China, Surveillance | China’s system of terror is sold to the whole world: – Much more control and monitoring

Strasbourg, Paris, Nice, Lyon and Marseille are just some of the 160 cities that have purchased surveillance technology from Chinese Huawei.

“Smart City Solution” is the name of the concept that China is a major exporter of. Hundreds of cities around the world buy this surveillance service from Huawei. With the system, communications are collected in a central data bank that analyzes information from various sources in the city. Central to the system is an unlimited number of surveillance cameras that are installed around the city. Huawei can also deliver telecommunications solutions and other infrastructure to the cities.

Everything is connected with an AI (artificial intelligence) monitoring system that makes it easier for the authorities to analyze weaknesses in the city, or to detect possible threats.

The Chinese balloon has been shot down over the US east coast

The system will help with a number of things such as capturing weaknesses in infrastructurehelp cities think green, detect accidents, crime or terrorist attacks.

In Hangzhou, China, the light signals are connected to the system, so that traffic jams are reduced to a minimum and ambulances on call always get the green light.

More and more cities are using the system to improve planning and operations. This type of data collection to make society greener and better for people.

Comes with warning

Josh Chin and Liza Lin are journalists in the US The Wall Street Journal. They have mapped the use of this technology worldwide, and have written the book “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control”. For several years, they have been watching how Huawei’s “Smart Cities” help less democratic regimes control people. They now warn that the technology is also a dream for regimes that want to monitor and oppress their citizens.

Chin and Lin tell Danish Berlingske that China’s rulers have always organized society with the community first and the individual second.

– Only in the 90s did the word “private life” enter Chinese dictionaries. Individual rights are an idea that originated in the West, says Lin and explains that China does not consider surveillance as something negative, but something that gives the authorities an overview.

Banned in the United States

The organization Privacy International works actively to prevent authorities from misusing technology to oppress their citizens. On his website writes they that Huawei provides central infrastructure for monitoring the citizens of Myanmar. In the capital, hundreds of cameras with facial recognition technology, connected with AI from Huawei, are used to control protesters against the military regime.

Iran has also purchased the “Smart cities” technology. There it will be used by the Revolutionary Guard. In Spain, France and Serbia, the system is in use. However, the US is said to have introduced a ban on Huawei’s system.

But in China too, the citizens have at times had enough of the surveillance. During the pandemic, “smart cities” technology was used to prevent the spread of infection. Connected to the computer system were, among other things, drones and robotic dogs that monitored and controlled the population.

– Robot dogs walked the streets, drones flew through the air. It was downright dystopian. They got an alarm clock, says Josh Chin to Berlingske.

– Oslo is a smart city

Lars Gjesvik is a research fellow associated with NUPI’s research center for digitization and cyber security. According to him, Oslo is already a so-called smart city.

– Oslo is often ranked as one of the world’s “smartest” cities, and other Nordic cities are also in the top tier. If it is about the use of digital solutions that make cities more efficient, Norway is already at the top of the world.

This does not mean, however, that the Norwegian and Chinese smart cities are particularly similar to each other.

– The idea of ​​what such technology should be used for in China and in Norway are different. Chinese society has more surveillance and the state has a very strong role. As a consequence, a smart city in China and one in Norway are not necessarily the same. There will be much more control and monitoring in China, says Gjesvik.

Privacy and challenges

– What problems are there associated with the use of Chinese solutions?

– Controversies with smart cities are often about surveillance and privacy and to what extent a smart city leads to more and problematic surveillance. A challenge could be that personal protection is poorly safeguarded, although this does not have to be the case. And then there is also the question of the access the Chinese regime can get to sensitive data.

Gjesvik says that a risk analysis must be carried out before using these smart city solutions, and especially if they come from states with which there is no security cooperation. He believes that you simply have to ask yourself if you are in favor of Chinese technology, because you fear being monitored.

– It is a very current issue, just look at the discussions around Chinese products such as Huawei and TikTok. But you have to assess it on a case-by-case basis, because if you want to exclude all Chinese technology, it will be quite dramatic. But when it comes to socially critical installations or data that is actually sensitive or problematic, it’s a little different, he says.

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