uyghurs – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Stories filed under: "uyghurs"

How Will China Answer The Hardest AI Question Of All?

from the I’m-sorry-chatbot,-I-can’t-let-you-say-that dept

There have been numerous stories about the new generation of AI chatbots lying when asked questions. This is rightly perceived as a big issue for the technology if it is to become routinely used and trusted by members of the public, as some intend. But in China, the problem is not that chatbots lie, but that they tell the truth. As an article in The Atlantic explained:

Even if a Chinese chatbot is trained on a limited set of politically acceptable information, it can’t be guaranteed to generate politically acceptable outcomes. Furthermore, chatbots can be “tricked” by determined users into revealing dangerous information or stating things they have been trained not to say, a phenomenon that has already occurred with ChatGPT.

Chinese regulators have just released draft rules designed to head off this threat. Material generated by AI systems “needs to reflect the core values of socialism and should not subvert state power” according to a story published by CNBC. The results of applying that approach can already be seen in the current crop of Chinese chatbot systems. Bloomberg’s Sarah Zheng tried out several of them, with rather unsatisfactory results:

In Chinese, I had a strained WeChat conversation with Robot, a made-in-China bot built atop OpenAI’s GPT. It literally blocked me from asking innocuous questions like naming the leaders of China and the US, and the simple, albeit politically contentious, “What is Taiwan?” Even typing “Xi Jinping” was impossible.

In English, after a prolonged discussion, Robot revealed to me that it was programmed to avoid discussing “politically sensitive content about the Chinese government or Communist Party of China.” Asked what those topics were, it listed out issues including China’s strict internet censorship and even the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which it described as being “violently suppressed by the Chinese government.” This sort of information has long been inaccessible on the domestic internet.

One Chinese chatbot began by warning: “Please note that I will avoid answering political questions related to China’s Xinjiang, Taiwan, or Hong Kong.” Another simply refused to respond to questions touching on sensitive topics such as human rights or Taiwanese politics.

Those rather clumsy efforts to prevent chatbots from telling the truth work to a degree, even if they are fairly blatant in their censorship. But there is a price to be paid for achieving this control. In effect, chatbots are being throttled to prevent them from operating freely and thus dangerously. That is not a recipe for producing the best or even good AI systems.

The Chinese government recognizes that chatbots and generative AI are likely to be key technologies for the future, and wants China to be one of the leaders there. But to achieve that means allowing engineers and entrepreneurs to explore this space as much as possible, an approach fraught with political dangers. The article in The Atlantic points out that there is a precedent for China’s rulers taking a chance for the sake of encouraging innovation:

The explosion of social media in China has also posed risks to the state, as it offers Chinese citizens the power to widely share unauthorized information – videos of protests, for instance – faster than censors can suppress it. Yet the authorities have accepted this downside in order to allow new technologies to flourish.

The world of chatbots and generative AI is already exciting, with major new developments every few weeks, and sometimes every few days. In China, things look likely to be even more interesting, as the country’s leaders grapple with the hard question of how much freedom to allow the developers of AI systems. Perhaps they should ask a chatbot.

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Filed Under: chatbots, chatgpt, china, generative ai, gpt, hong kong, social media, taiwan, uyghurs, wechat, xi jinping
Companies: openai

China Adds App Fakery To Its Bag Of Oppression Tricks

from the at-least-its-mass-murdering-was-out-in-the-open dept

The Chinese government hates its Muslim residents. It won’t even pretend otherwise. The Uyghur Muslim population has been targeted for years, resulting in disappearances, violence, oppressive surveillance, and other efforts that demonstrate that finding the country’s “EXIT” sign isn’t even an option.

It’s everything we’ve come to hate about China, albeit something that follows a couple of decades of the Chinese government pretending to play nice to ensure its manufactured products find willing purchasers pretty much everywhere else in the world.

And the purchasers have played along. Even the UN has pitched in to help China oppress certain citizens. Countries on the receiving end of the supply chain are unwilling to call it quits with a violent, bigoted government. The outrage directed at the Chinese government by world governments is mostly performative, limited to ineffectual efforts that won’t provoke China into calling in markers on all the foreign government debt it owns.

The only surprise in this report from the security researchers at Lookout is why the Chinese government is even bothering to disguise its methods.

