China invests in US universities to build its surveillance state
It was recently revealed that Chinese tech giant Alibaba provided a $125,000 grant to Dinesh Manosha, a professor at the University of Maryland. The grant was for the development of a machine learning software that could “classify the personality of each pedestrian and identify other biometric features.” The software is designed to predict the behavior of pedestrians for surveillance purposes.
Alibaba has in the past developed a product designed to recognize and classify the faces of Uyghur people, a Muslim minority in the Northwestern province of Xinjiang, on whom China has been conducting an unprecedented technology-driven crackdown. There is a significant possibility that Manosha’s research could be used to develop technology that expands the Chinese state’s surveillance capabilities. And he is not the only U.S.-based academic doing such research.
Darren Byler, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada and an expert on Uyghurs, says, “There are numerous instances of U.S. universities partnering or collaborating with Chinese companies that do state contracting work.”
Byler noted that funding was provided to the University of Illinois by surveillance company CloudWalk. He says, “Cloudwalk has done some of the most egregious work when it comes to automating surveillance of Uyghurs and others in China.”