Paul Moser
Appearances
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 4: Naming and Shaming
Hacking and the burden of hacking shifted under Xi Jinping from the People's Liberation Army, the Chinese military, to its intelligence operations, Ministry of State Security, or MSS. And what MSS does is it takes a very different approach. It basically says that anybody who wants to start a franchise who's good at this kind of stuff can have a try.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 4: Naming and Shaming
And so what we see is a sort of network of different hackers for hire emerging across China. And many of them have really deep technological experience and they want to turn it to these sorts of aims. And so effectively, it's a group of soldiers of fortune, you know, hackers for hire who are turning at the government's behalf.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 4: Naming and Shaming
onto the United States and trying to break into any and everything and any kind of new hack they get goes up the chain and they're rewarded.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 4: Naming and Shaming
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
So if you go to Xinjiang, there's these little kind of oasis cities all around the desert. And so these cities almost feel timeless. They're these sort of old mud brick cities, usually. What started to happen about seven or eight years ago is a huge amount of cameras started appearing on the walls there. And along with that came a lot of police checkpoints.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
And so when we were out there reporting in, you know, 2018, 2019, you basically got the sense of kind of a society utterly suffocated by kind of overwhelming both technological and kind of, you know, good old fashioned shoe leather surveillance.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
Basically, there's a small factory in southern China and a rumor goes around the factory that the two Uyghur workers there raped a Han Chinese woman. And so the Han Chinese workers confront the Uyghur workers. A fight breaks out. And I believe two Uyghur workers end up getting getting killed, beaten to death in what is effectively a factory riot.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
And this is the early days of YouTube and viral social media. None of it was blocked in China. And so it goes viral in China and it spreads all over Xinjiang. And in Xinjiang, you know, what is effectively a kind of, you know, ethnic tinderbox because there are all these tensions, it triggers this massive ethnic riot in which thousands of Uyghurs take to the streets in numerous cities.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
Some are armed with knives, some are armed with poles, and they murder at least 200 Han Chinese.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
And so if you walk down a street, you know, say one block, you'd probably pass 20, 30 cameras.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
And, you know, some of these are sort of your old fashioned dumb cameras, but some are new cameras with Nvidia chips in them, these kind of huge VCR or television sized kind of contraptions, and they're hanging from poles, they're hanging from trees, they're on traffic lights, and oftentimes they're aimed right at your face.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
And, you know, what's happening on the backside is that they're running facial recognition algorithms to try to kind of identify who you are and sort of track where you're going. But that's just one layer. So then the second layer is the human checkpoint. So maybe every couple hundred yards, you would run into a human checkpoint, usually staffed by police.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
And what the police would do is they would scan local people's identification cards. And so even if the face scanning doesn't work, the identification card will allow the police to mark this person with this identification number past this checkpoint at this time. And so what you start to imagine is kind of a map of the comings and goings of every single person in this city at all times.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
And what they do with this is they use it to kind of start building invisible interior barriers within the city. So, you know, if you are somebody that they don't necessarily trust, maybe you're not allowed to leave your neighborhood.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
So when you get out of, say, a square kilometer of your house, you might hit a police checkpoint and there, you know, when they scan your ID, an alarm might go off and it might say, actually, this person is at their barrier. They can't go any further.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
A virtual cage. What was really sad to see was that, you know, it was utterly targeted on the Uyghur ethnic minority. So you would see Han Chinese get out of their cars and just walk right past these checkpoints and nobody would stop them. But then for the ethnic minority for whom this is their homeland, it applies, and so they have to stop every single time.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
By 2017, they were appearing absolutely everywhere. They almost looked like Baroque sculptures mocking surveillance in some ways. You'd have three cameras hanging from a pole with another pole sticking off and two more cameras and then a camera next to that. I mean, it was just totally remarkable.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
And so I endeavored just to kind of get a sense of how absurd this was to track how many cameras I passed on my commute to work, which is about, I think, two subway stops in Shanghai. It took about 15 minutes. And during that time, I counted 250 people cameras. I tried to do it the first time without a counter and I'd lost track.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
So I actually had to download a little app that was a counter just to, you know, do it as I go. And I mean, there are big cameras on the escalators. There's tiny little hidden lenses inside each subway car, you know, just everywhere you can think of are cameras. And you just all of that data is being collected and being processed. And so it was a really remarkable thing.
To Catch a Thief: China’s Rise to Cyber Supremacy
Ep 1: The Five Poisons
But for a lot of people, you know, it sort of didn't register. You know, they just kind of ignored it and kept going. But it was, you know, the one thing that, you know, the physical infrastructure of China, you know, fundamentally changed.