Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao, and John LiuThe more than 1.4 billion people who live in China are constantly under surveillance.They are recorded by police cameras that are everywhere, on street corners and on subway rooftops, in hotel lobbies and apartment buildings.Their phones are tracked, their purchases monitored, and their online chats censored.Now even his future is under surveillance.The latest generation of technology sifts through the vast amounts of data collected about your daily activities to find patterns and disturbances, promising to predict crimes or protests before they happen.They target potential troublemakers in the eyes of the Chinese government, not just those with criminal pasts, but also vulnerable groups such as ethnic minorities, migrant workers, and those with a history of mental illness.They can alert the police if a fraud victim tries to travel to Beijing to request payment from the government, or if a drug user makes too many calls to the same number.They can notify the agents every time a person with a history of mental illness approaches a school.A lot of evasive maneuvers have to be made to avoid digital traps.In the past, Zhang Yuqiao, a 74-year-old who has petitioned the government for most of his adult life, could simply stay off major highways to dodge authorities and head to Beijing to fight for compensation for the torture of his relatives. parents during the Cultural Revolution.Now, he turns off his phones, pays cash, and buys multiple train tickets to bogus destinations.Though largely untested, new Chinese technologies, detailed in procurement documents and others reviewed by The New York Times, further push the boundaries of social and political controls and embed them more and more into the lives of people. people.At their most basic, they justify stifling surveillance and violate privacy, while at the extreme they risk automating systemic discrimination and political repression.For the government, social stability is paramount and any threat to it must be eliminated.During his decade as China's top leader, Xi Jinping has hardened and centralized the security state, unleashing techno-authoritarian policies to quell ethnic unrest in western Xinjiang and enforce some of the world's harshest lockdowns.The space for dissent, always limited, is fast disappearing."Big data should be used as an engine to drive the innovative development of public security work and a new growth point to fuel combat capabilities," Xi said in 2019 at a national public security work meeting.The algorithms, which would be controversial in other countries, are often heralded as triumphs.In 2020, authorities in southern China denied a woman's request to move to Hong Kong to be with her husband after software alerted them that the marriage was suspicious, according to local police.Further investigation revealed that the two of them were not usually in the same place at the same time and that they had not spent the Spring Festival holidays together.The police concluded that the marriage had been faked to obtain a migration permit.That same year, in northern China, an automatic alert about the frequent entry of a man into a residential complex with different companions prompted the police to investigate.They discovered it was part of a pyramid scheme, according to state media.Details of these emerging security technologies are outlined in police research documents, patent and surveillance contractor filings, as well as hundreds of government procurement documents reviewed and confirmed by The Times.Many of the procurement documents were shared by ChinaFile, an online journal published by the Asia Society, which has systematically collected years of records from government websites.Another set, describing software purchased by authorities in the port city of Tianjin to prevent petitioners from going to neighboring Beijing, was made available by IPVM, a surveillance industry publication.China's Ministry of Public Security did not respond to requests for comment sent by fax to its headquarters in Beijing and six local departments across the country.The new approach to surveillance is based in part on data-driven surveillance software from the United States and Europe, technology that rights groups say has codified racism into decisions like which neighborhoods are most closely watched and which inmates get probation.China takes it to the extreme, exploiting nationwide data reserves that allow the police to act with opacity and impunity.People often do not know that they are being watched.Police face little external scrutiny of the effectiveness of the technology or the actions it drives.Chinese authorities do not require a court order to collect personal information.At their most avant-garde, the systems pose perennial science-fiction puzzles: How is it possible to know that the future has been accurately predicted if the police intervene before it happens?Even when the software fails to deduce human behavior, it can be considered a success, as surveillance itself inhibits riots and crime, experts say.“This is an invisible cage of technology imposed on society,” says Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, “whose disproportionate weight is borne by groups of people who are already severely discriminated against in Chinese society.”“No place to hide”In 2017, one of China's best-known entrepreneurs had a bold vision for the future: a computer system capable of predicting crime.Entrepreneur Yin Qi, who founded Megvii, an artificial intelligence start-up, told Chinese state media that the surveillance system could give police a crime search engine, analyzing vast amounts of video footage to intuit patterns and alert authorities to suspicious behavior.He explained that if the cameras spot a person spending too much time at a train station, the system could flag a potential pickpocket.“It would be scary if there were actually people watching behind the camera, but there is a system behind it,” Yin said.“It's like the search engine we use every day to browse the Internet: it's very neutral.It's supposed to be something benevolent."He added that with such surveillance, "the bad guys have nowhere to hide."Five years later, his vision is slowly becoming a reality.Internal Megvii presentations reviewed by The Times show how the start-up's products assemble entire digital files for the police."It builds a multidimensional database that stores faces, photos, cars, cases and incident records," reads the description of a product, called "intelligent search."The software analyzes the data to "unearth ordinary people who seem innocent" to "crack down on illegal acts at the cradle."A Megvii spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company was committed to the responsible development of artificial intelligence, and that it was concerned with making life safer and more convenient and "not with policing any particular group or individual." .”Similar technologies are already being used.In 2022, the Tianjin police bought software made by a Megvii competitor, Hikvision, which aims to predict protests.The system collects data on legions of Chinese petitioners, a general term in China that describes people who try to file complaints about local officials with higher authorities.It then scores the petitioners on how likely they are to travel to Beijing.In the future, the data will be used to train machine learning models, according to a contracting document.Local officials want to prevent these trips to avoid political embarrassment or exposure of wrongdoing.And the central government does not want groups of disaffected citizens to gather in the capital.A Hikvision representative