by Paul Gregoire and Ugur Nedim
Editor’s note: this was published at sydneycriminallawyers.com.au, and sent to Gumshoe by Mark Wilhelm:
So, what does the far western province of Xinjiang in China have in common with the state of New South Wales? Answer: authorities in both regions are cracking down on future crime, in so far as both are employing policies of predictive policing and detaining people before they offend.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on February 26 that Chinese authorities are currently deploying and expanding a highly pervasive data surveillance system in Xinjiang. The Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) aggregates data and flags any behaviour the system identifies as suspect.
The IJOP integrates information collected from a range of technologies, including an immense network of CCTV cameras with facial recognition and infrared capabilities and WIFI sniffers, which collect identifying addresses from computers and smartphones.
Information is also gathered at an increasing number of police checkpoints, as well as data systems that store licence number plates and citizen ID cards. Officials also visit people’s homes and fill out forms on smartphone apps, which are submitted to the IJOP.
According to HRW, behaviours that the system identifies as suspicious include an individual suddenly buying more fertilizer than usual, a family storing large amounts of food in their home, or a person who is in possession of a large number of books.
Re-education gulags
If the IJOP flags any behaviour, officials are supposed to act upon this information on the same day. And on inspection, those that “ought to be taken, should be taken.” Two sources told HRW that the IJOP computer generates lists of individuals to be rounded-up by police.
These suspects are then sent to political re-education centres, where they’re held in indefinite detention, without charge or trial. Detainees are then subjected to a secretive investigation. They can later be sentenced to prison or be put through further instruction in Communist doctrine.
This Orwellian system was initiated in Xinjiang in August 2016, as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “Strike Hard” campaign, which seeks to target terrorist threats, but also, takes aim at those not toeing the party line.
Powerless in Their Homeland
Xinjiang is home to 11 million, predominately Muslim, Uyghurs. The CCP began its increasingly oppressive occupation of the region back in 1949. After years of Beijing’s encouraged migration, Uyghurs make up 45 percent of the population, while Han Chinese now account for 40 percent.
Following a peaceful protest by Uyghur people that turned into a violent clash with police in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi in 2009, Chinese authorities further cracked down. And this led to a series of violent reprisals carried out by Uyghurs across the country over the period 2013 to 2014.
Whilst Beijing continues the narrative of a rising terrorist threat in the region, commentators blame the reprisals on the harsh repression Uyghurs suffer under Chinese rule. Authorities have enforced cultural restrictions against growing beards, wearing veils in public, and religious fasting.
Secretary General of the World Uyghur Congress, Dolkun Isa, told Sydney Criminal Lawyers last March that Chinese authorities have recently implemented an intensive network of “police convenience centres” in the region.
These pseudo-police checkpoints have heavy camera surveillance and carry out 24 hour guard patrols.
NSW “Predictive Policing”
Cut to present day New South Wales, which is seemingly a world away from far western China. However, similar policing tactics and surveillance policies are being employed right here.
Take the Suspect Targeting Management Plan (STMP). It allows NSW police officers to place recidivist offenders, as well as people who’ve never been convicted of a crime, but are merely suspected of being at risk of committing future crimes, on a list for targeted intensive policing.
Those on the secretive list are repeatedly stopped and searched by police. And they’re also subjected to regular home visits from officers regardless of which offence, if any, they’ve previously committed.
A report released in November last year found the program, which was implemented in 2000, is disproportionately targeting youths. Data examined from ten local area commands over the year 2014-15 showed that 48.8 percent of STMP targets were under the age of 25.
The researchers also found that the largest single group subject to the program were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people making up 44 percent of all individuals. This is despite Indigenous people accounting for only 2.9 percent of the NSW population, according to 2016 Census figures.
Future Crime Incarceration
The NSW government passed the Terrorism (High Risk Offenders) Bill last November. This enables adult offenders who are deemed to pose a “risk of committing a serious terrorism offence” can have their prison sentence, or parole period, extended for a period of three years indefinitely.
But, these laws don’t just apply to convicted terrorists. Offenders whose crimes are classed as occurring in a “terrorist context” also come under their reach. They can even apply to inmates who’ve merely associated with those who’ve advocated support for terrorist activities.
In February, NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian said she wouldn’t rule out extending this regime to youth offenders. She made the remark as she was announcing the government was setting up a new countering violent extremism unit within the state juvenile justice system.
Under this new arrangement, young offenders deemed to be a national security threat will receive intensified communications monitoring, as well as undergoing deradicalisation programs.
Mass Surveillance Down Under
And a number of surveillance systems have been implemented at the federal level over recent times, which have all the hallmarks of the Chinese IJOP big data system.
In October 2015, the federal government’s metadata regime came into play. It requires telcos and ISPs to store their customers’ metadata for a period of two years. And the system allows 21 law enforcement agencies warrantless access to this personal information.
While in October last year (2017), the heads of all states and territories signed onto the federal government’s National Facial Biometric Matching Capability, which is a database that allows police and security agencies to match citizens’ driver licence photos with CCTV footage in real time.
Indeed, it seems that regardless of whether its Communist China or democratic NSW, authorities are increasingly applying new technologies in an intrusive manner, whilst calling on law enforcement agencies and corrective services to undertake the dubious task of predicting future crimes.
