 Welcome back to Building Tomorrow, a show dedicated to the ways that tech and innovation are making the world a freer, safer, and more prosperous place. As usual, I'm your host, Paul Matzko, with me today in the studio are Matthew Feeney and Will Duffield. Today, we're going to return to a subject that we dedicated an episode to several weeks ago. A place! Not even really a subject, a place! A couple weeks ago, we talked about the transformation of China and all the ways in which new tech is being rolled out and adopted en masse in China in ways that might not even happen in the US and for another five or ten years, China's leapfrogging us technologically. In that story, that episode was the optimistic case, the ways in which these new techs are going to improve life and economic growth in China, but there is a darker side to that tale. This new technology also can serve the Chinese government, the party, the Communist Party as it seeks to surveil and control its people. Two of these new technologies we're going to focus on today. One is a what's called the social credit system. The other is new applications of facial recognition technology. But let's get started with the social credit score system. Will, what's the, like what's the party line? I mean, I mean that metaphorically as well as literally. Well, I guess our media party line or our popular perception of social credit score systems in China is that they are holistic state systems designed to track the social impact of citizens behavior and either reward or punish them for it and that this is done with a high degree of certainty or efficacy across large segments of the population. Now, when you drill down into it, when you look at what this state social credit score system is or aspires to be by 2020, the planned delivery or rollout date and what you see on the ground with regard to these trial social credit systems that for the most part have been put into place privately by Chinese firms. There's a lot of room between the two interpretations or expectations as to what this is. And let's, we do need to get to the, I guess it's the sesame credit system is the biggest one. We do need to talk about that in a minute. Before we get there and I think we're going to complicate that story of, you know, one giant number that determines pretty much everything you can do as a Chinese citizen or consumer, we're going to mess with that narrative and show how it's not quite what it sounds like and then they're definitely not there yet. But before we do, there have been some early signs of a social credit system in place actually working. I think Matthew, you and I were talking about this earlier about, what was it, something like 15 million Chinese people have been placed on because of their low score on one of these systems. They've been banned from being allowed to buy plane tickets or to ride trains. How's that work? Right. I think it's somewhere between 12, 15 million. I'm not sure of the exact figure. But I think that speaks to what a lot of people in China like about the proposed system. China is a country that's undergone an economic transformation in the last couple of decades. Tons of people are appearing online, but there's not a good centralized credit system. And a lot of people are not paying back loans even after courts have required them to do so. And systems like this, systems by which you can use very popular private companies like Alibaba, for example, to help utilize a credit system is something that I can, I suppose, sympathize with why people might think that's a good idea, right? Well, here you're coming out of decades of communism. You don't have a history of, I guess, a Protestant work or debt repayment ethic. It's not a high trust society. So, yeah, trust is an essential part of any functioning economy. And this is an attempt to help do that. The problem is that these people who are put on the black list, which at the moment is very small because they're still in the trial period, a lot of what we've seen are trial programs that utilize private company data that already exists. So, it's disaggregated. Yeah, that's right. But the ultimate goal is a 2020 universal system. But if you are someone who is on this list, it can be really bad. It will make it difficult to buy train tickets, plane tickets. There's NPR had a podcast recently talking about how at least in one Chinese city, being on this list prompts your ringtone to actually be some sort of siren warning people next to you that you're bad at repaying debts. And that's people who are bad at paying debts. But more nefariously, I think, is what's happened to some people who stand up to the government. There's at least one journalist who's quite who I've seen reported on who wrote something the local government didn't like. They didn't think that his apology was sufficiently sincere. And he can't book train tickets. And he can't book travel and his life, he's been put in this weird situation where he's under effective house arrest thanks to this system. And that's the really worrying application of this system. When you're talking about a country in which internal free movement already isn't guaranteed, you need, there's