The Chinese government has spent years placing its hands around the collective neck of its Uighur minority. For some reason, the massive government fears a small minority of Muslims and has subjected it to constant surveillance and outright oppression.
The Chinese government has been assisted in these efforts by Huawei, a tech company that realizes it’s better to live to manufacture another day than fight back against the surveillance state desires of this extremely powerful entity.
Huawei’s facial recognition advances have been used to target Uighurs for additional oppression. Its tech generates “Uighur alarms” that immediately flag suspected minorities. Huawei swore back in 2020 that this repurposing had indeed been proposed, but had not been implemented. Three years have passed and there’s no reason to believe Huawei hasn’t given the Chinese government at least a trial version of its anti-Uighur tech.
Huawei isn’t the only player in the anti-Uighur space but it is perhaps the most internationally recognizable brand that appears to be cooperating with ongoing oppression efforts in China. And, if it works there, there’s no reason it won’t work elsewhere.
Afghanistan’s Taliban government is interested in surveillance tech that can be deployed to increase oppression of religious minorities. That’s what this report from The China Project says is already in progress: the deployment of Uighur-focused surveillance by the Islamist extremist government in Afghanistan against the Muslims it considers to be enemies.
[A]n August 2023 agreement between the Taliban and Huawei, China’s giant telecommunications and surveillance technology company, could soon see the rollout of cameras equipped with facial-recognition capabilities in every province of Afghanistan, putting Uyghurs on high alert.
In China, software and hardware from Huawei and companies such as Hikvision have enabled the CCP to usher in a total surveillance state in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which shares a 57-mile border with Afghanistan high in the Pamir Mountains.
This potential development follows a goodwill tour of sorts by the Chinese government, which sent one of its ambassadors to Kabul, Afghanistan in September of this year. This adds China to the small list of Taliban supporters, which also includes Iran, Russia, and Pakistan.
The China Project puts this spin on the news, suggesting the Taliban is more concerned with safety and security than the ongoing oppression of a Muslim minority.
Enter Huawei’s cameras, which the Taliban will use to hunt down insurgents and terrorists. A Taliban enemy, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-K, or more commonly ISIS-K), has 6,000 militia hiding in the east and parts of the north of Afghanistan. Its targeted bombing sprees include deadly attacks on the Russian Embassy in Kabul and a hotel used by Chinese businesspeople. Moreover, ISIS-K has threatened to bomb the embassies of China, India, and Iran.
None of this is speculative, however. The Taliban has a contract with Huawei, which suggests it desires access to Uighur-targeting tech. Then there’s this statement from the Taliban government, which suggests this tech may already be operative.
The Ministry of Interior said that the security cameras installed in Kabul and some highways across the country have facial-recognition capabilities.
The spokesman for the MoI, Abdul Matin Qani, said that many criminals have been detained through the use of these cameras.
“Some of the security cameras have high capabilities of facial recognition. We have good achievement in this regard in capturing criminals quickly and providing security in the city,” he said.
There’s a caveat, but that caveat depends on how much you trust the Taliban government to be honest. Qani claims this surveillance is a purely local effort, relying solely on Afghanistan tech companies.
He also stressed that there have been no contracts with any country regarding the cameras and that efforts are underway to make contracts for camera operations with domestic companies.
But that statement is potentially misleading. All it says is that the government is looking to local companies to provide cameras. It says nothing at all about adding foreign AI to its network of 65,000 cameras to keep an eye on its Uighur population.
Every oppressive government may be oppressive in its own way, but the Taliban’s plans for the Uighur population closely align with China’s. Why not avail yourself of the experience and expertise of a government and its favored contractors that have been in the Uighur oppression business for years? Sure, the Taliban government may want to spend locally, but AI specifically developed to target a very particular population would be a very handy addition to the Taliban’s toolkit.
