Revealed: Massive Chinese Police Database (Uyghur surveillance)

[mountaineer]

Alexander Muse asked on Twitter, "Will the FBI take cues from China's surveillance of Uyghurs to monitor Trump supporters?"

Revealed: Massive Chinese Police Database
Millions of Leaked Police Files Detail Suffocating Surveillance of China’s Uyghur Minority
Yael Grauer
January 29 2021, 3:00 a.m.

The order came through a police automation system in Ürümqi, the largest city in China’s northwest Xinjiang region. The system had distributed a report — an “intelligence information judgment,” as local authorities called it — that the female relative of a purported extremist had been offered free travel to Yunnan, a picturesque province to the south.

The woman found the offer on the smartphone messaging app WeChat, in a group known simply as “Travelers.” Authorities homed in on the group because of ethnic and family ties; its members included Muslim minorities like Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz, who speak languages beside China’s predominant one, Mandarin.

“This group has over 200 ethnic-language people,” the order stated. “Many of them are relatives of incarcerated people. Recently, many intelligence reports revealed that there is a tendency for relatives of [extremist] people to gather. This situation needs major attention. After receiving this information, please investigate immediately. Find out the background of the people who organize ‘free travel,’ their motivation, and the inner details of their activities.”  ...

Details of the investigations are contained in a massive police database obtained by The Intercept: the product of a reporting tool developed by private defense company Landasoft and used by the Chinese government to facilitate police surveillance of citizens in Xinjiang.

The database, centered on Ürümqi, includes policing reports that confirm and provide additional detail about many elements of the persecution and large-scale internment of Muslims in the area. It sheds further light on a campaign of repression that has reportedly seen cameras installed in the homes of private citizens, the creation of mass detention camps, children forcibly separated from their families and placed in preschools with electric fences, the systematic destruction of Uyghur cemeteries, and a systematic campaign to suppress Uyghur births through forced abortion, sterilization, and birth control. ...

Full story at The Intercept

[mountaineer]

Meanwhile:

China Is Sending People to Prison for Tweets Its Government Doesn’t Like
by Bobby Burack a day ago
updated about 8 hours ago   

Well, this is horrendous.

China’s Communist Party has sentenced more than 50 people to prison in the past three years for using Twitter and other platforms banned in China to criticize Chinese leader Xi Jinping and his government. The Wall Street Journal reports the growing use of prison sentences marks an escalation of China’s efforts to “control narratives and strangle criticism outside China’s cloistered internet.”

The majority of users that China has imprisoned have little influence and reach. Among the detained citizens, their online followings range from the hundreds to the low thousands, with one having fewer than 30 followers.

Unsurprisingly, China’s Public-Security Ministry didn’t respond to the WSJ‘s queries regarding the situation. Just as predictable, Twitter declined to comment. ...

Outkick

[mikezpen]

I'd say they are maybe 2 steps ahead of what the left wants to do here.They aren't sterilizing Trump supporters or locking them up yet.(But there has been talk of locking up those who attack "climate change" too much.)They are spying here and shutting down speech. The next thing w/b firms are rating employees on speech and attitudes.