Global Challenge Uyghur Women’s Rights Defenders & Intrusive Surveillance Technologies
March 22, 2023 | Justice For All | By Aidan Gouley
The discussion, moderated by Justice for All’s Rizwangul NurMuhammad, included Louisa Greve, Director of Global Advocacy of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, Zumret Dawut, a Uyghur human rights advocate and former detainee, Tursunay Ziyawodun, a Uyghur human rights advocate and former detainee, and Mihrigul Tursun, also a former detainee, Uyghur human rights advocate, and author. Each panelist lent powerful personal and professional insight to the discussion of the intersection of women’s rights and the draconian surveillance policies of the People’s Republic of China.
Ms. Greve began the panel discussion by providing an overview of the current situation in East Turkistan, describing in depth the various policy measures utilized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to perpetrate genocide against the Uyghur population. Ms. Greve discussed the complexity of surveillance technology in its all-encompassing nature and its connections to the global market. Indeed, global telecommunications companies like Huawei are intimately involved in the data collection, transmission, and analysis that further enables surveillance work by Beijing.
Ms. Greve expounded further upon emerging innovative technologies’ role in improving existing surveillance. The integration of AI into surveillance systems and the collection of “big data” enable machine learning that further increases the capacity and efficiency of state surveillance. Ms. Greve indicated that seemingly mundane, unrelated data collection may play a surprisingly outsized role in developing the algorithms that can surveil and track individuals in real time, even from a police cell phone. In short, modern surveillance is already scarily effective in East Turkistan but can progress further.
Read the full article: https://www.justiceforall.org/save-uighur/global-challenge-uyghur-womens-rights-defenders-intrusive-surveillance-technologies/