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Nafeez Ahmed on how western companies have aided and adopted Huawei’s terrifying and ubiquitous authoritarian tech.
As Western government agencies raise alarm bells about the surveillance dangers of Huawei’s technology exports, many have missed the bigger story: that major Western companies helped build China’s surveillance state – a model which is now being quietly exported back to the West under the guise of installing efficient and sustainable ‘smart cities’.
Huawei is already inside some of the most sensitive national security domains across the Western world.
So far, most stated concerns are about the risk of China spying on the West through technology provided by Huawei. But there is another concern – getting into bed with a company complicit in building the surveillance infrastructure for the largest detention camps since the Holocaust.
While Huawei is best known for its smart phones, the telecommunications giant played a major role in designing one of China’s first major “smart city” projects in the autonomous province of Xinjiang, in the remote oil town of Karamay.
The Internet of Things: the Politics of Control
Across the town, bus stations were equipped with electronic screens displaying travel information. In homes, ageing residents could push panic button to alert emergency services or relatives. If the social security system recorded an increase in unemployed people, officials would know right away – all thanks to Karamay’s smart city web of 2G, 3G and Wi-Fi networks.
China’s early smart city project in Karamay has since blossomed into a computerised police state in Xinjiang. Versions of Karamay have been expanded across Xinjiang to track some 2.5 million residents, targeting the province’s Uyghur Muslim minority.
Versions of Karamay have been expanded across Xinjiang to track some 2.5 million residents, targeting the province’s Uyghur Muslim minority.
Persons who are flagged for suspicious activities – such as praying – can be investigated by Chinese intelligence and detained in “re-education” camps. Currently, some one million ethnic Uyghur Muslims have been interned in what has been described by a UN human rights panel as “a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”
The seeds of China’s smart city paradigm were first planted by IBM in its “Smarter Planet” concept in 2009, when the company engaged with over 200 city mayors across China. The following year, IBM announced a 10-year smart city development strategy for China at a Beijing conference.
There are currently just over 1,000 smart city projects around the world. Yet about half of them are in China, making the country home to the world’s largest concentration of smart cities – and therefore the biggest and most intrusive surveillance architecture ever built by any single nation.
Among the company’s early smart city projects was the installation of its flagship Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) for Smarter Solutions in the city of Zhenjiang in 2012.
An IBM handbook published the same year describes the IOC as capable of combining vast quantities of information across “security agencies” and “other levels of government.” Sources include feeds from “weather, citizens, law enforcement, social welfare, video”. The handbook identifies the potential of Sentiment Analysis, which learns what citizens are saying about city services through social media.
IBM played a direct role in designing and transitioning Karamay into Xinjiang’s first smart city. This was part of a bigger plan to connect cities across Xinjiang. In the first half of 2014, 5,000 4G mobile stations were installed across Xinjiang’s 16 main cities and 63 counties. By the end of that year, a total of 12,000 4G base stations would be built.
Uyghur Muslims have been interned in what has been described by a UN human rights panel as “a massive internment camp that is shrouded in secrecy.”
By 2016, as smart city infrastructure was expanded across Xinjiang, IBM began introducing “cognitive IoT” (Internet of Things) into Karamay. IBM’s technology was built around the Watson IoT platform, an artificial intelligence (AI) system that is extraordinarily well-suited for a wide range of surveillance applications.
How exactly the Watson platform was practically applied in Karamay is unclear. IBM declined to respond to questions for this article. But Karamay is home to many Uyghur “re-education” camps, whose inhabitants are often detained by police for wearing Muslim clothing or having long beards. These practices are automated by the city’s extensive surveillance networks – first established under IBM’s “public security” platform, they have evolved into Huawei’s “Safe City” program.
Automated Racism
Huawei’s tremendous growth would have been impossible without support from IBM. As early as 2000, IBM signed an agreement with Huawei providing it with unprecedented access to its microelectronics division’s R&D facilities.
And according to a China Daily interview in 2016 with Huawei’s founding chief executive Ren Zhengfe, the Chinese telecoms giant pays IBM more than $100 million every year in management consultancy fees. Like IBM, Huawei did not respond to requests for comment.