Blood Money

U.S. Firms Are Helping Build China’s Orwellian State
BY LINDSAY GORMAN, MATT SCHRADER
When a Dutch cybersecurity researcher disclosed last month that Chinese security contractor SenseNets left a massive facial recognition database tracking the movements of over 2.5 million people in China’s East Turkestan colony unsecured on the internet, it briefly shone a spotlight on the alarming scope of the Chinese surveillance state.
But SenseNets is a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: Tech firms in the United States are lending expertise, reputational credence, and technology to Chinese surveillance companies.
The SenseNets database logged exact GPS coordinates on a 24-hour basis and, using facial recognition, associated that data with sensitive personal information, including national ID numbers, home addresses, personal photographs, and places of employment. 
Nearly one-third of the individuals tracked were from the Uighur minority ethnic group.
In a bizarre juxtaposition of surveillance supremacy and security incompetence, SenseNets’ database was left open on the internet for six months before it was reported and, according to the researcher who discovered it, could have been “corrupted by a 12-year-old.”
The discovery suggests SenseNets is one of a number of Chinese companies participating in the construction of a technology-enabled totalitarian police state in East Turkestan, which has seen as many as 2 million Uighurs placed into “re-education camps” since early 2017. 
Eyewitness reports from inside the camps describe harsh living conditions, torture, and constant political indoctrination meant to strip Uighurs of any attachment to their Islamic faith. 
Facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and speech monitoring enable supercharge the Chinese Communist Party’s drive to “standardize” its Uighur population. 
Uighurs can be sent to "re-education" camps for a vast array of trivial offenses, many of which are benign expressions of faith.
The party monitors compliance through unrelenting electronic surveillance of online and physical activities. 
This modern-day panopticon requires enormous amounts of labor, but is serving as a testing ground for new technologies of surveillance that might render this process cheaper and more efficient for the state.
Toward this goal, the party is leveraging China’s vibrant tech ecosystem, inviting Chinese companies to participate through conventional government-procurement tools.
Companies built the "re-education" camps.
Companies supply the software that watches Uighurs online and the cameras that surveil their physical movements.
While based in China, many are deeply embedded in the international tech community, in ways that raise serious questions about the misuse of critical new technologies. 
Foreign firms, eager to access Chinese funding and data, have rushed into partnerships without heed to the ways the technologies they empower are being used in East Turkestan and elsewhere.
In February 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced a wide-ranging research partnership with Chinese artificial-intelligence giant and global facial-recognition leader SenseTime.
SenseTime then held a 49 percent stake in SenseNets, with robust cross-pollination of technical personnel. 
SenseNets’ parent company Netposa (also Chinese) has offices in Silicon Valley and Boston, received a strategic investment from Intel Capital in 2010, and has invested in U.S. robotics start-ups: Bito—led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University—and Exyn, a drone software company competing in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) artificial-intelligence challenge.
This extensive enmeshing raises both moral and dual-use national-security questions.
Dual-use technology is tech that can be put to both civilian and military uses and as such is subject to tighter controls.
Nuclear power and GPS are classic examples, but new technologies such as facial recognition, augmented reality and virtual reality, 5G, and quantum computing are beginning to raise concerns about their dual applicability.
Beyond SenseNets, Chinese voice-recognition leader iFlytek is also supplying software to monitor electronic communications in East Turkestan.
A 2013 iFlytek patent identified by Human Rights Watch specifically touted its utility in “monitoring public opinion.” 
Nonetheless, like SenseTime, iFlytek recently established a multiyear research partnership with MIT. 
These partnerships lend reputational weight to activities that undermine freedom abroad.
Equally concerning is that the details of technical and research collaborations with Chinese companies can be opaque to international partners, concealing ethically objectionable activities.
When Yale University geneticist Kenneth Kidd shared DNA samples with a scientific colleague from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Institute on Forensic Science, he had no idea they would be used to refine genetic surveillance techniques in East Turkestan.
Massachusetts-based company Thermo Fisher is also implicated: Until it was reported last month, the company sold DNA sequencers directly to authorities in East Turkestan for genetic mapping.
Western companies and institutions must be far more vigilant in scrutinizing how Chinese partners are using their products, especially emerging technologies.
Facial recognition is a good place to start.
The industry needs to establish global standards for appropriate applications—use that respects human rights and the rule of law. 
In the United States, Microsoft has been an industry leader in calling for regulation and has tapped employees, customers, public officials, academics, and civil society groups to develop a set of “principles for facial recognition,” which it plans to launch formally this month.
When it comes to building out regulation, the devil may be in the details.
But the principles—fairness, transparency, accountability, nondiscrimination, notice and consent, and lawful surveillance—are sound.
Surprisingly, SenseNets lists Microsoft itself as a partner on its website, along with American chip manufacturer AMD and high-performance computing provider Amax.
In the case of SenseNets, these partnerships could be false claims by a company looking to boost credibility, unwitting collaboration on the part of U.S. tech firms, or true business relationships.
“We have been able to find no evidence that Microsoft is involved in a partnership with SenseNets,” a spokesperson for Microsoft told the authors, “We will follow up with SenseNets to cease making inaccurate representations about our relationship.”
But if these partnerships are real, they would violate all six of Microsoft’s principles.
California-based Amax, which specializes in high-performance computing for deep-learning applications, touts a partnership with Chinese state-owned Hikvision, the world’s largest supplier of video surveillance products. 
AMD is also involved in a Chinese joint venture supplying proprietary x86 processor technology.
Despite a general awareness of the ways American companies and individuals are abetting surveillance in East Turkestan, U.S. Congress and government officials have yet to call for a review of the extent of U.S. investment and research partnership entanglements. 
The Commerce Department’s proposed rule-making on controls for certain emerging technologies is a start, but its scope remains unclear.
The international tech community can help guide the ethical application of its developments.
After employee protests, Google reportedly suspended plans to launch Dragonfly, a censored version of its search engine custom-built for China, although there are suspicions the project may not be entirely dead. 
Authoritarianism has proven it can use emerging technologies to undermine democratic norms and freedoms.
As such, U.S.-based research-and-development organizations should perform basic due diligence on partnerships to assess their connection to surveillance regimes.
International scientific exchange has yielded awe-inspiring achievements, from the discovery of the Higgs boson to the eradication of smallpox.
And cooperation is growing faster than ever.
But by taking basic steps to understand their partners, investors can mitigate some of the unintended risks of that cooperation.
If they fail to do so, they will end up owning some of the responsibility for human rights abuses in East Turkestan and elsewhere.

