Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Saturday July 13 2019, @10:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-gets-it-next? dept.

How U.S. Tech Giants are Helping to Build China's Surveillance State:

AN AMERICAN ORGANIZATION founded by tech giants Google and IBM is working with a company that is helping China's authoritarian government conduct mass surveillance against its citizens, The Intercept can reveal.

The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to "drive innovation" — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.

Shenzhen-based Semptian is using the devices to enhance the capabilities of internet surveillance and censorship technology it provides to human rights-abusing security agencies in China, according to sources and documents. A company employee said that its technology is being used to covertly monitor the internet activity of 200 million people.

[...] After receiving tips from confidential sources about Semptian's role in mass surveillance, a reporter contacted the company using an assumed name and posing as a potential customer. In response, a Semptian employee sent documents showing that the company — under the guise of iNext — has developed a mass surveillance system named Aegis, which it says can "store and analyze unlimited data."

Aegis can provide "a full view to the virtual world," the company claims in the documents, allowing government spies to see "the connections of everyone," including "location information for everyone in the country."

The system can also "block certain information [on the] internet from being visited," censoring content that the government does not want citizens to see, the documents show.

[The Semptian video demonstration showing how the Aegis system tracks people's movements is embedded in the article]

[Related Cloud Platform by IBM - China]: SuperVessel


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Sunday July 14 2019, @11:50AM

    by jmichaelhudsondotnet (8122) on Sunday July 14 2019, @11:50AM (#866865) Journal

    Growth for the sake of growth is the morality of the cancer cell and xenomorph hive.

    Money with no questions asked is the idelogy of the Anton Chigur in No Country for Old Men.

    If anything has a price, that is the morality of prostitutes and clowns.

    You are responsible for the predictible effects of your own actions.

    You are guity for the foreseeable crimes against humanity committed with them.

    You only get one reputation, and those of us who like freedom do not soon foreget who helps build concentration camps and the machines of torture.

    Then there is the argument that is not like all of the others, what we build today to fight the enemy will be used against us tomorrow.

    This last one is hitting especially hard of late...there is some hard fast law of technology that gives everything a certain boomerang-y-ness spewing out semi-random poetic justice.

    And remember, we also have to teach these AI's to be good, and we don't want them to think we are total clowns.

    "It's ok when we do it" is only going to go over for so long, I bet.