At a location he keeps secret, John Honovich was on his laptop, methodically scouring every link on a website for a conference half a world away. Hikvision, the world's largest security camera manufacturer, was hosting the event--the 2018 AI Cloud World Summit--in its hometown of Hangzhou, a city of about 10 million people not far from Shanghai. Honovich, the founder of a small trade publication that covered video surveillance technology, wanted to find out what the latest Hikvision gear could do. He zeroed in on one section of the conference agenda titled "Eco-Friendly, Peaceful, Relaxed" and found a description of an AI-powered system installed around Mount Tai, a historically sacred mountain in Shandong. A video showed Hikvision cameras pointed at tourists climbing the thousands of stone steps leading to the famous peak.

When Peter George saw news of the racially motivated mass-shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo last weekend, he had a thought he's often had after such tragedies. "Could our system have stopped it?" he said. But I think we could democratize security so that someone planning on hurting people can't easily go into an unsuspecting place." George is chief executive of Evolv Technology, an AI-based system meant to flag weapons, "democratizing security" so that weapons can be kept out of public places without elaborate checkpoints. As U.S. gun violence like the kind seen in Buffalo increases -- firearms sales reached record heights in 2020 and 2021 while the Gun Violence Archive reports 198 mass shootings since January -- Evolv has become increasingly popular, used at schools, stadiums, stores and other gathering spots. To its supporters, the system is a more effective and less obtrusive alternative to the age-old metal detector, making events both safer and more pleasant to attend. To its critics, however, Evolv's effectiveness has hardly been proved. And it opens up a Pandora's box of ethical issues in which convenience is paid for with RoboCop surveillance. "The idea of a kinder, gentler metal detector is a nice solution in theory to these terrible shootings," said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union's project on speech, privacy, and technology. "But do we really want to create more ways for security to invade our privacy?

A Chinese company is selling its surveillance technology to Iran's Revolutionary Guard, police, and military, according to a new report by IPVM, a surveillance research group. The firm, called Tiandy, is one of the world's largest video surveillance companies, reporting almost $700 million in sales in 2020. The company sells cameras and accompanying AI-enabled software, including facial recognition technology, software that it claims can detect someone's race, and "smart" interrogation tables for use alongside "tiger chairs," which have been widely documented as a tool for torture. The report is a rare look into some specifics of China's strategic relationship with Iran and the ways in which the country disperses surveillance technology to other autocracies abroad. Tiandy's "ethnicity tracking" tool, which has been widely challenged by experts as both inaccurate and unethical, is believed to be one of several AI-based systems the Chinese government uses to repress the Uyghur minority group in the country's Xinjiang province, along with Huawei's face recognition software, emotion-detection AI technologies, and a host of others.

Beijing – Muslims in China's Xinjiang were "arbitrarily" selected for arrest by a computer program that flagged suspicious behavior, activists said Wednesday, in a report detailing big data's role in repression in the restive region. The U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said leaked police data that listed over 2,000 detainees from Aksu prefecture was further evidence of "how China's brutal repression of Xinjiang's Turkic Muslims is being turbocharged by technology." Beijing has come under intense international criticism over its policies in the resource-rich territory, where rights groups say as many as 1 million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities have been held in internment camps. China defends the camps as vocational training centers aimed at stamping out terrorism and improving employment opportunities. Surveillance spending in Xinjiang has ballooned in recent years, with facial recognition, iris scanners, DNA collection and artificial intelligence deployed across the province in the name of preventing terrorism.

A surveillance startup in Silicon Valley is being accused of sexism and discrimination after a sales director used the company's facial recognition system to harass female workers. Verkada, which was valued in January at $1.6 billion, equips its office with its own security cameras. Last year, the sales director accessed these cameras to take photos of female workers, then posted them in a Slack channel called #RawVerkadawgz alongside sexually explicit jokes. The incident was first reported by IPVM and independently verified by Vice. Employees told IPVM that a group of men in leadership positions on the sales team, many of whom grew up in Danville and played football together in high school, contributed to a culture of sexism.

Hikvision has marketed an AI camera that automatically identifies Uyghurs, on its China website, only covering it up days ago after IPVM questioned them on it. This AI technology allows the PRC to automatically track Uyghur people, one of the world's most persecuted minorities. Hikvision's product description states this camera supports Uyghur recognition (screenshot via Google Translate): Capable of analysis on target personnel's sex (male, female), ethnicity (such as Uyghurs, Han) and color of skin (such as white, yellow, or black), whether the target person wears glasses, masks, caps, or whether he has beard, with an accuracy rate of no less than 90%. By April 2019, Hikvision was well-aware of the human rights issues surrounding Xinjiang; that same month, they disclosed in their ESG report that they had "recently commissioned an internal review" on the matter. The PRC officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups, which the Chinese ambassador recently described as being'part of big family of Chinese nation'.