an internal passport system. How much of a new imposition is this? If you say now the private social credit trial system that this fellow is a part of or subject to has prevented from booking plane tickets. But before it, the local government being frustrated with him could have prevented him from being allowed to move, period. Is this a new imposition or just sort of stacking one form of movement restriction on top of another? So to clarify, my understanding is this particular system that's being used to get millions of people from being able to purchase plane tickets and train tickets is based off of a government-run pilot system that is for people who have defaulted on debt. So they're debtors who have had court judgment against them. Now there is an angle here that's disconcerting, which is the way in which the party will use debt default court lawsuits to basically squeeze out entrepreneurs who have angered local party officials. And generally just restricting the movement of debtor seems problematic. But just to clarify, this is not like the, and we'll talk about the private credit score systems in a bit. This is a government-run system just focused on defaulters, debtors. Yeah, but I want to make sure that we mention that what we just discussed, namely the kind of public shaming aspect of this is not reserved to this sort of system. There are places in China where if you attempt to jaywalk that your image live will appear and there will be loud condemnation of your behavior over loudspeakers. And that's a very creepy application. They haven't heard bad drivers too. I mean, as a pedestrian, I might welcome that. It's not the jaywalking thing. Well, one of the articles mentioned the particular jingle for, it was for the debtors, but they do something similar for jaywalkers in some states. But the little jingle was, so you've defaulted on, I don't know, your car payment and you might one day be walking on the street and like on the billboard see projected your image and it will play on a loop, a jingle that goes, come, come, look at these debtors. It's a person who borrows money and doesn't pay it back. And I don't know what the tune is. I imagine it must be to like Maroon 5 or some hated band. But do we have any evidence that this is effective? Like do we see higher debt repayment rates for it in places where they've rolled it out? Is there data? On the debt side, I don't know. On the jaywalking side, there's been a number of articles where they noted at least the city officials are claiming that at these targeted intersections where jaywalking was a problem, the rate has fallen. They did have to train people to respond in the way they wanted it. First people thought like, oh, I'm famous. I'm on the screen and they had to be told, no, no, no, you're being shamed. Yeah, that's exactly how it would work here. We couldn't do that. That'd be instant like E-celebrities. They'd put their twitch handle up or something with it. Yeah. But you have this, I mean, it's not at the point where you have a single score across multiple domains across the entire country. It's all kind of pilot programs for targeting jaywalking in a particular city or debtors across the whole country. But you can see the pieces kind of down the line. To boil a frog. You could bring all these pieces together into one aggregated system. But it's arguable here that like, and perhaps we should explain that when we talk about social credit systems, and we're going to talk here about what's called sesame credit, which is tied to Alibaba, which is the Chinese version of Amazon, basically, but even it does actually more than the Amazon in a lot of ways. Yeah, I think it certainly, from a bird's eye view, calling it the Chinese Amazon, I guess, does the job for the purpose of this podcast. But I think it's important for the audience to know that it does more than what we associate Amazon with. And I also want to make sure that we point out that on this side of the Pacific Ocean, right, we do have something like social credits for certain things and services that we use all the time. So you're rating on Uber is a version of this. And when you rate your Uber driver, we rate things all the time, you know, Yelp reviews. And with credit scores. And with credit scores, right? It's not a social aspect, but it certainly impacts our lives. Sure, but that's a slightly, I mean, that's certainly part of it, right? We're used to things called credit scores, but credit, credit scores will not affect whether you are allowed to buy a plane ticket to fly somewhere. If you have the money, you can buy the ticket. It's like merging, it's like what we all used to a FICO, which if you look up the acronym, I forget, it's just the random group of people of, you know, there was a three guys who put together the system back in the fifties, and we call it FICO now, combine the FICO, which is all about lending. When you've borrowed money, have you repaid it? With like customer appreciation programs that reward you for buying from companies with social media tracking, like are you a shit poster on social media? Do you, it's like combines these three kinds of data into one. Yeah, but that should be