Australia proposes face-recognition program to fight underage porn access

Urumqi, China, Apr 15, 2019 / 11:08 am (CNA).- Government-run social media and facial recognition technology are being used to help monitor and detain Muslims in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

This technology has been around China since 2016, but it has been a growing concern in regards to violations of religious freedom and human rights.

Uyghurs are a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority that mainly inhabit Xinjiang The advocacy group Uyghur Human Rights Project estimates that approximately ten percent of the Uyghur population, or some 1 million individuals, are being extrajudicially detained in a system of internment camps.

According to Darren Byler writing in Logic magazine, Chinese authorities monitor people through government-run social media platforms, which take the place of blocked websites like Twitter and Facebook. If flagged, the individual will then be a target for artificial intelligence recognition software and possible detainment.

A target’s actions online, or even lack of presence on the web, are monitored. Members of religious minorities could be registered as dangerous for posting ideologies contrary to that of the communist state, as when Muslims who share Islamic teachings or religious pictures.

Meanwhile, a facial recognition program will run through high-resolution video cameras capable of working in low-lighting and with a variety of different angles and facial expressions. The AI system, known as the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, collects data from a variety of sources.

After an individual has been flagged, officials will be notified through IJOP if that person crosses one of the many checkpoints placed in ocations throughout Xinjiang’s cities, or enter public buildings like banks or hospitals.

Uyghur Muslims could be arrested and detained under vague anti-terrorism laws. Hundreds of thousands of these people have been brought to detention centers. These centers have included torture, isolation, interrogation, and reeducation.

The Logic reported on a Muslim man from Xinjiang, known by the pseudonym Alim, who was arrested in 2017 after returning from studying abroad. When he re-entered China, he had been blacklisted and marked as a potential terrorist threat every time he passed a check point, which put him at the risk of detainment.

In 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the “People’s War on Terror” – a campaign to restrict and monitor protests in Xinjiang. The government has claimed that the crackdown is based on violent terrorism and not religious grounds.  

The United Nation issued a detailed report last August stating that minority groups in Xinjiang were “being treated as enemies of the State based on nothing more than their ethno-religious identity.”

“In the name of combating ‘religious extremism’ and maintaining ‘social stability’…China had turned the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region into something that resembled a massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy, a ‘no rights zone’,” the report states.

The technology is supposedly used to curb religious extremism and terrorism, but fears have been expressed that the technology would also extend to other religious minorities in China. At a March 2018 panel on PEN America’s report on social media censorship, experts decried China’s use of social media platforms.  

“All of the trends are pointing in a negative direction. …We know enough now about both the censorship machine as well as Xi Jinping’s intentions – I think that’s been made quite clear,” said Shanthi Kalathil, the director of the International Forum for Democracy Studies.

In China, people talk about how “it used to be that we afraid that our account would be closed or our posts would be deleted. Now we are afraid that we are just going to be taken away. Some are sentenced to administration detention for a few days, but there are a good number of people who have been sentenced to very long prison terms,” said Freedom House’s Senior Research Analyst for East Asia, Sarah Cook.

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CNA Staff, Jan 20, 2021 / 12:00 pm (CNA).- Investigators examining transfers from the Vatican to Australia have been unable to account for around $1.9 million sent between the two countries, local media reported on Wednesday.

Another $5.4 million in Vatican-linked transfers have been identified as being for legitimate expenses, such as travel, wages, and pension payments, The Australian newspaper said on Jan. 20.

Australian authorities have been investigating suspicious transfers from the Vatican to Australia for several months.

Australia’s financial crime watchdog acknowledged earlier in January that it had vastly overestimated the sum of what it said had been 47,000 Vatican transfers.

The Australian newspaper said on Jan. 13 that the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), a government agency, attributed the miscalculation to a “computer coding error.”

After a “detailed review” of its initial finding, AUSTRAC informed Australia’s Senate that its initial finding of $1.8 billion was incorrect, and the real figure amounted to $7.4 million, sent in 362 transfers between 2014 and 2020.

Investigators at AUSTRAC, the Bank of Italy, and the Institute for Religious Works (IOR) — also called the “Vatican bank” — are conducting a joint investigation into the $7.4 million.

After finding that $5.4 million came from legitimate expenses, nearly $2 million still remains to be tracked.

The Australian reported last week that AUSTRAC had also concluded that over the past six years there were 237 transfers totaling $20.6 million in the other direction: from Australia to the Vatican.

The newspaper said that AUSTRAC was, however, continuing to investigate suspicious transfers from the Vatican to Australia.

It added that Australian Federal Police and the Vatican’s financial intelligence unit were investigating four transfers to Australia from the Vatican. 

It said that two of the transfers were connected to Cardinal Angelo Becciu. A total of $1.5 million was reportedly sent to a company in Melbourne between 2017 and 2018.

Reports of suspicious money transfers from the Vatican to Australia date back to October when Italian media reported that an alleged transfer was part of a dossier being compiled by Vatican investigators and prosecutors against Becciu. 

Becciu resigned from his curial position and gave up his rights as a cardinal on Sept. 24, reportedly in connection with multiple financial scandals dating back to his time as the second-ranking official at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.

He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing or any attempt to influence the trial of Cardinal George Pell, the former prefect of the Vatican Secretariat for the Economy, which began in August 2018. 

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The second floor of St. Peter the Apostle Church in San José del Monte in the Philippines collapsed during Ash Wednesday Mass on Feb. 14, 2024. / Credit: Public Information Office of San José del Monte

ACI Prensa Staff, Feb 15, 2024 / 18:10 pm … […]