George Orwell’s 1984 is alive and at full pace in 2018.
How can a person be judged by police that he or she is at risk of committing crimes? I thought our laws presumed a person was innocent until proven guilty. Not these days. You are presumed to be a criminal if you live in a certain area or know of someone who has been involved in a crime or you speak or write of a person in authority that has acted criminally.
If a certain person’s father, grandfather or great grandfather was involved in crime, then he or she must be capable of criminal activity too, so he or she will be under surveillance forever, according to this stupidity.
Is it not enough to have these cameras everywhere, spying on everybody’s everyday activity, but never a working camera available when a crime is being executed by people in authority?
I ask, what terrorist activity has taken place on Australian soil, that was not planned by Federal or State Government departments? Can anyone name one such event?
Desperately thinking of a terrorist event.
Hilton bombing — opps. Sorry. Orchestrated.
If you ride a motorbike with a leather jacket you’ll be sent to the Gulag.
My point being, if there has never been a real terrorist attack on Australian soil, why are we being flooded with legislation, taking our rights from us, humiliating us at airports, having us under all sorts of surveillance and in general making life unpleasant? There must be some ulterior motive. Or are all our politicians pure thugs in creating such Machiavellian laws.
Wikipedia definition: Terrorism is, in the broadest sense, the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror among masses of people; or fear to achieve a financial, political, religious or ideological aim.[1] It is used in this regard primarily to refer to violence against peacetime targets or in war against non-combatants.[2
Who in Australia, has given the legislators the right to enact these evil laws? The politicians are supposed to be formulating legislation on behalf of the people. So who gave them the authority to impose these impediments on us? As far as I know, nobody knows of these laws until after they are passed in Parliament. Is this DEMOCRACY? NO!
Mal, they have not necessarily been passed as laws.
Recall when Dee was yelling about smart meters we discovered that the parliament of at least one state had given the manufacturers of the smart meters a sort of carte blanche, but it was not a law.
To follow a law’s progress, go to austlii.edu.au. Or google “legislative history” of such and such, NSW.
Thanks for your first comment above. I am scanning the US for a terrorist incident that was “genuine.” So far nuttin.’ I recall many years ago a blizzard in upstate, New York, right near Fort Drum. I think it was staged.
So if I’m “that far gone” it’s unlikely I can supply an incident. Hey, Mal, how about the Lindt Cafe?
Mary, I really enjoyed my time in Ft Drum. We did a 2-week “summer-camp” there in the 80s.
The trip up and back from Maryland yielded a large number of funny stories.
The blizzard I faced once we got there (staged?) consisted mostly of biting flies and mosquitoes. We were a helicopter unit, and we joked that some of them were bigger than our own stuff.
There were many bottles of Avon “skin so soft” floating around, not for use as bath oil, but for repelling those horrific bugs.
Mary, you are winding me up on “Lindt Café” are you not?
There was legislation just awaiting the action in Sydney Town.
As was the mock-up of the Lindt Café sitting at Holsworthy Army Base, which the authorities have had plenty of time to deny.
To Soldier Joe, (any relation to GI Joe? That used to be a doll like the Barbie doll)
No doubt the skeeters were staged. When I visited the tip-top of Scotland in 1981 I saw bumblebees that were so big I thought they were sparrows. But in those days I did not have the conspiracy mentality.
A moment ago I went to the Ft Drum website and got a barrage of warnings “If you enter this site we can do this, that and the other thing to you.” So I hopped off fast. I think maybe what it meant is “Soldiers, please do not post any porn.”
OK everybody. Let’s just call a spade a bloody spade.
They’re cranking up the Draconian legislation and surveillance as a precursor to coming down hard on We the People.
No, they’d never do that. They’re Aussie politicians and they’re “Good Guys”. They work hard for us.
May I remind everyone of Marcus Aurelius Cicero’s quote on treason??
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
The traitor talks about tax cuts, full employment, better health care, a fairer go for the battler……etc,etc”
At what point does the average Aussie understand that we are all being played by these shills?
Both sides of politics, all sides. All on comfy salaries and benefits. All paid by you.
And what do they produce of any worth??
NOTHING.
To Phil
.
easy peasy task – all they all have to do is not move, and look in the mirror then. that’s a solid start point imho…
Nothing new about this stuff:
This is how W. A. ‘s Attorney General responding to being asked to “cite the legal basis of an unexplained Police apprehension/search” of two of my sons(one of whom was a minor) on Albany’s main street at around 8:15 am on Saturday 24 June 2006:
ATTORNEY GENERAL’S RESPONSE OF 3 JULY ‘06:
“You may be aware that WA legislation, including the Police Act 1893(WA), the Criminal Investigation (Identifying People) Act 2002(WA) and the WA Criminal Code contain provisions not only relating to police and criminal offences but also police powers”.
That letter made no mention of there being “a reasonable suspicion that a crime had been or was about to be committed” : As Mary Max says, government henchmen do all sorts of things that “have not necessarily been passed as laws”. Parliament only comes into the picture at a point where the masses have become resigned to the fact that there’s nothing they can do about it.
commenting on ‘suspicion of’
You have a fly swatter???
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/01/terr-j01.html