China has turned East Turkestan into a zone of repression — and a frightening window into the future

The Washington Post

The Chinese database that Victor Gevers, a Dutch cybersecurity researcher, found online has given a rare glimpse into China’s extensive surveillance of East Turkestan, a remote colony home to an ethnic minority population that is largely Muslim. 

AT A minimum, the minority Muslim Uighur population of East Turkestan colony in China is about 11 million people, and probably significantly higher. 

So consider the scope of surveillance over Uighurs in light of a recent database leak that indicated about 2.5 million people in East Turkestan are being tracked by cameras and other devices, generating more than 6.6 million GPS coordinates in one 24-hour period, much of it tagged with locations such as “mosque” and “hotel.”
Victor Gevers, a security researcher for the GDI Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to defend Internet freedom, found the database, belonging to SenseNets, a Chinese company that provides facial recognition and other monitoring systems to the police. 

The company had left the database unguarded but closed it off when Mr. Gevers inquired. 

It included records such as identification numbers, gender, nationality, address, birth dates, photographs, employers and which cameras or trackers they had passed. 

Mr. Gevers suggests that more than a quarter of those in the database appear to be ethnic Uighurs, although it also included Han Chinese and others.
The data provides another glimpse into the darkening world of East Turkestan, which China’s authorities have turned into a zone of repression. 

In addition to ubiquitous electronic and physical surveillance, an estimated 1 million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims have been incarcerated in concentration camps where they are being brainwashed to wipe out their traditional culture and language.
According to Xiao Qiang, director of the Counter-Power Lab at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Information, East Turkestan is a window on the future of China, a “frontline” test-bed for data-driven surveillance that could then be spread well beyond. 

Mr. Xiao wrote in the Journal of Democracy last month that China under Xi Jinping is attempting to marshal the powers of artificial intelligence to process all kinds of surveillance data, including facial recognition, and systems that can monitor gender, clothing, gait and height of passersby, as well as voice recognition, and creating a DNA database.
After being asked by the New York Times about the use of its technology to build the DNA database, a Massachusetts company, Thermo Fisher, said it would no longer sell its equipment in East Turkestan. 

