Top Chinese technology firms have registered patents for tools apparently designed to detect, track and monitor Uighurs, according to research by the Pennsylvania-based video surveillance watchdog group IPVM [16]. A 2018 patent [17] filed by Shenzhen-based tech giant Huawei [18] with the State Intellectual Property Office (since reorganized [24] as the China National Intellectual Property Administration, CNIPA [25]) lists attributes by which an individual may be targeted, including "race (Han, Uighur)." This comes a month after IPVM released [19] details of a document [20] issued by Huawei and its Beijing-based corporate partner Megvii [21], "Huawei Video Cloud Solution and Megvii Dynamic Face Recognition Interoperability Test Report," which boasted of a "Uighur alarm" among the "basic functions of Megvii's facial recognition system."
"We cannot ignore the fact that these technologies have been developed in order to be able to efficiently carry out...brutal oppression," Rushan Abbas, executive director of the DC-based Campaign for Uyghurs [22], told the Thomson Reuters Foundation [26]. The Chinese embassy in Washington DC said cameras operated in public places in China and Xinjiang do not "target any specific ethnicity." (More at BBC News [27], BBC News [28], WaPo [29])
