Tag: Surveillance

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Defence India News

Hermes 900 Drones to Boost Indian Army’s Surveillance Capabilities

The Indian Army recently inducted the Heron Mark 2 drones which can be equipped with strike capabilities in the northern sector…reports Asian Lite News

The induction of the Heron Mark-2 drones along with the planned induction of the Hermes-900 drones is set to boost the surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities of the Indian Army.

“Induction of Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) Heron MK II and planned induction of Hermes 900 Starliners will not only boost the reconnaissance and surveillance capability of the Indian Army but also their teaming with combat helicopters, which will prove to be a game changer in the third dimension,” Army sources said.

The transfer of these remotely piloted aircraft has further enhanced the Army’s surveillance as well as strike capability and transformed Army Aviation into a potent force multiplier capable of operating in the Combined Combat Teams concept and performing varied tasks across the varied terrain of our country, they said.

The Indian Army recently inducted the Heron Mark 2 drones which can be equipped with strike capabilities in the northern sector, and have the older version of these unmanned aircraft at various locations across the country.

The sources further informed that the role of women officers has been steadily increasing in Army Aviation.

“Women officers were first inducted into the Air Traffic Control stream of Army Aviation in May 2009, followed by the posting of Women Officers of the EME as Engineering Officers in Army Aviation Units,” they said.

The onerous task of ensuring the maintenance, servicing and logistics aspects of Army Aviation are being performed at par with their gentlemen comrades in this stream as well.

Having smoothly inducted the women officers into the ATC and the Engineering Officer streams, it was a natural progression to induct Women Officers as Army Aviators.

Presently, two women officers are already serving as pilots in Army Aviation and three are undergoing training. (ANI)

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-Top News Asia News China

Thousands under secret surveillance in China


Caster estimated that in 2020, between 10,000 and 15,000 people went through the system, up from just 500 in 2013…reports Asian Lite News.

 Campaigners say China has ‘systematised arbitrary and secret detention’ by holding thousands of people under ‘Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location’ (RSDL), Al Jazeera reported.

Spain-based rights group Safeguard Defenders say that as many as 27,208 to 56,963 people have gone through China’s RSDL system since 2013, citing data from the Supreme People’s Court and the testimony of survivors and lawyers.

“These high profile cases obviously attract a lot of attention, but they shouldn’t detract from the fact that there’s no transparency. Collecting data that is available and analysing the trends, the estimate is that every year 4,000 to 5,000 people are disappeared into the RSDL system alone,” said Michael Caster, a co-founder of Safeguard Defenders, Al Jazeera reported.

Caster estimated that in 2020, between 10,000 and 15,000 people went through the system, up from just 500 in 2013.

The number includes well-known names like artist Ai Wei Wei and human rights lawyers Wang Yu and Wang Quanzhang, who were caught up in China’s 2015 crackdown on human rights defenders.

Other foreigners have also gone through RSDL, like Peter Dahlin, a Swedish activist and co-founder of Safeguard Defenders, and Canadian missionaries Kevin and Julia Garrett, who were accused of espionage in 2014, the report said.

William Nee, a research and advocacy coordinator at China Human Rights Defenders, said that since RSDL was first employed almost a decade ago, use of the extrajudicial detention system has changed from an exception in its early days to a more widely used tool.

“Before, when Ai Wei Wei was taken away, they had to make an excuse that it was really about his business, or a tax issue or something like that. So there’s this trend, a decade or two ago, where they would use a pretence to detain someone when the real reason was their public participation or their political views,” said Nee, as per the report.

Communist Party members, state employees and anyone involved in ‘public affairs’ are held in a similar parallel system known as ‘liuzhi’.

Since its introduction in 2018, an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people have been held in liuzhi each year, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, the report said.

Conditions under both RSDL and liuzhi have been described as tantamount to torture, and inmates are held without a right to legal counsel.

Sleep deprivation, isolation, solitary confinement, beatings, and forced stress positions have been reported by survivors of both systems, according to multiple rights groups.

In some cases, the inmates may be placed in an infamous “tiger chair” which restricts limb movement for days at a time, the report said.

Together, RSDL, liuzhi and similar extrajudicial procedures have “systematised arbitrary and secret detention”, said Caster, as per the report.

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-Top News China

China begins crackdown on spy cameras

SECURITY CAMERA

Regulators are now demanding that online platforms and camera makers do their part in addressing these blatant privacy violations…reports Asian Lite News

In a bid to tighten enforcement of digital protection and privacy laws, Chinese authorities have launched a fresh crackdown on spy cameras, under which social and e-commerce platforms in China will face “severe” punishment if they fail to purge spy camera tutorials, hidden-camera videos and cheap, easily-compromised cameras from their platforms.

In a joint announcement on Friday, the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Public Security Bureau and the State Administration for Market Regulation launched a three-month campaign to crack down on the huge underground market for spy cameras and hidden-camera videos, reported South China Morning Post (SCMP).

In recent times, spy cameras have become widely available in China and have been found in hotel rooms, public bathrooms and even private homes. On social networks, tutorials can be purchased on how to gain access to home security camera feeds.

Regulators are now demanding that online platforms and camera makers do their part in addressing these blatant privacy violations, while social networks have been directed to clean up hacking tutorials, exploitation tools and secretly recorded videos.

