Honovich had seen reports trickling out in the West of Uyghurs being subjected to constrictive surveillance and mass detentions. The feature seemed completely unethical to him, and he immediately wondered how China might use it against the Uyghur people, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority group, in the province of Xinjiang. In his many years in the industry, he’d never seen a surveillance company set out to automatically detect racial minorities. Honovich downloaded the video and took screenshots of the computer screen, for safekeeping. Below it was data that the camera’s AI had inferred. He saw a zoomed-in view of one visitor’s face. Piano music played as a narrator explained, in Mandarin with English subtitles, that the cameras were there “to identify all visitors to ensure the safety of all.” The video cut to a shot of a computer screen, and Honovich hit pause.
A video showed Hikvision cameras pointed at tourists climbing the thousands of stone steps leading to the famous peak. He zeroed in on one section of the conference agenda titled “Eco-Friendly, Peaceful, Relaxed” and found a description of an AI-powered system installed around Mount Tai, a historically sacred mountain in Shandong. Honovich, the founder of a small trade publication that covered video surveillance technology, wanted to find out what the latest Hikvision gear could do. Hikvision, the world’s largest security camera manufacturer, was hosting the event-the 2018 AI Cloud World Summit-in its hometown of Hangzhou, a city of about 10 million people not far from Shanghai. At a location he keeps secret, John Honovich was on his laptop, methodically scouring every link on a website for a conference half a world away.
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