Surveillance State by Josh Chin

Author:Josh Chin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

* * *

Most early investors in China’s digital surveillance industry followed Intel’s example and put their money into companies that built physical systems. By 2017, the smart money had moved to a new breed of company that specialized not in the eyes of the surveillance state but in its brains. The most prominent among this new group was a start-up known as SenseTime, founded by a small group of Chinese computer scientists and engineers doing innovative work with neural networks at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Inspired by the processing activity of the human brain, a neural network is capable of learning patterns and regularities in data. Spam filters in email are an example: When someone marks a message as spam, the neural network studies its content and learns to classify similar emails as spam. The more feedback it gets about its choices—from a user telling it when it has misclassified a message—the better it gets at filtering out unwanted emails. This type of data processing, known as deep learning, is particularly useful in the fields of computer vision and image analysis. And SenseTime’s advancement of image recognition algorithms was particularly impressive, helping it push computer vision to levels of accuracy that hadn’t been seen before.

SenseTime’s success attracted a horde of suitors hoping to invest. One of the first American investment firms to fund the start-up was IDG Capital, which bought a stake with $10 million pooled from the University of Michigan, early Facebook investor Jim Breyer, the Rockefeller Foundation, and other limited partners. When we first visited the SenseTime offices in Beijing in 2017, it was in the middle of raising $410 million—a record funding round for an AI company at the time—from IDG and a handful of Chinese firms. The next year, it raised an additional $1.2 billion, including funds from Fidelity International in Boston and Silver Lake Partners, a powerhouse Silicon Valley private equity firm whose largest backers include the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and the Teacher Retirement System of Texas. A 2019 investigation by Buzzfeed News found that six American universities and at least nineteen public pension plans or retirement systems held indirect investments in SenseTime or its domestic rival Megvii Technology.

For those who got in with SenseTime early, the payoff was gargantuan: by the time of the Buzzfeed story, the company was valued at $4.5 billion. Later that year it climbed to $7.5 billion, greater than the gross domestic products of sixty countries.

Investors’ enthusiasm for SenseTime was easy to grasp. Its technology felt both revolutionary and practical. Banks had already started using it to verify their customers’ identities. It helped users of live-streaming video platforms “enhance” their virtual appearance by adding cartoon animal ears or whitening the tone of their skin. More ominously, it offered some of the most advanced facial recognition systems for the country’s well-funded police.

Before the topic became sensitive, Chinese surveillance start-ups were happy to talk about their collaboration with public security forces. In 2017, SenseTime’s CEO, Xu Li, told us

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.