_In late 2021, Lookout researchers encountered a tweet from Twitter handle @MalwareHunterTeam referencing an English-Uyghur dictionary app that had been flagged by VirusTotal contributors as malware tied to Bahamut, a threat actor primarily active in the Middle East. While analyzing this sample, it became clear that this malware was instead connected to surveillance campaigns targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities in China and abroad. Overlapping infrastructure and TTPs indicate these campaigns are connected to APT15, a Chinese-backed hacking group that’s also known as VIXEN PANDA and NICKEL. We named this malware family BadBazaar in response to an early variant that posed as a third-party app store titled “APK Bazar._”

The research has continued, resulting in this conclusion:

Over 70% of these apps were found in Uyghur-language communication channels within the second half of 2022.

Given the years of oppression, the remaining, un-incarcerated-for-life members of this community are understandably suspicious of apps they don’t recognize. Given the Chinese government’s enthusiasm for pervasive surveillance, Uyghur residents may decide to find alternate routes for communications. Plenty of local options are obviously out of the question. And that’s why the government is now impersonating apps to ensure Muslim residents stay under the government’s thumb. Here are just some of the apps the spyware impersonates (screenshot via Lookout):

The subterfuge appears to be necessary for the government to talk Muslim minorities into implicating themselves in bogus crimes the Chinese government can utilize to vanish them away forever. And it’s not just limited to Muslims in China. This particular impersonation goes beyond China’s borders to target Muslims in nearby countries.

Specifically, several of the samples we analyzed masqueraded as mapping apps for other countries with significant Muslim populations, like Turkey or Afghanistan. We also found that a small subset of apps were submitted to the Google Play store, indicating that the threat actor was interested in targeting Android device users outside of China, if possible.

If there’s any upside, it appears none of these variants were distributed by Google’s Play Store. But if that store is not an option (and it isn’t in China), users go elsewhere. And when they do that, they run a greater risk of downloading malicious software, rather than the apps they are seeking.

The surveillance software masquerading as common phone apps is extremely powerful. Lookout researchers report the variants they’ve seen can collect location data and access call logs and contact lists. They also can extract device-identifying info (IMEI, IMSI, etc.), Wi-Fi connections, and files stored on the device. On top of that, the malware can record phone calls and take pictures, completely compromising device users who’ve inadvertently installed the spyware.

This malware has been observed before by the researchers. But, as of July 2022, the malware has shifted to specifically target Muslims by spoofing apps most commonly used by the Muslim community. In addition to infecting targets sideloading apps (due to Google Play’s unavailability), victims have reported being targeted with messages containing links to harmful spoofs via services like Telegram and WhatsApp. (Fun fact: the US Defense Department loves targeting Muslim-focused apps too!)

The researchers don’t specifically name the Chinese government as the originator of these spoofed apps and subsequent infections. But they do point out most of this activity has been traced to “Chinese threat actors” operating on behalf of the government. And that’s just a layer of implausible deniability. The Chinese government wants its Muslim minority gone, if not just dead. That it’s decided to engage in app-based oppression rather than genocide is perhaps commendable. But only because people have tended to take a dim view of genocide for the last 150 years or so. The Chinese government is evil. Just because it has somewhat pivoted to app fakery doesn’t mean it’s any less of a threat to its own people.

Filed Under: china, fake apps, surveillance, uyghurs

How China Uses Western Influencers As Pawns In Its Propaganda War

from the chaos-and-suspicion dept

China’s efforts to subdue the turkic-speaking Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region will be familiar to Techdirt readers. International awareness is increasing, too, not least thanks to the diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics that the US and other countries have announced. That presents an interesting challenge to the Chinese authorities: how to counter the growing evidence of pervasive surveillance and large-scale arrests of the Uyghurs. Using official outlets like China’s Global Times is one way, but its articles are easily dismissed as crude propaganda. Much more interesting is the approach described by the New York Times, which looks at how China is helping Western YouTubers to report on the country:

The videos have a casual, homespun feel. But on the other side of the camera often stands a large apparatus of government organizers, state-controlled news media and other official amplifiers — all part of the Chinese government’s widening attempts to spread pro-Beijing messages around the planet.

State-run news outlets and local governments have organized and funded pro-Beijing influencers’ travel, according to government documents and the creators themselves. They have paid or offered to pay the creators. They have generated lucrative traffic for the influencers by sharing videos with millions of followers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

Typically, the Chinese government support comes in the form of free organized trips around China, particularly in Xinjiang. By showing the influencers a carefully sanitized image of life in the country, the authorities don’t need to worry about negative stories. They simply make it easy for the YouTubers to present images of jolly peasants and happy city-dwellers, because that’s all they are allowed to see.