rewarded. Well, it depends who's setting the policy, right? So a private company, like if Amazon started doing this, there'd be very few at least libertarian objections where if Amazon wanted to reward people and give them discounts or favors if they bought American products or if they bought patriotic products, you know, a lot of red, white and blue. That's why CVS gives you a four foot longer seat. Right. So there's no libertarian objection to that per se. The problem is that the Chinese government's plan for this universal system for 2020 is a lot more intrusive and worrying than an Alibaba credit score, which some people might find creepy. Do you want a big company like that deciding to reward you if you buy good patriotic stuff or foreign goods, or if you're buying bad video games or what? But at least privately, that's about as soft a touch as you can get when it comes to. Sure. And what the Chinese government has in mind is a little more worrying than that, yeah. Which it raises the specter of, okay, so you are a dissident, you're not happy with the treatment of oppressed people groups. And so you're complaining about the central government, the central government responds by putting, you know, lowering your social credit score or requiring Alibaba to do so. In which case now, yeah, you can't buy certain products, you're paying more money. I mean, your cost of living goes up, your ability to move throughout the country goes down. You might not be able to put your kids in private schools. Like the debtor system means you can't, you have to keep your kids in public school systems. So like the ramifications for your daily experience, your daily life get really bad really quickly. It relies upon a private data gathering capability such that I think it really throws into question the extent to which anyone can use data on a large scale, liberally as it were, or without illiberal consequence under a single party state or regime. You know, the act of even private collection, knowing that we're the state to want it, they would be able to have whatever access they wished, whether that is morally defensible or at least pragmatically something that ought or ought not be done. I should mention our producer Tess just texted me and said, has anyone seen the Black Mirror episode? Yes, yes, of course, yeah. So I think for our listeners who watched it, that's where there's like a wedding and her score goes down. The premise is I hate that I know her like this, I forget her name, but Ron Howard's daughter, she's a very good actress in her own right, but I'm sorry that how I know. She plays the protagonist in this near future where daily interactions are, that's right, yes, Bryce Dallas Howard. She plays the main character and throughout the day interactions are rated. So if we had a good podcast, I'd rate it a certain number of stars, but it's not just that it's your barista. All kinds of day-to-day interactions are rated and you have a score. And the nightmare scenario that plays out in this Black Mirror episode is that she's been invited to a wedding, but thanks to a few things that happen to her unfortunate realities of the day mean that her score goes down and down, which makes it more difficult to rent a car, more difficult to get certain goods. And it's one of the great things about Black Mirror is it's sort of this show that is taking a look at the near and conceivable future. It's not far off what we're discussing today, but we should keep in mind, of course, that this is the Chinese government that wants to plan all this. And I have my own creepy concerns about a private system. Even in that Black Mirror episode, there was no coercion, as you would see within a state-backed social credit system. And I was frankly surprised that more characters didn't just walk away and live in a Kazinsky hut. Why not? This says probably more about you, Will. Most people like to be part of societies. Society where everyone's rating you all the time. That's terrible. I'm going to have to be pushed pretty far to live in a hut in the woods. It's fine for weekend, maybe, but this is the weird thing that... I'm looking at a bomb at it. Just get away from being rated all the time because it's intrusive and dehumanizing. But I think... So we have this that when people hear social credit systems, who've seen this episode, that's what they're thinking. And I think the thing to note is that this is... The government is not actually close to rolling out anything like this, that the current experience of most Chinese consumers with Alibaba's sesame credit has been actually overwhelmingly popular and positive. All the polls that you sent a poll to me, Will, it's very popular over there. Yeah, some stuff from Merix.org. And part of that something I think you teased, Matthew, which was that you have people... We shouldn't underestimate the benefits of banking the unbanked. If you want to join the global middle class, it is vital that you have access to credit. And there are people... Because it's a country that only in the last generation or two has emerged from essentially a pre-modern agricultural economy, they don't have an easy avenue to get onto a banked credit system. So