declined to comment on the system.Under Xi, official efforts to control petitioners have become increasingly invasive.Zekun Wang, a 32-year-old member of a group that for years sought redress for real estate fraud, said authorities in 2017 had intercepted fellow petitioners in Shanghai before they could even buy tickets to Beijing.He suspected that the authorities were monitoring his communications on the WeChat social media application.Hikvision's system in Tianjin, which works in cooperation with police in nearby Beijing and Hebei province, is more sophisticated.The platform analyzes the probability that individuals will make a request based on their social and family relationships, their previous trips and their personal situation, according to the contract document.Help police create a profile of each, with fields for officers to describe the protester's temperament, including "paranoid," "meticulous," and "short-tempered."Many of the people who petition are doing so for the government's mismanagement of a tragic accident or negligence in the case, all of which go into the algorithm."It increases a person's early warning risk level if they have low social status or have experienced a major tragedy," reads the procurement document.When the police in Zhouning, a rural county in Fujian province, bought a new set of 439 cameras in 2018, they listed the coordinates where each one would go.Some were hung above intersections and others near schools, according to an acquisition document.Nine settled outside the homes of people with one thing in common: mental illness.While some programs try to use the data to uncover new threats, a more common type relies on preconceived notions of law enforcement.In more than a hundred hiring documents reviewed by The Times, the surveillance focused on blacklisting "key people."These people, according to some of the hiring documents, included the mentally ill, convicted felons, fugitives, drug users, petitioners, suspected terrorists, political agitators, and threats to social stability.Other systems targeted migrant workers, idle youth (adolescents without education or work), ethnic minorities, foreigners, and those infected with HIV.Authorities decide who gets on the lists, and there is often no process to notify people when they do.Once individuals are in a database, they are rarely deleted, said experts, who fear new technologies will reinforce disparities within China, imposing surveillance on less fortunate parts of its population.In many cases, the software goes beyond simply selecting a population, allowing authorities to set digital tripwires that indicate a potential threat.In a Megvii presentation detailing a rival Yitu product, the system's interface allowed police to design their own early warnings.Using a simple fill-in-the-blank menu, police can base alarms on specific parameters, such as where a person appears on the blacklist, when they move, whether they meet with other blacklisted people, and the frequency of certain events. activities.Police can configure the system to send out a warning every time two people with a history of drug use check into the same hotel or when four people with a history of protesting enter the same park.Yitu did not respond to email requests for comment.In 2020, in the city of Nanning, the police bought software that could search for “more than three key people checking into the same or nearby hotels” and “a drug user calling a new number outside the city ​​frequently,” according to a bidding document.In Yangshuo, a tourist city famous for its otherworldly karst mountains, authorities bought a system to alert them if a foreigner without a work permit spent too much time near foreign language schools or bars, an apparent effort to catch foreigners. people who overstay their visas or work illegally.In Shanghai, a party-run publication described how authorities used software to identify those who exceeded normal use of water and electricity.The system sent a "digital whistle" to the police when it found suspicious consumption patterns.The tactic is likely designed to target migrant workers, who often live together in close quarters to save money.In some places, they are seen by police as an elusive, and often impoverished, group that can bring crime into communities.Automated alerts do not result in the same level of police response.Police often prioritize tips that point to political issues, such as protests or other threats to social stability, said Suzanne E. Scoggins, a Clark University professor who studies policing in China.On occasion, the police have openly stated the need to profile individuals.“Through the application of big data, we paint a picture of people and give them labels with different attributes,” said Li Wei, a researcher at China's national police university, in a 2016 speech. “For those who receive one or more types of tags, we infer their identities and behaviors, and then carry out targeted preventive security measures.”Zhang began petitioning the government for compensation for his family's torture during the Cultural Revolution.Since then, he has filed a petition for what he claims is police persecution of his family.As China has developed its techno-authoritarian tools, he has had to use spy-film tactics to evade surveillance that he says has become “high-tech and Nazified.”When he traveled to Beijing in January from his hometown in Shandong province, he turned off his phone and paid for transportation in cash to minimize his digital footprint.He bought train tickets to the wrong destination to avoid police surveillance.He hired private drivers to get around checkpoints where his identification card would set off the alarm.Tianjin's system has a special function for people like him, who have "some awareness of fighting reconnaissance" and regularly change vehicles to evade detection, according to the police procurement document.Whether he has activated the system or not, Zhang has noticed a change.Every time he turns off his phone, he said, the agents show up at his house to check that he hasn't gone on another trip to Beijing.Even if police systems can't accurately predict behavior, authorities may consider themselves successful because of the threat, said Noam Yuchtman, an economics professor at the London School of Economics who has studied the impact of surveillance in China.“In a context where there is no real political accountability,” having a surveillance system that frequently dispatches police officers “can work quite well” in deterring riots, he said.Once the parameters are established and the warnings activated, the police have little flexibility, centralizing control.They are judged on their ability to respond to automated alarms and their effectiveness in preventing protests, according to experts and public police reports.Technology has codified power imbalances.Some tender documents refer to a “red list” of people that the surveillance system must ignore.A national tender document said the feature was for "people who need privacy protection or VIP protection."Another, from Guangdong province, was more specific, stipulating that the red list was for government officials.Zhang expressed frustration with the way technology has isolated those with political power from ordinary people."The authorities don't seriously solve problems, but do whatever it takes to silence the people who raise them," he said."This is a huge step backwards for society."Zhang said he still believed in the power of technology to do good, but in the wrong hands it could be a "scourge and shackle"."Before, if you left your house and went to the countryside, all roads led to Beijing," he said."Now, the whole country is a network."