BBC Panorama Documentary on AI Features IPVM
By Conor Healy and Charles Rollet, Published May 28, 2021, 04:54am EDTThe world's longest-running news television program, BBC Panorama, prominently featured research from IPVM in its investigation into AI including critical examinations of Dahua, Hikvision, and Huawei.
Watch the 3-minute clip featuring IPVM including the BBC visiting IPVM's USA testing facility:
IPVM Quoted Alongside Microsoft, Human Rights Watch
The BBC Panorama episode covered how artificial intelligence is changing the modern world, dividing the US and China. IPVM’s Government Director Conor Healy was interviewed for the documentary, joining Microsoft President Brad Smith and Human Rights Watch’s China Director Sophie Richardson, among others.
BBC Banned In China After Xinjiang Reporting
The BBC has authored several high-profile investigations into PRC government human rights abuses in Xinjiang, e.g. rape and sexual abuse against Uyghurs, a look inside Xinjiang's 're-education camps', and Uyghur children being "systematically separated" from their parents; the BBC's reporting on COVID in China was also considered especially sensitive.
In response, this February the PRC government banned the BBC in mainland China and Hong Kong and a month later ejected its Beijing correspondent John Sudworth. PRC state media said this showed the government's "zero tolerance for fake news". (The PRC is ranked as one of the worst countries for press freedom.)
BBC Quotes IPVM's Hikvision, Dahua, Huawei Uyghur Alerts
Panorama said IPVM "uncovered new evidence" of high-tech Uyghur repression in the form of 'Uyghur alerts' which automatically detect Uyghur faces for PRC police. IPVM finding a Huawei patent which included Uyghur detection was used as an example:
IPVM's Conor Healy told the BBC the patent shows Huawei "worked directly with the Chinese government" as it was co-authored with the government-run China Academy of Sciences. The BBC also brought up IPVM's article on Hikvision touting a Uyghur-detecting AI camera:
Along with IPVM finding Uyghur-tracking code in Dahua's public SDK:
In response, Huawei told the BBC it "does not condone the use of technology to discriminate or oppress against members of any community". Dahua claimed, without evidence, that it mentioned Uyghurs in the context of all the PRC's 56 officially recognized minorities. Hikvision said its mention of Uyghur detection was "uploaded online without appropriate review", denying its tech had any "minority recognition function".
China Government Falsely Claims No Uyghur Analytics
The London UK PRC Embassy told the BBC that "there is no so-called facial recognition technology featuring Uyghur analytics whatsoever":
This statement is false, with IPVM and others like The New York Times finding numerous original PRC government and surveillance company documents explicitly mandating facial recognition tech with "Uyghur alarms", "real-time Uyghur warnings", "Uyghur/Non-Uyghur" detection, etc.
The BBC also quoted the chair of China's "Expert Committee on AI Governance" Dr. Lan Xue, who also denied the existence of Uyghur analytics but said that the use of technology against "terrorists" in Xinjiang is "quite understandable":
[Dr. Lan Xue:] the media outside China - a lot of those sort of charge, many are not accurate and not true, but one thing that we do have to recognize [is] that in Xinjiang there was a separatist movement that generated a lot of terrorists. I think the Xinjiang local government had the responsibility to really protect the Xinjiang people. So I think if the technology is used in those contexts that's quite understandable [emphasis added]
"Huge Implications For Society": 'One Person, One File' Examined
IPVM also contributed as-yet unreported documents illustrating China’s AI-based surveillance ambitions with a system called 'One Person, One File', which was mentioned in a police tender from Nanqiao District (Anhui province) found by IPVM:
The BBC said "One Person One File could have huge implications for society", as it consists of a system of comprehensive profiles on PRC citizens to analytically assess and even predict individuals’ behavior, tracking things like "relationships", "peer analysis", and political activities, said IPVM's Healy:
For each person the government would store their personal information, their political activities, relationships... anything that might give you insight into how that person would behave and what kind of a threat they might pose
IPVM found a new Huawei patent suggesting it is also developing a 'One Person, One File' system integrated with facial recognition data:
Huawei "didn't directly address Panorama's questions about their involvement in One Person One File", the BBC reported, although Huawei stressed that it is "independent of government wherever it operates".
