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ASK MIT NOT TO HELP CHINA KILL FREEDOM

Last year, China received $412 billion U.S. dollars in trade surplus from the United States. We are China’s consumers. It’s about time China learns to respect us. That would be good customer service from China. Let’s start with our leading universities, which are helping the Chinese government to surveil and suppress Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Chinese Christians.

HOW IS MIT HELPING CHINA

MIT is helping three major Chinese companies develop technologies which are being used by the Chinese totalitarian regime against its civilians in a genocidal attack on individual rights and liberty. In collaboration with iFlytek, SenseTime and Huawei, MIT is helping create a surveillance state unlike any the world has ever seen.

iFlyTek

iFlyTek is building a nationwide voice recognition system to monitor its population. MIT has a five-year contract with iFlyTek, a leading Chinese company in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) knowing fully well that iFlytek supplies voice pattern collection systems to the police in Xinjiang.

Huawei

Huawei has a partnership with the Ministry of Public Security in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and has research deals with over 50 US universities.  MIT says it will not renew its current partnerships with Huawei but will “revisit collaboration as circumstances dictate.” The current circumstances in China mean that MIT and all other universities must immediately and permanently end any collaboration with Huawei.

SenseTime

MIT is also partnering with SenseTime, which has developed a sophisticated, proprietary deep learning platform which allows the Chinese government to use face recognition, video analysis, text recognition, etc against its citizens.

HOW TO STOP MIT

Call the president of MIT, L. Rafael Reif, and tell them to permanently end collaboration with iFlyTek, SenseTime and Huawei.

HOW CHINA IS KILLING FREEDOM

About 63% of all Uyghurs or about 7.5 million people out of 12 million of the total population of Uyghurs, are subjected to direct surveillance and control. A full 3 million are in the concentration camps, 500,000 children are taken to orphanages, and forced communist guests are placed in a 1 million Uyghur households where about 5 million-plus Uyghurs live.

But those who are outside this system are still subject to extraordinary scrutiny. Their blood is drawn for DNA, their faces scanned, voices recorded, and fingerprints taken by the authorities. Children are interrogated. Neighbors become informants. Mosques are monitored. Cameras are everywhere. Security posts are 500 yards apart in cities. Each Uyghur car must be fitted with tracking devices. Uyghur Muslims must install a spyware application on their devices.

The totalitarian determination of the Chinese Communist Party and modern technology are producing a massive abuse of human rights on an unprecedented scale.

What we are witnessing in Eastern Turkistan (Xinjiang) is massive, concerted campaign of coerced sociocultural re-engineering. And our own MIT is helping China do this.

Artificial intelligence and other technologies are being used against innocent civilians because of their religious, cultural or political views.

The MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has announced a new five-year collaboration with iFlyTek, a leading Chinese company in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing.

https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/csail-launches-five-year-research-partnership-iflytek 

https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/10/22/china-voice-biometric-collection-threatens-privacy

Authorities are collaborating with iFlytek, a Chinese company that produces 80 percent of all speech recognition technology in the country, to develop a pilot surveillance system that can automatically identify targeted voices in phone conversations. 

It is also the designated supplier of voice pattern collection systems purchased by Xinjiang and Anhui police bureaus. It says it has set up, jointly with the ministry’s forensics center, a key ministry laboratory in artificial intelligent voice technology (智能语音技术公安部重点实验室) that has “helped solve cases” in Anhui, Gansu, Tibet, and Xinjiang. The company states it can develop artificial intelligence systems that can handle minority languages, including Tibetan and Uyghur.

iFlytek’s website also claims it has developed other audio-related applications, including “keyword spotting” for “public security” and “national defense” purposes. The web page gives no further details of what these keywords or the security threats might be. In a patent it filed in August 2013, iFlytek states that it has developed a system to discover “repeated audio files” in the telecommunications system and on the internet that may be useful in “monitoring public opinion”:

They also have a partnership with Sensetime.

http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-sensetime-announce-effort-advance-artificial-intelligence-research-0228

Considered China’s leading AI “unicorn” valued at more than $3 billion, SenseTime has developed a sophisticated proprietary deep learning platform and built applications for multiple industries. The company has applied its core computer vision technologies, including face recognition, video analysis, text recognition, and autonomous driving, across industries such as automobile, finance, mobile Internet, robotics, security, and smartphones.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-19/this-company-is-helping-build-china-s-panopticon-it-won-t-stop-there

SenseTime set up a joint venture called Xinjiang SenseTime Leon Technology Co. in the province last year, but the company declined to say whether its technology is at work in the network of cameras that scan many license plates and faces at checkpoints. The authorities’ system has clearly been enhanced by some company’s powerful AI software, says Adrian Zenz, a researcher who studies government contracts in the region. “It’s become a real key component of the security apparatus,” he says. “The point is to reliably identify a person based on their biological properties.”

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