So I wanna tell you a story about my friend Dee.
She lives in a big city in Turkey, and that's where we met.
So a couple of years ago, Dee got engaged, and all she wanted was to have
her whole extended family come to her wedding.
So that sounds like a simple thing, but it turned out to be a lot more complicated than she expected.
That's because Dee is a Uyghur.
So the Uyghurs are a Muslim ethnic minority group, who live in this huge region called Xinjiang,
which is this big part of China right on the border of central Asia.
And over the past couple of years, in the name of national security
the Chinese government has systematically imposed
a high-tech police state that is making nearly every aspect of ordinary life impossible for Uyghurs.
So if you were a Uyghur in Xinjiang, the government
could tell you what you can and can't name your children
what apps you can have on your phone, what music you can listen to
even what kind of funeral you can give your parents after they die.
And to enforce these rules, the government is relying on all kinds of brand-new technology.
Things like DNA databases, cell phone scanning devices, and predictive policing programs.
All of this is meant to invade and monitor even the most ordinary
aspects of life for the region's Muslim minorities.
So for Dee's family, this meant that they had to jump
hurdle after hurdle just to try to get the passports they needed to leave China and go to her wedding in Turkey.
You see, the government confiscates passports now for Muslim minorities.
So knowing this, Dee wasn't that optimistic. But she still held out hope.
She kept putting off and putting off her wedding, and months went by.
So finally, one day, Dee and her mom got on a video chat with her family back at Xinjiang.
She asked them how everything was going, and they said it was all fine.
But then one of her relatives held up a hand-written sign.
It said, "We couldn't get the passports."
Dee felt her heart sink.
She held it together for the rest of the call, but after they hung up, she started to cry.
The reason Dee started to cry and the reason that they had to hold up that sign
is that they were afraid of audio surveillance.
And Dee's family was exactly right to be afraid.
If the police had been listening in on that call and they hadn't liked something that they had heard,
they could've been sent to one of the region's massive internment camps.
So these are places where Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are held
euphemistically called political education centers.
And they're places where people are being force-fed communist party propaganda.
They're being taught the government's version of Chinese history, given Chinese language lessons
and subject to a range of kind of appalling treatments
things like food deprivation, sleep deprivation, being held in stress positions, torture, and more.
So I first spoke about this issue at the Oslo Freedom Forum in May.
And since then, UN officials have come out and said upwards of a million people
are being held in camps just like this all across Xinjiang. A million people.
And that doesn't even encompass the hundreds of thousands more
that are trapped in the region's penal system
or the millions that are now living in a surveillance state that is so repressive
that it's often referred to as an open-air prison.
What's happening in Xinjiang today is one of the world's most urgent human rights crises
and it's a crisis that impacts every single one of you in this room today.
So for its 70 year history, China's communist party has used lots of different ways to repress dissent
from censoring the news media, to building networks of informants among its own citizens.
So the difference today, is that this repression is being ramped up in places like Xinjiang.
And it's being done with the assistance of new technology
that's enabling the government to vacuum up huge volumes of data about its citizens.
So Xinjiang is a pretty extreme case within China.
But we're already seeing some of the technology that was deployed in
Xinjiang being put into use in other parts of the country.
So take facial recognition cameras, for instance.
You can now see these cameras in train stations and other public places all throughout China
and police departments say that they're helping them fight crime.
But China is also a country where criminal courts are convicting 99.9% of the accused annually
based on government data.
So given that ratio, if you're indicted in a case that's even remotely politicized
it's extremely unlikely that you're going to get a fair trial.
So another obvious example is WeChat, which is this messaging app that many of us here know and love.
It's the app that people use for everything from calling their grandmother, to ordering to takeout
to ride shares, e-payment, bill payment, and lots more.
Now, WeChat is really fun to use, but in terms of user privacy protections it's pretty lacking.
Like most internet companies that operate in China today
they're require to hand over certain kinds of user information to government authorities upon request.
And WeChat doesn't make public what kind of information this is,
when they hand it over, to what authorities, and why.
