China Leads the Way to Total Surveillance "Stable" Societies

When "deep learning" is entirely "data driven:"

Smart technology backed by artificial intelligence will be a tool to assist the police forces of the future. Chinese IT and telecoms giant Huawei says its Safe Cities technology has already helped Kenya bring down urban crime rates.

But who's a criminal? In China, documents for the Police Cloud project unearthed by Human Rights Watch list "petitioners" - people who complain to the government about perceived injustices - as potential targets of surveillance, along with anyone who "undermines stability" or has "extreme thoughts." Other documents cite members of ethnic minorities, specifically Muslim Uighurs from Xinjiang, as subjects of scrutiny.

Maya Wang, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said what sets China apart is "a complete lack of effective privacy protections," combined with a system that is explicitly designed to target individuals seen as "politically threatening."

"In other countries, we are often concerned about the use of big data for deepening existing policing bias - for example, for targeting historically disadvantaged groups like African Americans in the U.S. context - but for the Chinese systems, the targeting of people of certain ethnicity is a fundamental function of the system," she added.