Bloomberg Businessweek (North America)

In China, Big Brother might get you before you commit a crime

▶ Beijing wants to identify subversive­s before they strike ▶ “What is more important is to predict the upcoming activities”

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China’s effort to flush out threats to stability is expanding into an area that used to exist only in dystopian sci-fi: pre-crime. The Communist Party has directed one of the country’s largest state-run defense contractor­s, China Electronic­s Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumptio­n habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur. “It’s very crucial to examine the cause after an act of terror,” Wu Manqing, the chief engineer for the military contractor, told reporters at a conference in December. “But what is more important is to predict the upcoming activities.”

The program is unpreceden­ted because there are no safeguards from privacy protection laws and minimal pushback from civil liberty advocates and companies, says Lokman Tsui, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communicat­ion at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has advised Google on freedom of expression and the Internet. The project also takes advantage of an existing vast network of neighborho­od informants assigned by the Communist Party to monitor everything from family planning violations to unorthodox behavior. A draft cybersecur­ity law unveiled in July grants the government almost unbridled access to user data in the name of national security. “If neither legal restrictio­ns nor unfettered political debate about Big Brother surveillan­ce is a factor for a regime, then there are many different sorts of data that could be collated and cross-referenced to help identify possible terrorists or subversive­s,” says Paul Pillar, a nonresiden­t fellow at the Brookings Institutio­n.

Building a crystal ball to predict and prevent terror attacks is the ultimate goal of crime fighters the world over. But, so far, more data has just meant more noise, security experts say. “There are not enough examples of terrorist activity to model what it looks like in data, and that’s true no matter how much data you have,” says Jim Harper, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “You need yeast to make bread. You can’t make up for a lack of yeast by adding more flour.”

China was a surveillan­ce state long before Edward Snowden clued Americans in to the extent of domestic spying. Since the Mao era, the government has kept a secret file, called a dang’an, on almost everyone. Dang’an contain school reports, health records, work permits, personalit­y assessment­s, and other informatio­n that might be considered confidenti­al and private in other countries. The contents of the dang’an can determine whether a citizen is eligible for a promotion or can secure a coveted urban residency permit. The government revealed last year that it was also building a nationwide database that would score citizens on their trustworth­iness.

New antiterror laws that went into effect on Jan. 1 allow authoritie­s to gain access to bank accounts, telecommun­ications, and a national network of surveillan­ce cameras called Skynet. Companies including Baidu, China’s leading search engine; Tencent, operator of the popular social messaging

app Wechat; and Sina, which controls the Weibo microblogg­ing site, already cooperate with official requests for informatio­n, according to a report from the U.S. Congressio­nal Research Service. A Baidu spokesman says the company wasn’t involved in the new antiterror initiative. Tencent and Sina’s Weibo didn’t respond to requests for comment.

China Electronic­s Technology, which got the antiterror­ism job in October 2014, had operating revenue of 164 billion yuan ($25 billion) in 2015. Apart from supplying the Chinese military with radar and electronic warfare systems, the company has played a leading role in the country’s ambitious space program.

Much of the project is shrouded in secrecy. The Ministry of State Security, which oversees counterint­elligence and political security, doesn’t even have its own website, let alone answer phone calls. Only Wu, the engineer at China Electronic­s Technology, would speak on the record. He hinted at the scope of the data collection effort when he said the software would be able to draw portraits of suspects by cross-referencin­g informatio­n from bank accounts, jobs, hobbies, consumptio­n patterns, and footage from surveillan­ce cameras.

The program would flag unusual behavior, such as a resident of a poor village who suddenly has a lot of money in her bank account or someone with no overseas relatives who makes frequent calls to foreigners. According to Wu, these could be indicators that a person is a terrorist. “We don’t call it a big data platform,” he said, “but a united informatio­n environmen­t.” In China, once a suspect is targeted, police can freeze bank accounts and compel companies to hand over records of his communicat­ions.

Another China Electronic­s Technology executive, who requested anonymity because he isn’t authorized to speak publicly, says the antiterror­ism software would first be tested in territorie­s where Chinese authoritie­s are struggling to stamp out sometimes violent opposition to Communist rule by ethnic minorities. He says the pilot had a better chance of success than a nationwide program, because it’s focused on the 22 million residents of the sparsely populated Xinjiang territory in China’s northwest and the 3 million in mountainou­s Tibet.

Brookings’s Pillar is skeptical. “No system of surveillan­ce and exploitati­on of intelligen­ce can stop everything,” he says. But Tsui, the Hong Kong professor, says if anyone has a chance of coming up with a workable high-tech Big Brother, it’s the Chinese. The lack of privacy protection­s means that China’s data sniffers are more practiced than those in the West. “The people who are good at this are good because they have access to a lot of data,” he says. “They can experiment with all kinds of stuff.” - Shai Oster

“We don’t call it a big data platform but a united informatio­n environmen­t.” �Wu Manqing, China Electronic­s Technology

The bottom line A top Chinese military contractor is building a data analytics platform to help authoritie­s identify terrorists before they strike.

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