WeChat also has a problem with censorship.
So many of you will be familiar with these adorable Winnie the Pooh memes
that Chinese internet users have been using to poke some gentle fun at their leaders for quite a long time.
And if you've ever used WeChat in the PRC, you might experience seeing these memes
not making it through to the person you're talking to or even disappearing in real life.
So the government is also investing in lots of big data programs, including in the field of policing.
So one of these programs, which has been documented extensively
by Human Rights Watch, is called the Police Cloud.
And this is a program that draws on different parts of people's lives in an effort to build profiles of them
and some of this data is from areas that we would consider to be private
things like your medical records, your religious practices, and more.
So the idea is to build out networks of people's contacts, and the endgame
is to predict crimes before they even happen.
So predictive policing, as this is called, is not unique to China, and in fact
cities around the world are experimenting with programs just like this.
But in China, local police departments have explicitly stated that they're going
to use these programs to go after people: like dissidents and minority groups.
What's clear is that these programs set up incentives
for people to police each other and to censor themselves.
So these same kinds of incentives exist for companies, too.
So think about Tencent's WeChat, for instance.
Tencent has no incentive to set up things like end-to-end encryption or better user privacy protections,
and if it did, it could lose the Chinese market altogether.
Chinese companies have worked hand-in-hand with the government to build the surveillance state
and many of these companies have global ambitions, too.
So Western firms have been building and selling surveillance technology for a pretty long time.
But Chinese firms are making the same tech cheaper and more accessible
to lots of buyers all across the developing world.
And we're already seeing this start to happen, in places as far flung as Ecuador
where law enforcement authorities have bought up a network of Chinese-made
facial recognition cameras to help fight crime.
But in the past, Ecuador's government has also gone after political opponents
and civil society groups, and we're seeing these exact same dynamics start to play out
in places like Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Malaysia, and more.
What's clear is that without strong, clear, and reliable individual privacy protections
it is the foregone conclusion that technology like this will be abused.
So when we used to talk about abuses of surveillance technology on
the scale that it's happening in China today, it was always a hypothetical.
But what's happening in Xinjiang, it shows us that a version
of that dystopian future, it's already here with us.
And for the people here who are not from this part of the world
and for whom this crisis might feel a little bit remote
I hope that you'll keep in mind that what the Chinese government is doing in the west of its country
there's not a lot stopping any other government from doing the same sort of thing.
The technology and the tools are already out there
and for some subset of authoritarian governments, the will to do this is out there, too.
The question is: what do we do about it?
So, as the crisis in Xinjiang has continued to gather more attention,
the Chinese government has rolled out a kind of propaganda campaign of its own
and at times, this campaign can feel almost as surreal as the technology that surrounds it.
As one official has put it
Xinjiang is home to the happiest Muslims in the world. The happiest Muslims in the world.
So over the past year and a half or so, I've interviewed probably many dozens of people
who've borne witness to this crisis, and many of those people have family members
that have been sent to the camps themselves.
And among those interviews, there's one that's just
stayed with me, one that I think about all the time.
And the woman I'm talking about is a brilliant accountant
someone who learned four languages on her own
a single mother of three, and, you know, a person who has accomplished really a lot in life.
And she's now also a refugee.
So this woman escaped Xinjiang kind of pretty early on
in the crisis before she knew how bad things were gonna get.
And she took her oldest son with her.
She had always planned to go back and get her two younger children
who she left with her parents, but she had to save up
enough money to bribe officials in Xinjiang for the passports that she needed to get them out.
But very quickly after she left, it became clear that if she set foot within China again
she would almost certainly be sent to the camps herself.
And so she's lived with that guilt of leaving her two children behind every single day for years.
So after I finished talking to this woman, being the kind of force of nature that she is, she started grilling me, too.
She had some questions for me as an American journalist.
She asked me first, you know, what can we do to make the US government care about this?
She asked, does the rest of the world care enough to act on this?
I didn't have good answers for her that day, but I would love to turn that question onto all of you as well.
Does the rest of the world care enough to act on this?
Do we?
Thank you.