One of the authors of the New York Times piece, Paul Mozur, noted on Twitter another important way that the authorities are able to help their influencer guests. Once produced, the China-friendly videos are boosted massively by state media and diplomatic Facebook and Twitter accounts:

One video by Israeli influencer Raz Gal-Or portraying Xinjiang as “totally normal” was shared by 35 government connected accounts with a total of 400 million followers. Many were Chinese embassy Facebook accounts, which posted about the video in numerous languages.

A new report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, “Borrowing mouths to speak on Xinjiang“, has some more statistics on this practice:

Our data collection has found that, between January 2020 and August 2021, 156 Chinese state-controlled accounts on US-based social media platforms have published at least 546 Facebook posts, Twitter posts and shared articles from [China Global Television Network], Global Times, Xinhua or China Daily websites that have amplified Xinjiang-related social media content from 13 influencer accounts. More than 50% of that activity occurred on Facebook.

Mozur says that the use of Western influencers in this way also allows employees of Beijing-controlled media, like the journalist Li Jingjing, to present themselves as independent YouTubers. On Twitter, however, she is labeled as “China state-affiliated media“. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute sees this as part of a larger problem (pdf):

labelling schemes adopted by some video-sharing and social media platforms to identify state-affiliated accounts are inconsistently applied to media outlets and journalists working for those outlets. In addition, few platforms appear to have clear policies on content from online influencers or vloggers whose content may be facilitated by state-affiliated media, through sponsored trips, for example.

According to Mozur, China’s state broadcaster is actively looking for more influencers, offering bonuses and publicity for those who sign up. In the US, China’s consulate general is paying $300,000 to a firm to recruit influencers for the Winter Olympics, ranging from Celebrity Influencers with millions of Instagram or TikTok followers, to Nano Influencers, with merely a few thousand. The ultimate goal of deploying these alternative voices is not to disprove negative stories appearing in Western media, but something arguably worse, as the New York Times report explains:

“China is the new super-abuser that has arrived in global social media,” said Eric Liu, a former content moderator for Chinese social media. “The goal is not to win, but to cause chaos and suspicion until there is no real truth.”

As if we needed any more of that?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: china, influencers, propaganda, social media, surveillance, uyghurs

An Unplanned, Ad-Hoc Collaboration Reveals The On-The-Ground Truth About China's Internment Camps For Uyghurs

from the name-that-surveillance-camera dept

The US, UK and Australia have all announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The reason given for the move is because of human rights abuses in China, particularly in the turkic-speaking region of Xinjiang. Techdirt has been writing about the Chinese authorities’ use of technology to censor and carry out surveillance on the local Uyghur population, among others, for some years. One of the most controversial aspects of China’s policy in the region is the use of huge detention camps. According to the authorities there, these camps are for educational and vocational training. Human rights organizations call them internment camps; some governments speak of “genocide” against the Uyghurs.

Given the highly sensitive nature of the topic, it is naturally hard to ascertain what is really happening in these camps. One solution is to use satellite imagery to peek inside China’s tightly-controlled borders. Perhaps the best-researched investigation using this technique appeared on BuzzFeed News last year. The main article, and the four follow-ups, revealed the hitherto unknown scale of the internment camps, but were necessarily limited by their use of an extreme physical viewpoint — the view from space.

A Chinese travel blogger going by the name of Guanguan decided to investigate on the ground some of the camps located by BuzzFeed News, by driving to them. The remarkable 20-minute video summary of his travels provides unique views of the camps, which complement the satellite imagery used by BuzzFeed News. Specifically, they show in some detail side-views of the camps. This allows Guanguan to make reasonable guesses about which camps are indeed for education and training of some kind, and which ones are likely to be high-security internment camps.

The video is well-worth watching in its entirely, since it provides probably our best glimpse yet of the reality of China’s internment camps for Uyghurs and others (wisely, Guanguan seems to be out of China now). In fact, the quality of the video images is such that IPVM, which specializes in covering the world of video surveillance, was able to recognize several of the security cameras used at the internment camps. There are a few cameras from the Chinese company Dahua Technology, but the majority identified come from Hikvision. This, Techdirt readers will recall, is the company whose director of cybersecurity and privacy said that IoT devices with backdoors “can’t be used to spy on companies, individuals, or nations.” IPVM reported that Hikvision “declined to comment” on these latest findings. Its article noted that the visual evidence of Hikvision cameras being used in multiple internment camps, the result of an interesting unplanned, ad-hoc collaboration between Western journalists and a Chinese video blogger, is likely to make things even worse for a company already blacklisted by the US government.