having social credit, which you count transactions, not just loans, because there's a carp for the horse problem here, which is you don't have a lending history and you can't get it because you don't have a lending history. And so a social credit system gives you potential access for hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers to getting on the credit at ride to the global middle class. Right. And I think what people might be creeped out about is the fact that someone could spend $10 on... Or the equivalent of $10 on diapers or the same equivalent on hard liquor. And it would have a different impact on how you're viewed by the private company or potentially even the state. Whereas you might repay that money regardless of what you spend it on and be equally good to lenders. But it's the nudging that I think freaks people out and has this dystopian atmosphere around it. There's much informal cheating of this system or opportunities for arbitrage. I'm ringing up at the front counter. I give the cashier a dollar and he scans the diapers instead of the beer, even though I'm buying beer, so that it shows up as though I'm responsible and I get discounts and good rewards when, in fact, I'm getting my beer and being naughty. Yeah, I don't know. It wouldn't surprise me, but I haven't seen data... But I would expect just the... Keep an eye out for it. ...the greater the rewards, the more incentive you have for those sorts of schemes... ...increase the black market. ...increase the same way as if your smart fridge starts selling data to your insurer. And as to what you put in... So you would have a fridge that's connected to the network that you buy all the good foods that reward you in your social credit score. That all go in your fridges monitoring what you bought and refilling it... Oh, we talked about automatically... ...doing that here with health insurance. Right, exactly. So you have your official fridge that tracks and then you have a black market fridge that doesn't track where you put your liquor. And you get the idea there. There's people always going to find a way of gaming a system like that. Well, why don't we move on to the second part of our new surveillance tech in China. And that's facial recognition. And we mentioned this with the jaywalking ordinances. And what that uses is cameras. There are over 200 million. There'll be 300 million cameras in the next, I think, by 2020 surveillance cameras in China. So like every major intersection, street corners, I mean, in urban centers, it's hard to find the place in public that isn't covered by a surveillance camera at this point. And unlike surveillance cameras in other parts of the world where you see high density, they're networked, which is a big change. You hear that everywhere in central London is covered by CCTV as well, but it's a bunch of private CCTV cameras that no one's really querying or saving. So the idea is as you jaywalk across the street, the camera is catching our image, it scans your face against the database and can generate who you are just by, just from your face. At least that's the promise of this. And then you do all that shaming type stuff we're talking about. Actually, they're also rolling out car tracking technology using cameras, not unlike the drone episode that we talked about in the previous week where in Baltimore, they've been trying out drone tracking from the skies that the police can follow any car in the city as it drives around the bus track criminals, bank robbers, et cetera. Not drones yet. One day, maybe. Those are like salad tracking. Or blimps, right? In Baltimore, they were using Cessna airplane. I'm not aware of a... They had a blimp and they lost it and it crashed into the Chesapeake. Oh, that might, yes. But we would talk the persistence of alien systems. Yeah, just anything that you can take photos and then run back through the photos. But they're developing a similar system using closed captioned TV cameras, which would follow a person, a person level or cars. So now the idea here, there have been a number of stories about individual criminals caught using this closed captioned facial recognition system. Like there was a potato thief who stole $17,000 worth of potatoes, as one does. I imagine Will, on the weekends, you're not in your Kaczynski cabin. You're out there stealing potatoes. But he got caught... Irish hero. He got caught going through a security checkpoint at a pop concert. And the facial recognition software said this is a wanted man who's under using fake documents. So these stories are being highlighted by the government. There is something Orwellian about the idea of even police using smart glasses with cameras in them with facial recognition technology, just scanning crowds, looking for criminals. But there's a bit of a mismatch between the official story of what this looks like and how it works and what is actually going on behind the scenes. So when you look at the jaywalking stories and you dig down a little bit, it turns out the system's not really automated. So they are taking videos of everyone as they jaywalk. But then someone has to actually go and feed... The system can't handle more than a few thousand