Day: November 4, 2022

Army shelling of a village in Sagaing region’s Kanbalu township killed a teenager and his grandmother and injured two other members of the same family.

A junta shell hit a house in Zee Ka Nar village on Thursday. The boy, Paing Set Hmu, was hit in the head and died instantly. His grandmother was also hit by shell fragments and died the next morning, locals told RFA. The boy’s seven-year old sister and a female relative in her 60s suffered minor injuries to their heads, hands and legs.

“Junta troops in Koe Taung Boet village fired a shell and it landed on a house in Zee Ka Nar village which is located in the west [of the township],” a local said, speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons.

“The whole family was injured. The 13-year-old boy, Paing Set Hmu, died immediately and his 68-year-old grandmother, Win, was hit in the abdomen and died this morning,” he said.

Junta forces shelled the nearby forest on the same day and fought skirmishes with local People’s Defense Forces, the local said.

Residents said troops stationed in Koe Taung Boet village arrested and interrogated around 10 locals after they attacked villages around the township.   

RFA has not been able to verify the information independently and calls to the junta spokesman for Sagaing region, Social Affairs Minister Aye Hlaing, went unanswered on Friday.

Some 1,512 civilians died in Sagaing in the 21 months since the Feb. 1, 2021 coup, the Institute for Strategy and Policy (ISP) reported at the end of last month.

Sagaing has the largest number of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Myanmar since the coup, after intense fighting forced them to flee their villages. As of Oct. 19, there were more than 680,629 or 41 percent of the country’s IDPs in the region the independent research group said.

Chinese public security entities have been acquiring U.S. technology with the transfers becoming increasingly regular, especially of DNA analysis equipment needed for mass surveillance, a new report has found.

The report ‘The Role of US Technology in China’s Public Security System’ by the U.S. intelligence and security research Insikt Group revealed the sweeping extent of technology transfers from U.S. companies to Chinese companies to be used by the public security apparatus, including in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

From DNA analysis to thermal imaging, from data storage to digital forensics and cyber security, a vast range of U.S. technology has been transferred to the Chinese public security system. 

Surveillance and counter-surveillance are among the main focuses of the technology transfers, the report said.

“In some cases, public security entities in China almost certainly seek technology from U.S. companies because foreign products outperform domestic equivalents,” it said.

In other cases, the technology was acquired “to ensure compatibility” as it had already been used by Chinese organizations.

According to the report, public security entities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region “appear to have purchased at least 481 hard disk drives from Seagate and Western Digital” in early-to-mid 2022, including surveillance-specialized drives and drives acquired alongside equipment from China’s leading surveillance providers. 

Both Seagate Technology Holdings and Western Digital Corporation are well-known American data storage companies.

“Other entities in Xinjiang, such as prisons belonging to the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, have also recently carried out surveillance-oriented purchases of Seagate or Western Digital hard disk drives,” it said.

Another report released last year also said U.S. technology companies were supplying China’s surveillance state with equipment and software for monitoring populations and censoring information, including in Xinjiang.

Western governments and human rights groups have condemned Beijing for surveillance and other abusive policies against the 12 million Muslim Uyghurs in the region, which they said amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity. China has repeatedly denied the allegations.

 

‘Extremely common transfers’

“When I started the research, I did not expect these technology transfers to be so prevalent,” said report author Zoe Haver.

She began the project by looking at transfers of counter-surveillance devices used by the U.S. military and U.S. law enforcement, but during the process she found that Chinese public security entities were purchasing U.S. technology for use in many other areas, such as aviation, DNA analysis, thermal imaging, optics, surveillance, cybersecurity, network infrastructure, and data storage.

“With some of the technologies that I was tracking, such as DNA analysis equipment, I observed new purchases on pretty much a day-to-day basis. These transfers are extremely common across China,” she told RFA.

The Chinese public security apparatus has been seeking DNA analysis equipment, with the reliance on U.S. technology in this area “most notable,” according to the analyst.

“This equipment can potentially be used to help build population databases and carry out mass surveillance,” Haver said.

Entities belonging to the powerful Ministry of Public Security (MPS) have been acquiring U.S. technology via legal channels at industry exhibitions, third-party agents and distributors, and even from U.S. companies’ local subsidiaries in China.

Recently more and more U.S. firms have been bought by Chinese companies and this has “aided the growth of China’s domestic industries and facilitated sales of U.S. products to public security end users,” according to the report.

Another factor is the cross-border flows of talent that have become increasingly common in the era of globalization.

U.S. control response

Haver compiled the report by sifting through thousands of public Chinese government procurement records and she said that she was struck by the sheer number of procurement documents.

In response to the state violence that Chinese public security entities carry out, particularly in Xinjiang, the U.S. government has taken some steps in recent years to restrict the transfer of U.S. technology to them.

The Export Control Reform Act of 2018 referred to items that have law enforcement-related applications and stipulated that “the U.S. export control policy should serve to protect human rights.”

In 2019 and 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security placed 21 Chinese public security entities (in addition to various Chinese companies) on an export licensing restrictions list.

But Insikt’s report raised the question of “the efficacy of current U.S. export control measures that target Chinese public security entities and the Chinese companies that support them.”

“As third-party distributors and agents play such a prominent role in the technology transfer process, the U.S. government may find it difficult to implement effective export restrictions,” Haver told RFA.

Jailed land rights activist Trinh Ba Tu is being denied family visits at Prison Camp No. 6 in Vietnam’s bleak Ngha An province after he started a hunger strike nearly two months ago to protest against prison guards beating him for refusing to settle his denunciation.

He started to refuse food on Sept. 6 and told his father later that month he had been put in solitary confinement, beaten and shackled.

At the end of September, right after Tu’s father Trinh Ba Khiem returned from prison, his family filed a petition to the Ministry of Public Security to investigate the accusations. The ministry replied that the family should send the petition to the People’s Procuracy of Nghe An province. So far, his family has not received a response.

Tu was also denied two visits from his father last month and the punishments show no signs of ending, even though it’s unclear whether he is still on hunger strike.

Tu’s father went to the prison on Thursday and asked to see his son but his request was refused. He was told he couldn’t make another appointment for more than two weeks.

“I went in there for about an hour to submit the [appointment] book. Then a prison officer came out and said that Tu was still being disciplined so I couldn’t send him things or see my child until November 21.

“I don’t know if Tu has stopped his hunger strike yet, and I don’t know what the situation is yet. The Prison Camp 6 warden said nothing more.”

Khiem said the warden he spoke with was called Loc who was a captain of the local management team for political prisoners.

RFA Vietnamese called the prison on Thursday to verify Khiem’s claims but no one answered the phone.

Prisoners normally have the right to a one-hour monthly visit from their relatives, to make a 10-minute phone call every month and to receive provisions from their families.

Khiem said he was extremely worried about his son’s health, especially since two political prisoners died while serving their sentences in the prison.

In 2019, former teacher Dao Quang Thuc died in the prison while serving a 13-year sentence. This August, citizen journalist Do Cong Duong also died there. Both men were healthy before being transferred to the prison camp.

Trinh Ba Tu, 33, his brother Trinh Ba Phuong, 37, and their mother Can Thi Theu, 60, were arrested in mid-2020 on charges of “conducting propaganda against the state” for speaking out strongly on social networks about the Dong Tam land rights dispute.

At the beginning of May last year, Tu and his mother were sentenced to eight years in prison and three years’ probation each. Phuong was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Prison No. 6 is located in the region with the harshest climate in the Central region. Many former prisoners have told RFA that the guards are particularly brutal to prisoners of conscience.