Data on Society | Article Review | Assignment

Running head: DATA ON SOCIETY
Data on Society
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1DATA ON SOCIETY
Article: Uncle Sam punishes China for abusing Uyghur Muslims – by
blacklisting top AI surveillance companies
Question 1:
The selected article is written by Katyanna Quach who is a technology journalist. This
selected article was published on the website of The Register in October, 2019. The Register
has always remained one of the top websites for providing information technology news and
it is one of the reliable sources. More specifically, The Register is actually a British
technology news and opinion website that was founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, Ross
Alderson and John Lettice (Sci/Tech News for the World, 2020). The Situation Publishing
Ltd is currently is listed as the publisher of their site. If the history of The Register is
examined then it has been assessed that they have done various of investigation in the past
and always has provided us the reliable outcomes. One of these investigations performed by
The Register was regarding Intel chips flaw investigation (Claburn, 2020). Overall, the media
biased fact check has reported that The Register is a has always provided factual reporting
and these are usually sourced. Thus, The Register is one of the media sources available right
now.
Question 2:
The current article has about how the US has punished China for abusing their
Uyghur Muslims. As China was abusing the Uyghur Muslims US blacklisted top AI
(Artificial Intelligence) companies of China. This article has made certain of claims. These
claims by the article is discussed below.
Claim 1: Millions of Uyghur Muslims in China has been subjected to constant surveillance
and they have been sent to the internment camps.

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Claim 2: US has responded to this situation by placing the Xinjiang People’s Government
Public Security Bureau and 19 of its subsidiaries and the US has also made eight tech
organizations of China on its entity list, due to which they have now become a subject of
sanctions (Quach, 2020).
Claim 3: Some of the organizations that are punished includes Megvii and SenseTime. Both
of them are unicorn start-ups and their value are over one billion dollars. The SenseTime
which is named Shangtang in China is having estimated value of seven billion US dollars
(Quach, 2020). This organization was founded in Hong Kong which mainly develops AI
algorithms related with the facial recognitions.
Claim 4: Megvii is also a similar type of organization that is based in Beijing and the current
value of this organization is about four billion dollars. Megvii is well known for their Face++
software which has been integrated within a Police app for targeting the Uyghurs Muslims.
(Quach, 2020)
Claim 5: Yixin Science and Technology Co and Yitu Technologies, both are blacklisted as
they were supplying facial recognition technology to the Chinese Government.
Claim 6: US were clamping down visas to the Chinese officials who does have a potential
connection with abuse of minority groups in China.
Question 3:
The current article has been mostly developed independently without any type of
citations of any other sources. Though there was lack of citing the other sources this article
has properly used primary sources of data for creating the article. In this article, direct
statements of different personnel have been quoted directly which has helped this article to
achieve proper reliability. As appropriate primary sources have been included within this
article, it has helped to enrich the article with proper information. In this aspect it has been

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also assessed that the direct quotes have been taken either from a reputed organization or it
has been taken from some high rank officials which confirms the credibility of this article.
Question 3:
Regarding the current article, I was able to verify all the claims that has been made by
the journalist Katyanna Quach. For the first key argument I visited on The Guardian and
found that it is also supporting the same argument (Byler, 2020).
The second claim of this article was also legit and I understood this when I visited the
website of the Federal Register which is the daily journal of the Government of the Unites
States (Addition of Certain Entities to the Entity List, 2020).
The justification behind the third claim also become clear to me, when I founded
exactly similar information at the CNN and the Reuters (Pham, 2020). Not only these two
sources, but also there were several of other sources which supported the same.
In April 2019, the New York Times published an article where they discussed how
China is using the Face++ for profiling their minorities and this article has actually supported
the fourth key claim of the current article (Mozur, 2020).
While searching for the credible sources for supporting the fifth key claim of the
article I have found that several of other new articles were claiming the same and among
them, Bloomberg was one of the most important credible sources (Donnan & Leonard, 2020)
which cleared my doubts regarding the fifth claim.
The last claim of this article was that US were clamping down the visas of the
Chinese officials who were related with the abusing. This claim was also supported by
different types of external sources and from them one important source was The Hill
(Coleman, 2020). Thus, this claim of the article was also very appropriate.

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Question 5:
Regarding the article if the Beard and Longstaff’s ethical decision framework is
applied in this context the main applicable principles will be responsibility principle. The
responsibility principle of the Beard and Longstaff’s ethical decision framework defines that
technology designers should be identifying all the possible use of a technology (Beard &
Longstaff, 2020). In the present article the Chinese Government misused the AI technology
for abusing the Uyghur Muslims in their country. From these perspectives the Beard and
Longstaff’s ethical decision framework relevant for the current case study.
In this article, the actual author of this article has not taken any sides. But by applying
the Beard and Longstaff’s ethical decision framework it has been assessed that though US
have punished China, US were at the correct side while the China was at the wrong
sidev(Beard & Longstaff, 2020). Chinese government misused the technologies to abuse the
Uyghur Muslims. From my personal perspective what is done by China is completely wrong
as they have just misused the technology for their own purpose intentionally. In this way, the
framework of Beard and Longstaff’s ethical decision has helped to evaluate the current
argument of the article.

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References:
Addition of Certain Entities to the Entity List. (2020). Available at:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/10/09/2019-22210/addition-of-
certain-entities-to-the-entity-list
Beard, M., & Longstaff, S. (2020). Ethical By Design: Principles For Good Technology - The
Ethics Centre. Available at: https://ethics.org.au/ethical-by-design/
Byler, D. (2020). China’s hi-tech war on its Muslim minority. Available at:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/apr/11/china-hi-tech-war-on-muslim-
minority-xinjiang-uighurs-surveillance-face-recognition
Claburn, T. (2020). Meltdown The Sequel strikes Intel chips – and full mitigation against
data-meddling LVI flaw will slash performance. Available at:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/10/lvi_intel_cpu_attack/
Coleman, J. (2020). US imposes visa restrictions on Chinese officials over Xinjiang human
rights abuses. Available at: https://thehill.com/policy/international/china/464885-us-
imposes-visa-restrictions-on-chinese-officials-over-xinjiang
Donnan, S., & Leonard, J. (2020). Bloomberg - Are you a robot?. Available at:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-07/u-s-blacklists-eight-chinese-
companies-including-hikvision-k1gvpq77
Mozur, P. (2020). One Month, 500,000 Face Scans: How China Is Using A.I. to Profile a
Minority. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-
surveillance-artificial-intelligence-racial-profiling.html
Pham, S. (2020). The United States strikes a blow to China's AI ambitions. Available at:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/09/tech/hikvision-sensetime-blacklist/index.html

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Quach, K. (2020). Uncle Sam punishes China for abusing Uyghur Muslims – by blacklisting
top AI surveillance companies. Available at:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/09/us_ai_sanctions/
Sci/Tech News for the World. (2020). Available at: https://www.theregister.co.uk/