It took just seven minutes for the police to catch him.
Last year, BBC correspondent John Sudworth visited Guiyang, the capital city of the Guizhou province in southwest China. The city extends 3,100 square miles, with around 4.7 million people. Sudworth was on a special assignment to find out whether the Chinese law enforcement really could find anyone, anytime. The local police have a digital photo archive of every citizen in the city. And police have access to CCTV cameras everywhere. Many of the systems supporting these cameras use artificial intelligence (A.I.) for facial recognition. China is building what it calls “the world’s biggest camera surveillance network.” China leads the way with this technology. The network already has around 200 million CCTV cameras in use, and it aims to add another 400 million within three years. The systems track everyone. They can match your face through relatives, friends, the places you visit, the car you drive, and where you work. And when they aren’t recognizing individual faces, they can still parse people out by age, ethnicity, or gender. And these cameras are placed throughout the city, keeping a watchful eye on everyone’s every move. If you’re like us, that sounds like a huge
invasion of privacy. But the city’s police claim they want to keep their citizens safe by preventing criminal behavior. For citizens with no criminal record, police say their cameras will slide right by. But if your face pops up on a camera and you’re registered as a person of interest – look out. When the system recognizes a face, it alerts the nearest authorities. And it’s proving to be effective. In April 2018, China’s CCTV surveillance system caught a suspect known as “Mr. Ao” attending a concert. He had driven 50 miles with his wife to see Chinese pop star Jacky Cheung in Nanchang. He was at a concert with 60,000 other fans. Cameras located at the concert entrance identified the 31-year-old, who was wanted for alleged economic crimes. As police grabbed him in the middle of the crowd, Mr. Ao reportedly said that if he’d known how extensive the surveillance system was, he would never have gone. It’s not the first time that Chinese police have used facial recognition to capture a suspect. But in Guiyang, Sudworth wanted to see it in action for himself. Invited inside the high-tech police control
By Christian Olsen
American Consequences
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