faces being checked against the system. So they're actually doing it by hand on the back end. So the camera's capturing people's faces, but then they're by hand putting in batches of a few thousand people to scan against. So it's not like they're catching them at the moment, instantly identifying them, putting them up and shaming them right then and there. It can often be weeks or months. And it's not very efficient if you're having to do it by hand that feeds the purpose. And I assume like most facial recognition systems we see in the world at the moment, you get a lot of false positives? So that's an interesting point because false positives and false negatives are an important part of the efficiency of any facial recognition system. And here you've got police wearing glasses highlighting certain people's faces. So unlike a false positive somewhere else, here it instigates or might instigate an immediate foot chase. Yeah, I want to make sure that we're clear that... So a lot of the jaywalking shaming from what I understand is not... Even if it doesn't identify you immediately, there will be some sort of detection that someone is jaywalking and it will have a live feed of wherever that intersection is. It might not identify you, but it's still enough that it would deter some people. And I don't think it's the case and maybe I'll have to be checked, but I don't think it's the case that in every region, like every camera with facial recognition capability in China is being out there with the same database. But it's not that hard to think, okay, well, in the center of this town, here are the 10,000 people most likely to be here at this desk. You don't need all 1.4 billion people in China, all of that data. And I think it is being used in some parts of China, much more ruthlessly than in others. There's a big difference between using it to deter jaywalking and using it to track people's religious practices and other things like that. Well, you can imagine, let's say in a particular region, the local party chapter wants, there's 100 people who they're particularly concerned about right now who have been participating in anti-government activity. And so they say, okay, we want to catch these people doing something wrong that we can shame them for. So we're going to have our database of a few hundred or a few thousand people. We're going to make that accessible to these jaywalking cams to other kind of monitoring devices so that they can be flagged instantly and we can then bring them in for, that's our legal fiction for imprisoning or harassing them. Well, I've said in print before that my objection to facial recognition is this pervasive real-time use of law-abiding citizens. So if you have a facial recognition system that is used as an investigation tool and it is only populated with data related to people with outstanding warrants for violent crimes, then my objections reduce in number. But it's not clear to me that, I mean, nothing like that is what we're seeing in China, frankly. And it's, I don't want to scare listeners that China is the future of American surveillance. We have very different political system and judicial system, but it's frightening nonetheless to see your fellow man treated in this creepy way. Well, there was this interesting aspect of this where it's kind of, it's not unlike the social credit system where the official party line is that there is this, you know, robust single-score system that's going to be developed within two years. Of course, the reality that that's hype. The reality is that there are bits and pieces of a system that are disconcerting in their own right, but we're not anywhere close to a full single-score social credit system. The same thing is kind of true of facial recognition, which there is the, both the central government and kind of local party chapters and municipal governments have an interest in making people think that they might be being watched and surveilled and recognized, you know, facial recognition at any given moment, even if they're not. Like it plays their benefit to hype up to exaggerate how far this technology has been developed and how much it's actually being implemented. Well, this isn't a new kind of observation. I think people who pay attention to surveillance have said for a long time that some of the scariest implications of widespread surveillance is the impact it has on low-abiding people. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, there are very interesting studies done on Google searches, Wikipedia searches, and Pew had an interesting survey on people's behavior. And it turns out that you don't have to be a Islamic fundamentalist to be a little creeped out by what Snowden revealed. And you might be a little less likely to Google certain things, medical conditions, fetishes, religions, anything related to actually quite popular hobbies that have to do with gun making or anything to do with firearms. You might, it's not a surprise that low-abiding people change their behavior in the wake of surveillance, either surveillance revelations or not even revelations, just new policies, like more cameras on the street. And that's the really worrying thing that you'll