Congress is considering important legislation that would help expose and pressure others who enable China’s abuses.
China’s goal is to use these technologies to suppress dissent, and to predict and snuff out any challenge to the ruling Communist Party’s grip on power. 

In East Turkestan, surveillance is part of a policy of cultural genocide. 

In addition to the camps and cameras, Mr. Xiao says the government has issued guidelines to collect DNA samples from all East Turkestan residents between ages 12 and 65.
When George Orwell’s “1984” was published seven decades ago, it seemed a dire warning of a future dystopia ruled by thought police and authoritarian control. 

Today, such a world is becoming a reality in East Turkestan. 

We agree with human rights groups who have urged the United Nations Human Rights Council, when it meets starting Monday, to launch an international fact-finding mission to East Turkestan to expose this unsettling experiment in state control of human behavior.

China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Quislings

The Chinese turned to a Massachusetts company and a prominent Yale researcher as they built an enormous system of surveillance and control.
By Sui-Lee Wee

Tahir Imin, a 38-year-old Uighur, had his blood drawn, his face scanned and his voice recorded by the authorities in China’s East Turkestan colony.

BEIJING — The authorities called it a free health check. Tahir Imin had his doubts.
They drew blood from the 38-year-old Muslim, scanned his face, recorded his voice and took his fingerprints. 

They didn’t bother to check his heart or kidneys, and they rebuffed his request to see the results.
“They said, ‘You don’t have the right to ask about this,’” Mr. Imin said. 

“‘If you want to ask more,’ they said, ‘you can go to the police.’”
Mr. Imin was one of millions of people caught up in a vast Chinese campaign of surveillance and oppression. 

To give it teeth, the Chinese authorities are collecting DNA — and they got unlikely corporate and academic help from the United States to do it.
China wants to make the country’s Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, more subservient to the Communist Party. 

It has detained up to a million people in concentration camps, drawing condemnation and threat of sanctions from the Trump administration.
Collecting genetic material is a key part of China’s campaign.

A comprehensive DNA database could be used to chase down any Uighurs who resist conforming to the campaign.
Police forces in the United States and elsewhere use genetic material from family members to find suspects and solve crimes. 

Chinese officials, who are building a broad nationwide database of DNA samples, have cited the crime-fighting benefits of China’s own genetic studies.
To bolster their DNA capabilities, scientists affiliated with China’s police used equipment made by Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company. 

For comparison with Uighur DNA, they also relied on genetic material from people around the world that was provided by Kenneth Kidd, a Yale University geneticist.

Kenneth Kidd is helping China's Final Solution

On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would no longer sell its equipment in East Turkestan, the colony of China where the campaign to track Uighurs is mostly taking place. 

The company said separately in an earlier statement to The New York Times that it was working with American officials to figure out how its technology was being used.
Kidd said he had been unaware of how his material and know-how were being used. 

He naively "believed" Chinese scientists were acting within scientific norms that require informed consent by DNA donors.
China’s campaign poses a direct challenge to the scientific community and the way it makes cutting-edge knowledge publicly available. 

The Chinese campaign relies on public DNA databases and commercial technology, much of it made or managed in the United States. 

In turn, Chinese scientists have contributed Uighur DNA samples to a global database, violating scientific norms of consent.
Cooperation from the global scientific community “legitimizes this type of Orwellian genetic surveillance,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who has closely tracked the use of American technology in East Turkestan.

China has maintained an iron grip in East Turkestan, where it is trying to make Uighur Muslims more subservient to the Communist Party.

Swabbing Millions
In East Turkestan, in northwestern China, the program was known as “Physicals for All.”
From 2016 to 2017, nearly 36 million people took part in it, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency. 

The Chinese collected DNA samples, images of irises and other personal data.

It is unclear whether some residents participated more than once — East Turkestan has a population of about 24.5 million.
In a statement, the East Turkestan government denied that it collects DNA samples as part of the free medical checkups. 

It said the DNA machines that were bought by the East Turkestan authorities were for “internal use.”
China has for decades maintained an iron grip in East Turkestan. 

