New Delhi: Surveillance has taken a new shape in China as it has begun using flock of drones disguised as birds to keep a check on its citizens and it has code named the operation as ‘Dove’.
According to The Atlantic, the birds match up to the real ones and often, even the real ones fly alongside the drones. Moreover, the drones flap in a way that it cannot be differentiated from the actual birds.
According to The Atlantic, one researcher involved in the project has claimed that the robotic birds can mimic 90 percent of the movements of their biological counterparts, and they’re also very quiet, which helps them avoid detection.
Mission Dove according to the report quotes Yang Wenquing, a member of the team behind Dove, who said the technology has “some unique advantages to meet the demand for drones in the military and civilian sectors” and “good potential for large-scale use in the future.”
But the segment which lives under the most intense surveillance are the 22 to 25 million Muslims. According to The Atlantic, a Freedom House study found that extensive surveillance affects many religious groups, with Muslims as well as Protestant Christians and Tibetan Buddhists experiencing an increase in persecution over the previous five years. In an interview this week, Timothy Grose, a China expert at the Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, told me, “Right now, we see a lot of the repression being directed against Muslims.”
Such Doves have now been flown over five provinces so far in China. According to the report, it’s Xinjiang, a northwestern region heavily populated by Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority, where it has been majorly flown.
The province has been known for being a breeding ground for separatism and extremism. There have been ethnic riots which killed hundreds in 2009, and some Uighurs have perpetrated terror attacks in recent years. The area is now subject to a heightened level of surveillance, with authorities collecting DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans, voice samples, and blood types from residents.
But it’s certainly not a new discovery that China is under intense surveillance. According to the report, China has deployed facial recognition as a technique to arrest criminals and also to identify one in a large crowd.
China also employs a technique where employees have to wear helmets that scan their brainwaves for rage, depression, anxiety, or fatigue, and that alert their bosses to any perceived problem.
That’s not all, there also have been reports that the country’s social credit system which keeps a track of the millions of individuals keeps a check on the shopping of its citizenry and likewise determine how moral or immoral they are and consequently raise or lower their citizen score.
According to The Atlantic, the country has been mostly targeting Uighurs. But its not just Uighurs, but also other ethnic groups like Kazakhs.
This is majorly because; the Chinese have always perceived Muslims as a threat to integrity of the country. This is also because of the Uighur separatists who have been aspiring for their own national homeland and has always maintained foreign contacts across the border in Kazakhstan.
“The Chinese government thinks that these Turkic Muslims have incorrect thoughts,” Maya Wang, a senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, wrote in an email, according to The Atlantic. The mail further reads as, because they identify more with Turks and Muslims in Turkey and Central Asia. To correct these thoughts, and to make them loyal subjects of the Chinese Communist Party, it needs to reengineer their identities and to tightly control them.”
According to the Atlantic, Chinese experiments in surveillance are having an impact elsewhere in the world: some of the new tech of surveillance which is essentially experimented on Uighurs are also carried on to other parts of the world.
“Xinjiang provides a testing ground from which they can then try it in larger places,” Grose said to The Atlantic. Chinese firms have already sold their surveillance tech to countries like Malaysia, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe, and may soon gain a foothold in Europe, too.
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