just- And it's not just people as well, but private firms that provide valuable services, who PayPal will process payments for is, to some extent, contingent upon not just state regulation, but signals sent by the state as to what is approved and what is not. You can look to something like Operation Choke Point there or more recent crackdowns on ASMR cameras post-FOSTA. So there's a sense in which, I mean, what we're describing here, and we talked about this in an earlier episode with Aaron, the idea of Bentham's 19th century philosopher, his idea of the Panopticon, right, where you have a prison in the middle, there's a watcher who can look into the cells of the prison. Now, it doesn't really matter if the watcher- In his Panopticon, the watcher can see into all the cells all at once, but even the possibility of surveillance. So he can't literally watch all the cells himself. And just like here, the Chinese government can't actually see and process and prosecute based on the information it's receiving from 300 million CCTVs all at once. But if you can't determine when you're being surveilled and when you aren't, you might as well be being surveilled all the time as far as you know. Is that camera in the corner of the street corner? Is it watching? Is it not? I don't know. I better. It's safer to assume it is. Right, it's safer to assume it is. There's actually, this is just a funny tidbit. It turns out the Chinese government calls its facial image database, calls it the SkyNet, which I thought, I don't know if someone, someone in China is a big Terminator fan or if they just didn't get the reference. So if you know anyone named Sarah Connor, maybe they shouldn't visit anytime soon. Maybe not go over. There is one little tech tidbit I wanted to throw in here and it isn't immediately applicable to like live camera, you know, facial recognition software, but you could see how it might be down the road. So at TechCrunch Disrupt, there was an anti-facial recognition startup. It's out of Israel called DID and like, you know, D-Hash ID and ID is you're, you know, de-identifying, dis-identifying yourself. And what they do is they, it's really about like social media images. So you share an image on Facebook and what you don't want is some company reading the image, recognizing it's you, and then based on that activity you're engaged in or based on information from that, you know, knowing more information about you than you want them to know. Like they now know you went to the beach with your family on this date or etc. So there's lots of potential ways in which people don't want those images online giving personal information about themselves out. Well, there's this very bit of, it's a bit of a catch-22 when you think about these anti-surveillance methods and techniques. So you can use something like what Paul's just described or you, there's a whole niche fashion industry of anti-surveillance clothing. Dazzle paint on and then you look fabulous. There's also glasses. There are garments that cloak you from thermal scanners. When you're talking about online, you can use tour, texting, you can use signal. The problem is, unfortunately, some people are going to think you look suspicious in virtue of doing this. Yeah, you're wearing dazzle paint. You look like, you know, 80s glam rock star. Sure. So that's the worry. So I'm not against people using methods like this, of course, but I think it's a regrettable fact that states will keep an eye on people who take evasive action when it comes to surveillance. But I think we should expect is, like we're talking about like in hindsight, we should expect this to escalate. There will be a facial recognition, image recognition, arms race, essentially. But when you think about though, that's, I think, easy for us to say. So in the United States for the moment, and I think for the foreseeable future, even if CCTV is outfitted with facial recognition technology, you're not going to get pulled over by the cops if they notice that you're wearing a big hat or if you're wearing... But the problem is that... We have anti-mask laws in many states. Right, but there's a difference between... Yeah, a big hat. Window tint, yeah, window tint. And the problem is that in parts of China where this has really been utilized a lot, that's just not an option. That it's not going to be good enough for when the Chinese police officer comes up to you to say, well, I object to this sort of thing, so I'm wearing a big hat and I don't need you. It's just telling someone who lives in the Uyghur community that that is an option is laughable, which is a shame. This is a good moment to turn to. So we've been talking about two new buckets of technology and how it can be used for surveillance and social control in China. Let's talk a little bit about the people who are going to be affected by this in some of the worst ways, for whom the ramifications... Who are being affected by it. Right. It's not will be. It's happening now as you listen to this podcast. So why don't we actually start with talking... You mentioned Uyghur activists, Uyghur dissidents. Fleshed out, who are the Uyghurs? Why is this surveillance technology, social control