In recent years, it has blamed Uighurs for a series of "terrorist" attacks in East Turkestan and elsewhere in China, including a 2013 incident in which a driver struck two people in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
In late 2016, the Communist Party embarked on a campaign to turn the Uighurs and other largely Muslim minority groups into loyal supporters. 

The government locked up hundreds of thousands of them in what it called "job training" camps, touted as a way to escape poverty, backwardness and radical Islam. 

It also began to take DNA samples.
In at least some of the cases, people didn’t give up their genetic material voluntarily. 

To mobilize Uighurs for the free medical checkups, police and local cadres called or sent them text messages, telling them the checkups were required, according to Uighurs interviewed by The Times.
“There was a pretty strong coercive element to it,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies the plight of the Uighurs. 

“They had no choice.”

A market in Kashgar, a city in East Turkestan. China has detained up to a million people in camps in the western region.

Calling Kidd
Kenneth Kidd first visited China in 1981 and remained curious about the country. 

So when he received an invitation in 2010 for an expenses-paid trip to visit Beijing, he said yes.
Kidd is a major figure in the genetics field. 

The 77-year-old Yale professor has helped to make DNA evidence more acceptable in American courts.
His Chinese hosts had their own background in law enforcement. 

They were scientists from the Ministry of Public Security — essentially, China’s police.
During that trip, Kidd met Li Caixia, the chief forensic physician of the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science. 

The relationship deepened. 

In December 2014, Li arrived at Kidd’s lab for an 11-month stint. 

She took some DNA samples back to China.
“I had thought we were sharing samples for collaborative research,” said Kidd.
Kidd is not the only foreign geneticist to have worked with the Chinese authorities. 

Bruce Budowle, a professor at the University of North Texas, says in his online biography that he “has served or is serving” as a member of an academic committee at the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science.
Jeff Carlton, a university spokesman, said in a statement that Budowle’s role with the ministry was “only symbolic in nature” and that he had “done no work on its behalf.”
“Budowle and his team abhor the use of DNA technology to persecute ethnic or religious groups,” Mr. Carlton said in the statement. 

“Their work focuses on criminal investigations and combating human trafficking to serve humanity.”
Kidd’s data became part of China’s DNA drive.
In 2014, Chinese ministry researchers published a paper describing a way for scientists to tell one ethnic group from another. 

It cited, as an example, the ability to distinguish Uighurs from Indians. 

The authors said they used 40 DNA samples taken from Uighurs in China and samples from other ethnic groups from Kidd’s Yale lab.
In patent applications filed in China in 2013 and 2017, ministry researchers described ways to sort people by ethnicity by screening their genetic makeup. 

They took genetic material from Uighurs and compared it with DNA from other ethnic groups. 

In the 2017 filing, researchers explained that their system would help in “inferring the geographical origin from the DNA of suspects at crime scenes.”
For outside comparisons, they used DNA samples provided by Kidd’s lab, the 2017 filing said. 

They also used samples from the 1000 Genomes Project, a public catalog of genes from around the world.
Paul Flicek, member of the steering committee of the 1000 Genomes Project, said that its data was unrestricted and that “there is no obvious problem” if it was being used as a way to determine where a DNA sample came from.
The data flow also went the other way.
Chinese government researchers contributed the data of 2,143 Uighurs to the Allele Frequency Database, an online search platform run by Kidd that was partly funded by the United States Department of Justice until last year. 

The database, known as Alfred, contains DNA data from more than 700 populations around the world.
This sharing of data could violate scientific norms of informed consent because it is not clear whether the Uighurs volunteered their DNA samples to the Chinese authorities, said Arthur Caplan, the founding head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s School of Medicine. 

He said that “no one should be in a database without express consent.”
“Honestly, there’s been a kind of naïveté on the part of American scientists presuming that other people will follow the same rules and standards wherever they come from,” Dr. Caplan said.
Kidd said he was “not particularly happy” that the Chinese ministry had cited him in its patents, saying his data shouldn’t be used in ways that could allow people or institutions to potentially profit from it. 

If the Chinese authorities used data they got from their earlier collaborations with him, he added, there is little he can do to stop them.
He said he was unaware of the filings until he was contacted by The Times.
Kidd also said he considered his collaboration with the ministry to be no different from his work with police and forensics labs elsewhere. 

