Special Chinese opinion: China wants to predict the actions of terrorists

The Chinese government commissioned the largest military contractor, the China Electronics Technology Group , to develop a crime prediction system. On the basis of computer analysis of the life of citizens, - work, hobbies, activity in social networks, consumer habits - the system should be able to predict the planned terrorist attacks.

“It is very important to analyze the attacks after they are committed,” said Wu Manqing, chief engineer of CETG. “But it is even more important to predict such actions.” Mankin says that in their company they call this program not “big data processing”, but “environment with combined information”.
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It is believed that freedom of speech and the private life of citizens in China are not of such high value as in the so-called. "Developed" countries - despite the hot scandals associated with mass surveillance, the PRISM system and the "Patriot Act" in the United States. In this regard, the Chinese authorities have the opportunity to collect an extensive collection of data about each of the citizens, store them and use them in order to ensure public order.

Practically for each inhabitant of the country, a special file was created , which lists his school achievements, medical history, working successes, reviews about his personality and other confidential information. This information is used, for example, to make promotions. In addition, last year it was announced the development of a special system that, on the basis of these data, will assign citizens " social points " characterizing their reliability as members of society. All this is due to good intentions to improve the social environment and the desire for progress.

According to the assistant professor Lokman Tsui of the journalistic school of the Chinese University in Hong Kong, this program is unique because it does not meet any resistance from laws on private life or from public organizations. In addition, in China, it is customary to monitor your neighbors, and cases of non-standard behavior quickly become the property of the competent authorities. All these properties can contribute to the creation of a system to which the Communist Party is striving.

On the other hand, an increase in the amount of data does not lead to an automatic improvement in the efficiency of the system, no matter how much Marxism instructs us about "the transition from quantity to quality." Jim Harper of the Cato Institute (Washington, USA) says that in this case more data simply means “more noise”. “There are not enough examples of terrorist activity to model them in terms of data, and this remains true no matter how much data you collect,” he argues. “Yeast is necessary for making bread, and their absence cannot be compensated for by increasing the amount of flour.”

Another representative of CETG, who did not wish to be named, said that the pilot project of this system will be held in special territories of China - where an ethnic minority is in tough opposition to the ruling party. This is 22 million people in the province of Xinjiang , which became part of China in 1949, and 3 million Tibetans.

Will the Chinese succeed in unleavened bread - time will tell. In the end, China managed to build the Great Firewall, which seriously limits communication with the rest of the world via the Internet. And to track the facts of corruption of officials, there is a video surveillance system called, “neither more nor less” - “ Skynet ”.

Even in China, when there are signs of a suspicious activity of a citizen, the authorities have the right to freeze his bank accounts and demand from the employer access to the person’s communications from his workplace. So if such a system is possible, then first of all it will most likely appear there.