technology, particularly disconcerting to the Uyghur community? Yeah, the Uyghurs are a Muslim minority who live in Western China in an area that they refer to as East Turkestan, what the Chinese refer to as... I'm going to butcher the pronunciation, but Xinjiang province, which translates basically to New Frontier, it became part of what the People's Republic and the last century. And the Uyghurs are not ethnically Han Chinese, it's a distinct cultural group, or if it's distinct language, it's Turkic, right? They're Turkic, right? So they have a distinct cuisine, distinct language, distinct culture, and of course they're Muslim. And they have been the target of... I think it's said that they are the target of the most intensive and highly sophisticated surveillance regime in the world. The Chinese state, well, it's not, I guess, popularly recognized and they don't necessarily sell themselves this way. It's an ethno-state. It is a Han Chinese state. To be Chinese is to be Han Chinese. And the reason why, well, the Chinese will... The government will make the argument that this intensive surveillance is necessary because the last couple of years, Uyghur separatists have committed atrocities. So 2014, some Uyghur attacks killed a couple dozen people. 2009, there's a lot of unrest in the region. But a lot of that, I think, of course, is worrying, but does not justify the extent of the surveillance we see. And just to... I think it's important to outline exactly what we're talking about here. We're talking about iris scanners, Wi-Fi sniffers, mandatory ID, the scanning of phones at checkpoints you have... They're QR codes outside people's homes that the police can scan to then determine who's supposed to be in the home. It's like a list of residents in QR form. Yeah, we have also shopping bags being x-rayed. It's horrible. And at least one Uyghur who made it to the United States has described when he and his wife were detained, having DNA taken, having mandatory voice samples, and, of course, mandatory facial scans. The impact this has had on the community is intense. The UN estimates that probably around one million of these people are in what the Chinese government will call vocational training centers, right? But they're concentration camps. It's not... And I'm not using that term lightly. This is mandatory propaganda brainwashing centers, effectively. And the people who are deemed eligible for this kind of reeducation is, unfortunately, down in large part to religiosity, that the more devout a Muslim you are, the more that you profess your religion, the more likely you are to end up in one of these places. But it needn't be political Islam, Islamism in any sense. It can simply be trying to live a halal life, trying to follow the edicts of your religion as they apply to you and no one else and not trying to push them on anyone else, just trying to be a good person as you understand it. And yeah, that'll land you in one of these reeducation centers. And I think it's fair to say that this is the worst surveillance system we have on the planet. It's what the North Koreans would use if they could afford it and had the technology. But the Chinese certainly have the resources. The governor of the province used to run Tibet, which tells you all you need to know. These parts of China... Just cycle them around like the British empire used to. These parts of China are, I suppose, historically difficult to clamp down on. And that's in many different factors contribute to that. The ongoing worries that people around the world have with Islamic terror, of course, will provide constant excuses because the Uighurs are Muslim. And the Chinese certainly have not just a... There's this horrible cocktail of this, this anti-religion sentiment, but also this ability to conduct surveillance. And as I said earlier in the podcast, I don't want to make it sound as if what the Uighurs are being subjected to is what we should be ready for in the United States. We have a totally different political and judicial system. But it is an example of how this technology can be used when there aren't checks in place. And it's very, very worrying. And you earlier mentioned as well the role that Chinese foreign investment plays in the somewhat muted response we've gotten with regard to this from the Muslim world, particular wealthier areas within. Sure. So we have a colleague, Mustafa Akyol, who works here at Cato, who's Turkish. And I was speaking to him about this a while ago, and he said it was really notable that the Turkish president and the Saudis and the Egyptians are pretty quiet about this crisis in large part because they don't want to piss off the Chinese, which is... It's easily the worst Muslim persecution that's happening at the moment, but from outside. And usually, a lot of Muslim communities will be outspoken when they see a persecution, whether it's in Chechnya or the former Yugoslavia. And Erdogan has criticized the treatment of Muslims in Europe. Yes, but the Chinese seem to be immune from that degree of criticism, which is a shame, because they deserve to be... The Chinese government deserves to be on the receiving end of severe criticism. So besides the