 percent.

It is probably more influential in global politics, it is the proportion of German car production that was sold in China in 2021.

A year earlier it was even 39.4 percent.

This means that a piece of legislation by the Chinese Communist Party that was thrown out could bring the major German automakers to the brink of bankruptcy.

Then not even Robert Habeck could quickly sell a few million cars to other countries.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, the deep dependence not only of Germany but of the entire world economy on China is often criticized.

It is very difficult, if not impossible, to reduce it, and the two reasons for this are globalization and digitization.

This dependency is the backdrop against which the latest revelations about the Chinese dictatorship, the Xinjiang Police Files, must be viewed.

It is an anti-Muslim, racist, ethnic »cleansing«; the exile president of the Uyghurs speaks of genocide.

It is perhaps the first digitally powered genocide.

China supplies surveillance technology to around 80 countries

The political concept of »change through trade« has been badly damaged since the Russian debacle.

Now it could even be reversed: the liberal democracies of the West could change, and not for the better, because they trade heavily with China.

Because the surveillance and control apparatus, the outlines of which are also visible in the Xinjiang Police Files, has been known for a long time.

Exports, on the other hand, are less well known: China has delivered its surveillance technologies to around 80 countries, including Europe, most recently to Serbia.

That means we have to deal with Chinese surveillance anyway and therefore with the technology and the ideology behind it.

The now clearly visible mass oppression of the Uyghurs follows from the most important, self-declared goal,

that the CP wants to achieve through surveillance: »maintaining stability«.

Far from being irrelevant, this phrasing represents both the perspective on the data collected via surveillance and the direction of interpretation.

This in turn is due to a basic characteristic of digitization: data alone is a heap of information junk.

They only become meaningful when you set yourself a goal, ask the right questions and, based on these questions, evaluate the data in the right way.

This sounds banal, but it is enormously relevant for any form of mass surveillance.

Because surveillance, especially in dictatorships, is allowed to do everything except produce no results.

Two surveillance ideologies must be distinguished here:

, as used in Germany for classic video surveillance in public places.

And

, combining different data to spot potential threats.

Both forms of monitoring are technically intertwined, but conceptually very different: documentation is related to the past, prediction is related to the future.

Or more precisely: the probability that a certain future will occur.

High-end surveillance machines work with probabilities.

The advantage of probabilities: There is always an outcome.

For a surveillance apparatus with a compulsion to deliver results, that's fabulous.

Not for those being monitored.

Because if you add the goal of "maintaining stability" to this principle, then the data from the surveillance is used to calculate the probability that a person poses a threat to that same stability.

One of the associated software platforms is called IJOP, short for Integrated Joint Operations Platform.

Each monitored person gets a score, when the score reaches a certain level, the state and its organs take action.

This procedure also explains why individuals are locked away for completely absurd "offences".

Adiljan T. went to jail for working out in a certain gym for two weeks.

This may have something to do with the fact that any terrorist suspects met there during this time - but it doesn't have to.

Because this is where another fundamentally digital mechanism comes into play: data correlation.

The principle is simple, it is also behind many applications of artificial intelligence, namely to find certain, supposedly or actually meaningful patterns in data sets that do not care about causality, but only draw correlation conclusions from the combination of old and new data.

The authorities then believe, for example: someone

who often runs red lights and uses certain words in chat is more likely to become a troublemaker.

The monitored behaviors that are correlated can appear completely harmless and can also be: doing sports, quitting smoking, fasting on Ramadan.

In Xinjiang, at least 10,000 people have been jailed based solely on algorithmic correlation of their behavioral data.

The more data sets, the better, the monitors believe, technically correct. But sometimes the logic behind it seems like looking for a needle in a haystack and ordering more hay for this purpose.

The program that orders more hay is called Sharp Eyes and brings together many different data sources, "data fusion" in technical jargon.

China has half the world's surveillance cameras, and out of the twenty most heavily monitored cities on the planet, 17 are in China.

IJOP can merge this data with all address data, behavioral data such as travel and consumption history and physical attributes such as facial features, height and blood type.

An alternative to facial recognition, gait recognition, which analyzes the movement of body parts in relation to one another and comes close to the uniqueness of fingerprint recognition, has proven to be particularly helpful during the pandemic and its ubiquitous masks.

Which, of course, the Chinese state has also stored, as well as iris scans that can be made from dozens of meters away without anyone noticing.

DNA profiles are also stored there, which were collected under various health pretexts.

Of course, communication such as chats and emails is also evaluated.

Portals to the digital surveillance world

What is difficult or impossible to access online is read out at checkpoints.

In several Chinese provinces, people are repeatedly forced to connect the smartphone to a reading device that transfers all data and transfers it to the personal data collection.

In Xinjiang, so-called "three-dimensional portrait and integrated data doors" have been set up at critical points from the state's point of view, such as in front of mosques. They are reminiscent of metal detectors and represent a kind of portal into the digital surveillance world.

If you walk through these doors, your face is analyzed and all data that can be read from the outside is read from the smartphone.

The IJOP system connected to the data doors in turn calculates the probability

that the person just passing is "dangerous" for stability - and immediately sends push messages to the police officers guarding the data door.

Which, depending on the software assessment, question, interrogate or imprison the person.

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You have to imagine this surveillance machine as a human sieve with which all those who have been filtered out are deported directly to the re-education camps or gulags.

In connection with the monstrosities that the Xinjiang Police Files prove, a big question arises, which was also evident in the Ukraine crisis: How do the western, liberal democracies deal with it when other great powers deliberately and persistently violate human rights, namely in the magnitudes of aggressive war and genocide?

Those who wanted to let Putin have his way in Ukraine will probably ask: Does Germany have to react at all, or can't we just ignore everything?

But what actually stands behind it is much bigger.

Namely the question: How serious are we about the universal values ​​of the Enlightenment?

How bigoted are we when the human rights of Chinese Muslims are offset against a noticeable reduction in our prosperity?

To be honest, I'm afraid of both possible answers.

And from those who will give them.