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Filed Under: china, guanguan, internment camps, surveillance, uyghurs
Companies: hikvision

Chinese Internet Companies Are Censoring People Who Write Or Speak Tibetan Or Uyghur, Lending A Hand To China's Cultural Genocides

from the remembering-Jack-Ma dept

Techdirt has reported on the oppression of Tibetans by the Chinese authorities for 15 years now. More recently, the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs in Xinjiang have come in for the same treatment, with the apparent aim of breaking their spirit and imposing total obedience. But alongside the hundreds of prisons and physical repression — sometimes leading to deaths — the Chinese authorities have been making it increasingly hard for Tibetans and Uyghurs to preserve their distinctive, non-Han cultures. Now Chinese Internet companies are lending a hand to these cultural genocides, reported here by Protocol:

First it was Talkmate, a language-learning app that partners with UNESCO, that posted via its official Weibo account that it had “temporarily” taken down Tibetan and Uyghur language classes “due to government policies.” There is no set date for them to return.

On some services, even people who already speak those languages aren’t allowed to write them. The popular Chinese streaming service Bilibili has banned comments posted in Tibetan and Uyghur:

Screen recordings shared by Fergus Ryan, a senior analyst with ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, showed that when he tried to type comments in Uyghur and Tibetan, he received error messages that read: “Comment contains sensitive information.”

Similarly, on Douyin, the original Chinese version of TikTok, whenever live-streamers speak an ethnic minority language or a dialect, they will receive a warning to switch to Standard Chinese. And if they don’t, Douyin’s moderators will just cut off the stream, regardless of the content.

The companies are probably not doing this with the explicit intent to stifle Tibetan and Uyghur cultures. It is more likely that they are frightened they will be punished if they let any content that the Chinese government might deem to be “instigating” terrorism or separatism slip through. The dramatic fall from grace of China’s outspoken tech billionaire, Jack Ma, stands as a chilling warning to all Internet companies, big or small. Safer just to block everything in these sensitive languages, it seems. And so the rich living cultures of Tibet and the Uyghurs move another step closer to extinction.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: censorship, china, culture, internet, tibet, uyghurs, xinjiang

China Orders Every Vehicle In Region Troubled By Ethnic Unrest To Be Fitted With Satnav Tracker

from the spy-in-the-sky dept

Techdirt stories on China tend to paint a fairly grim picture of relentless surveillance and censorship, and serve as a warning of what could happen in the West if government powers there are not constrained. But if you want to see how a real dystopian world operates, you need to look at what is happening in the north-western part of China’s huge domain. Xinjiang was originally a turkic-speaking land, but the indigenous Uyghur population is increasingly swamped by Chinese-speaking immigrants, which has caused growing unrest. Violent attacks on the Chinese population in the region have led to a harsh crackdown on the Uyghurs, provoking yet more resentment, and yet more attacks.

Last November, we noted that the Chinese authorities in Xinjiang were describing censorship circumvention tools as “terrorist software.” Now the Guardian reports on an ambitious attempt by the Chinese government to bring in a new kind of surveillance for Xinjiang:

Security officials in China’s violence-stricken north-west have ordered residents to install GPS tracking devices in their vehicles so authorities are able to keep permanent tabs on their movements.

The compulsory measure, which came into force this week and could eventually affect hundreds of thousands of vehicles, is being rolled out in the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang, a sprawling region that borders Central Asia and sees regular eruptions of deadly violence.

The rollout is already underway — those who refuse to install the trackers will not be allowed to refuel their vehicles:

Between 20 February and 30 June all private, secondhand and government vehicles as well as heavy vehicles such as bulldozers and lorries will have to comply with the order by installing the China-made Beidou satellite navigation system.

Beidou is the homegrown version of the US Global Positioning System, completely under the control of the Chinese government. According to Wikipedia, the Beidou system has two levels of accuracy:

The free civilian service has a 10-meter location-tracking accuracy, synchronizes clocks with an accuracy of 10 nanoseconds, and measures speeds to within 0.2 m/s. The restricted military service has a location accuracy of 10 centimetres, can be used for communication, and will supply information about the system status to the user.

Being able to track any car in the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture of Xinjiang to a few inches should be enough even for the paranoid Chinese authorities. The fear has to be that, if successful, this latest form of extreme surveillance may spread to other regions in China, assuming Beidou could cope with such large-scale tracking.

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Filed Under: china, gps, privacy, satnav, tracking, uyghurs, xinjiang