AI Technology Compared To Orwell
The BBC quoted Healy saying that Orwell himself could not have "ever imagined" a system like 'One Person, One File':
If you have any desire to protest what they're building will cut off your ability to do that before you even start. It makes any kind of dissidency potentially impossible and creates true predictability for the government in the behavior of their citizens, I don't think that Orwell would've ever imagined that a government could be capable of this kind of analysis [emphasis added]
Microsoft President Brad Smith echoed this sentiment, commenting (generally) that he was "constantly reminded of George Orwell's lessons" about "a government who could see everything":
I’m constantly reminded of George Orwell’s lessons in his book 1984. You know the fundamental story…was about a government who could see everything that everyone did and hear everything that everyone said all the time. [...] Well, that didn’t come to pass in 1984, but if we’re not careful that could come to pass in 2024.
BBC Panorama Other Findings
The Panorama documentary contained a number of other findings unrelated to IPVM, notably PRC police testing emotion-detection software on detained Uyghurs:
The BBC quoted an anonymous software engineer saying he had installed such systems for PRC police, with AI being used to "indicate a person's state of mind, with red suggesting a negative or anxious state of mind". Human Rights Watch's China Director Sophie Richardson was quoted calling out this "shocking material":
It is shocking material. It's not just that people are being reduced to a pie chart, it's people who are in highly coercive circumstances, under enormous pressure, being understandably nervous and that's taken as an indication of guilt, and I think, that's deeply problematic.
PRC AI-Based Video Surveillance Raising Alarms Globally
The BBC's extensive quoting of IPVM's findings shows that PRC video surveillance and AI practices are raising unprecedented alarm worldwide. Unethical usage of AI-based video surveillance technology, such as 'Uyghur alerts', threatens core human rights and the video surveillance industry's broader reputation.
2 reports cite this report:
Comments (25)
Just finished the documentary. A very interesting watch. Congrats to the IPVM team for becoming such a resource of information in the field and having it demonstrated in the video documentary.

05/28/21 12:57pm
Wow, you guys got a strong response from ‘Truth Seeker’ on LinkedIn. I deleted my comment - hope they don’t come after me 😬
There were a number of errors in the program plus it was very biased against CN.
It heavily relied on single-source evidence so unfortunately as a piece of investigative journalism it fell rather short of the mark. Something that the BBC have been failing in quite often these days…
Martin Bashir’s Diana interview
Laura Keunesburg (need I say more)
awful coverage of the Coronavirus pandemic
Very interesting to watch!
The situation is not simple, it’s complex and definitely not straight black or white
ps I do not work for Hikvision somplease don’t beat me!
This IPVM research is also being cited by some media.
Blacklisted Chinese Surveillance Equipment Companies Secure Regional US Governments as Customers
IPVM well done in exposing what is happening in China with “One Person, One File” and how Hikvision and Dahua are tools for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The western world is completely ignorant with the genocide in Xinjiang. Also, ironic how Professor Russell is warning about AI research of autonomous weapons but fails to recognize the espionage by the CCP in the top research universities in the world. The CCP will obtain advanced AI technology in every possible way, probably too late to debate the ethics of such research in the USA.
Below are just a few news articles about the infiltration of the CCP in research universities:
"(The PRC is ranked as one of the worst countries for press freedom.)"
Only second to the US. We falsely believe we have freedom of press. We don't.
"I believe that both the USA and UK intelligence have significant profiling capabilities that are comparable in depth to the Chinese government.
The US uses it’s ‘special relationship’ with the UK to obtain intelligence on US citizens that would otherwise be unconstitutional and I suggest this likely happens in the other direction too!"
The US is already doing this as noted in another post above with assistance from the UK and Australia. It is nothing new. We will loose control of the AI within 30 years; it took less then 50 years to get to this point. 30 is a conservative estimate. That is of course if we don't extinct ourselves first with another fun virus(or more accurately, the vaccine). But so long as we have the virologists that create them (funded by us...) telling us how to combat them maybe we survive to see the AI pandemic. AI will become as invasive and dangerous as any man made virus so, yes, I'll say pandemic..just remember, like the BS covid-19 and those to follow, we did it to ourselves.

IPVMU Certified | 06/01/21 01:05pm
I really appreciate your advocacy of privacy with security and your concerns for human rights. Business must include ethics, after all, no matter how sophisticated we get, it's all for the betterment of humanity, so ethics is central to security, or any field.