Facial recognition software is helping China commit a genocide. The software gives the government an absurd amount of control and insight. With such great control comes abuse of power. China is one of the first countries using the software with evil intent. Kashgar, China, is finally in the spotlight of the media. This small city in western China is under the conditions of a genocide. Muslim Chinese citizens known as Uighurs are being forced into concentration camps and imprisoned for “treason”. Its the same reason Saudi Arabia arrests U.S. activists for protesting. Its a ridiculous front giving the government a so called reason to take these people away. How the government learns of the whereabouts of Uighur citizens is with the help of facial recognition.  Chris Buckley and Paul Mozur report that a technician of the facial recognition software showed how easy it is to track someone. “To demonstrate, she showed how the system could retrieve the photo, home address and official identification number of a woman who had been stopped at a checkpoint on a major highway. The system sifted through billions of records, then displayed details of her education, family ties, links to an earlier case and recent visits to a hotel and an internet cafe.” There is no hiding. If the government wants to find certain individuals they will.

It is laughable how the Chinese government has been trying to cover up the making of a modern genocide. The government claims the concentration camps are “training centers” stamping out extremism and giving Muslim Chinese citizens new skills. To the witnessed and documented shackled Uighurs, the government says authorities were carrying out “normal judicial activities.” At this point the Chinese government referring to the Uighur citizens as “people” seems like a stretch. The “training centers” consist of Muslim women raped, being given forced abortions, or sterilization. This is how a genocide is carried out without the direct killing of a group of people under the same culture.

The world is also very unaware of this story. To prove this, I asked several of my friends who I consider to be above average intelligence, whether or not they had heard of the genocide in China, and to my surprise they were uninformed. Although the NY Times and the Daily Mail have covered the story, its still been buried underneath the more interesting topic of our presidents impeachment.