He said governments should have access to data about minorities, not just the dominant ethnic group, in order to have an accurate picture of the whole population.
As for the consent issue, he said the burden of meeting that standard lay with the Chinese researchers, though he said reports about what Uighurs are subjected to in China raised some difficult questions.
“I would assume they had appropriate informed consent on the samples,” he said, “though I must say what I’ve been hearing in the news recently about the treatment of the Uighurs raises concerns.”

Machine Learning
In 2015, Kidd and Budowle spoke at a genomics conference in the Chinese city of Xi’an. 

It was underwritten in part by Thermo Fisher, a company that has come under intense criticism for its equipment sales in China, and Illumina, a San Diego company that makes gene sequencing instruments. 

Illumina did not respond to requests for comment.
China is ramping up spending on health care and research. 

The Chinese market for gene-sequencing equipment and other technologies was worth $1 billion in 2017 and could more than double in five years, according to CCID Consulting, a research firm. 

But the Chinese market is loosely regulated, and it isn’t always clear where the equipment goes or to what uses it is put.
Thermo Fisher sells everything from lab instruments to forensic DNA testing kits to DNA mapping machines, which help scientists decipher a person’s ethnicity and identify diseases to which he or she is particularly vulnerable. 

China accounted for 10 percent of Thermo Fisher’s $20.9 billion in revenue, according to the company’s 2017 annual report, and it employs nearly 5,000 people there.
“Our greatest success story in emerging markets continues to be China,” it said in the report.
China used Thermo Fisher’s equipment to map the genes of its people, according to five Ministry of Public Security patent filings.
The company has also sold equipment directly to the authorities in East Turkestan, where the campaign to control the Uighurs has been most intense. 

At least some of the equipment was intended for use by the police, according to procurement documents. 

The authorities there said in the documents that the machines were important for DNA inspections in criminal cases and had “no substitutes in China.”
In February 2013, six ministry researchers credited Thermo Fisher’s Applied Biosystems brand, as well as other companies, with helping to analyze the DNA samples of Han, Uighur and Tibetan people in China, according to a patent filing. 

The researchers said understanding how to differentiate between such DNA samples was necessary for fighting "terrorism" “because these cases were becoming more difficult to crack.”
The researchers said they had obtained 95 Uighur DNA samples, some of which were given to them by the police. 

Other samples were provided by Uighurs voluntarily, they said.
Thermo Fisher was criticized by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and others who asked the Commerce Department to prohibit American companies from selling technology to China that could be used for purposes of surveillance and tracking.


Marco Rubio
✔@marcorubio
Grotesque to read @thermofisher fawning over #XiJinping in #China’s state media.
A reminder #ThermoFisher is making lots of $ helping #Xinjiang authorities conduct mass detention & brutal suppression of #Uyghur Muslims by selling them DNA sequencers.http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201811/05/WS5bdfe891a310eff3032869d9_12.html …
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On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would stop selling its equipment in East Turkestan, a decision it said was “consistent with Thermo Fisher’s values, ethics code and policies.”
“As the world leader in serving science, we recognize the importance of considering how our products and services are used — or may be used — by our customers,” it said.

Tahir Hamut, a Uighur now living in Virginia whose blood was taken by the police in East Turkestan, said it was “inconceivable” that Uighurs there would have consented to give DNA samples.

Human rights groups praised Thermo Fisher’s move. 

Still, they said, equipment and information flows into China should be better monitored, to make sure the authorities elsewhere don’t send them to East Turkestan.
“It’s an important step, and one hopes that they apply the language in their own statement to commercial activity across China, and that other companies are assessing their sales and operations, especially in East Turkestan,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch.
American lawmakers and officials are taking a hard look at the situation in East Turkestan. 

The Trump administration is considering sanctions against Chinese officials and companies over China’s treatment of the Uighurs.
China’s tracking campaign unnerved people like Tahir Hamut. 

In May 2017, the police in the city of Urumqi in East Turkestan drew the 49-year-old Uighur’s blood, took his fingerprints, recorded his voice and took a scan of his face. 

He was called back a month later for what he was told was a free health check at a local clinic.
Mr. Hamut, a filmmaker who is now living in Virginia, said he saw between 20 to 40 Uighurs in line. He said it was absurd to think that such frightened people had consented to submit their DNA.
“No one in this situation, not under this much pressure and facing such personal danger, would agree to give their blood samples for research,” Mr. Hamut said. 

“It’s just inconceivable.”