Uyghurs, there are other communities that are not ethnic or religious communities that are also being targeted by the Chinese government. We have ordinary consumers. We have journalists. Will, this is something you've done a little bit of research on. Well, we've seen a broader media crackdown this summer and fall, particularly targeting foreign media or publishing capacity not controlled by the state. Twitch has been banned. And beyond the suppression of Uyghurs, we've seen a broader crackdown on religion and religious media and expression in China this summer and fall. While you certainly see the harshest conduct reserved for this Uyghur minority, we've seen a crackdown on unlicensed that is ungoverned by the Chinese state churches, bulldozing churches, forcing churches to put pictures of Xi up on the walls, and now a bill prohibiting the live streaming of sermons or religious gatherings. You often are seeing prohibitions on church or religious attendance by those under 18, which really cuts religion off at the knees as it were. If you can't inculcate or introduce your children to your religion, it's pretty hard for it to last beyond your lifetime. So we can understand both the Uyghur crackdown, but also a broader media anti-religious crackdown as part of a whole that seeks to cut out potential alternative sources of authority, particularly political authority outside of the Communist Party and the Chinese state. Yeah, there's this vast network of Chinese house churches and who will spread, say sermons, like a recording of a sermon to, you know, there'll be a really good preacher. They can't meet in like an American style mega church with seating for 20,000 people. They're in cells, essentially like sell a cell structure in house churches and they'll spread popular sermons among the different houses. And that kind of thing is now being criminalized. It's disconcerting. I mean, you consider that there are now, there are far more Christians in China than there are in the United States, actually larger the entire population of the United States. So it's a very large community of people who you're starting to see this kind of government crackdown on as well. Everyone's eyeing that, you know, you have a connected, digitally connected consumer base of somewhere between, you know, three and a quarter to a billion people who have smartphones, use them, you know, use services like Alibaba, et cetera, for almost all of their purchases and much of their daily life experience. People are, you know, they're ready to try to cash in and get capture part of that market. They put pressure on their governments not to speak out against these kind of abuses because, well, at the end of the day are, you know, a few million Uighurs in Western China worth the billions of dollars of lot of potential, you know, foregone profit from a Chinese marketplace. And so there's a, there's a calculation going on there for a lot of Western, Western companies, not unlike Google, who has, you know, the project Dragonfly was leaked in the last couple of months where they're planning on going back. I don't see how they can go through with this. Especially at this point where they've dropped out of this DOD contract. We should explain what it is. Yeah, let's explain the project Dragonfly. So back in 10 years ago, from 2006 to 2010, Google cooperated with the Chinese government to censor their search, that database. So if you put it in Tiananmen Square, nothing would come up or it would, you know, it would redirect you away from stuff the Chinese government decided was a risk to the regime. So Google did once enter in, you know, they went against their first principles, which, you know, do no evil. This is the corporate slogan. They kind of violated that, cooperate with an authoritarian government. But by 2010, the pressure to stop doing so got so strong that they pulled out. So for the last eight years, they haven't, there is no Google search function in China. But a new leadership at Google has decided, look, again, this is a large market, a very potentially profitable market we want a piece of. And so the documents were leaked that they've been secretly considering rolling out this project Dragonfly, a deeply censored version of Google search in which essentially the party could say, we don't want these search terms to pop up. Or if they do pop up and ties and searches to individual phone numbers and addresses, we can track search. Yeah, yeah, can be policed. So, you know, again, we have a system in which government voices, major companies around the globe aren't willing to speak out against human rights abuses against communities like the Uighurs just because it would cost too much. And we don't value their freedoms and their liberties as much as we value making money with the Chinese consumer marketplace. So that's the situation that we're in. I think that's where we'll leave off this week. And until next week, be well. Building Tomorrow is produced by Test Terrible. If you enjoy our show, please rate, review and subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. To learn about Building Tomorrow or to discover other great podcasts, visit us on the web at libertarianism.org.