Internet firms who fail to carry out these rectifications will be “severely punished” according to laws and regulations, the regulators said in the notice.

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Despite these directives, tiny cameras were still found on China’s biggest e-commerce platforms including Taobao Marketplace, JD.com and Pinduoduo, mostly billed as security surveillance tools, reported SCMP.

The clean-up campaign comes hot on the heels of the release of China’s Data Security Law – slated to go into effect from September 1. It is an important new national legislation that offers a legal framework for the governance of data activities in China’s digital economy.

Under the new law, organisations and individuals engaging in data processing activities, who fail to fulfill their data security protection obligations face a fine of up to 500,000 yuan, with fines of up to 2 million yuan for bigger data leaks.

“The law calls on top government agencies to formulate national data security strategies, policies and coordinate a comprehensive data governance system across regions and industry departments,” Alex Roberts, counsel for technology, media and telecommunications at global law firm Linklaters, said last week.

As China’s intense crackdown on its tech companies continues, Beijing is calling on tech giants to share their information with the authorities and asserting its authority over data held by US companies in China as well.

Moreover, Beijing is also intensifying the pressure on foreign firms operating in China to keep records gathered from local customers inside the country, so the government has more authority over the records. (ANI)

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-Top News China Politics

China transformed into a full-fledged Surveillance State during Covid

Chinese President Xi Jinping visits Anhui Innovation Center and learns about the technological innovation in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province. (XinhuaYan Yan)

Information flowing through China’s digital networks is closely monitored and controlled on the insistence of the CCP, making its digital security more precarious and vulnerable, reports Pushkar Sinha

Under the garb of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has leveraged its social credit system to coerce and manipulate the behaviour of its own people.

“Every Breath You Take: China’s New Tyranny” -a new book authored by Ian Willams spotlights that the social credit system in the party-state came of age during the Covid-19 pandemic, as the disease became an excuse to roll out new pilot schemes, with major implications on individual freedoms.

While some provinces rate social standings through a point scoring system, others use technology and Big Data to backlist individuals and businesses. For instance, in Rongcheng, a city close to the Yellow Sea, 10 points are deducted for not wearing a mask in public while the cost of failing to self-isolate costs 50 points, as reported by Foreign Policy magazine. Overcharging for medical supplies, selling fake medical goods, not wearing masks, violating quarantine and consuming wild animal products were some of the acts on which the local authorities rapidly imposed social credit retaliation, in the months following the eruption of the pandemic on Chinese soil.

Prohibition from high-speed rail travel, luxury hotel bookings and buying flights were part of a variety of disincentives that were imposed to punish those who were put on the blacklist. Businesses can be blocked from participating in government programmes and subsidies, while citizens can be barred from government employment if their scores fall below the minimum acceptable level.

Adam Knight, the author of a new paper titled Going Viral: The Social Credit System and COVID-19, points out that Ministry of Transport put drivers who used express lanes reserved for key workers have been restricted from carrying out further transportation services. Misdemeanours related to hiding virus symptoms, concealing details of foreign travel, avoiding medical treatment or having contact with suspected patients have been added to people’s personal social credit file. The BBC reports that even whistle-blower medics and journalists exposing the scale of suffering were jailed for allegedly spreading “rumours” or false information, as defined by their enforcers.

Out of 96 Covid-related infringements, only nine were deemed serious enough to warrant criminal proceedings by the Shanghai government. Nevertheless, these records were made public online and attached to the individual’s credit record. Behaviour condoned by the CCP is rewarded with access to a bureaucratic “green channel” at government offices for faster paperwork-processing, discounts on utility bills or easier access to state-backed loans including cash payments, says a Times report.

The New York Times is reporting that a “Traffic Light”, as it is popularly known, is a colour coded smartphone app that crunches data and awards user with red, amber or green code according to the determination of infection risk. There is a growing interest in the CCP to make the app permanent to bolster its surveillance state and standardise “social control” systems.

Another aspect of the Traffic light app is that it was introduced as a mini app within Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Alipay apps rather than a standalone one. The data collected by these established apps combined with the GPS tracking ability of the Traffic Light app has led to fears of China becoming a “digital leviathan” that encourages people not to question the system for fear of reprisals.

In areas under lockdown, phone location data is being used to monitor movement and enforce curfews. If a patient is designated for quarantine, geolocation pings on their phone can alert authorities if they stray out of their homes. Phone location data is also being used to map with precision the locations visited by the person two weeks before diagnosis.

A combination of human and automated computer analysis is used to work out the individuals they may have infected. A text message is then sent out through one of the major apps alerting those who may be at risk.

Information flowing through China’s digital networks is closely monitored and controlled on the insistence of the CCP, making its digital security more precarious and vulnerable. The Economist has revealed that information sent through WeChat or Alipay must pass through central servers as plain text, unencrypted so that the company can filter and censor them according to the government’s requirements.

Besides, in China, cameras installed on road walks have facial recognition system, along with licence plate determination abilities that instantly alert authorities if anyone is found breaking quarantine. The system can be accurately described as a clever form of soft totalitarianism as it encourages people not to act against the will of the authorities.

(This content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com)

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