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Why Hong Kong Protesters Are Sawing Down Sensor-Laden Lampposts
Why Hong Kong Protesters Are Sawing Down Sensor-Laden Lampposts
The government confirms that the hardware could spy on citizens, but says protesters’ fears are unfounded.
The most successful surveillance devices are unobtrusive by nature, which means spotting them is difficult and engaging with them directly can be surreal. Cameras that look like are cheap and . Law-enforcement agencies mount microphones in streetlights and perch on traffic lights. The DEA hides cameras . Marketers track where you get .
In Hong Kong, anxieties about the surveillance-tech arms race has fueled the against a bill—proposed, then , but still —that would give officials the authority to extradite suspects to countries without existing extradition agreements with the city. This includes mainland China, a terrifying prospect Hong Kongers say undermines their autonomy and gives China the ability to silence those critical of its government.
The Chinese government is sophisticated , and evading it requires equally sophisticated tactics. Protesters have been hiding their faces with surgical masks and umbrellas, using burner cellphones, and paying for transit in cash. And, for the past month, they’ve also been with electric saws.
Protesters fear these “smart lampposts”—streetlights and cameras, perched high above the most densely populated areas of the territory—may have surveillance and facial-recognition capabilities. It’s not been proved or debunked, but the threat is compelling enough that protesters have toppled 20 such lampposts since their rollout in July. “I think that [smart lampposts are] just a trick the government is using to spy on us. It invades our privacy,” a protester who “Nick” told the Hong Kong Free Press. Nicholas Yang Wei-hsiung, Hong Kong’s secretary for innovation and technology, has denied the claims, the South China Morning Post reported, as “conspiracy theories.”
In a Twitter thread , Chris Lau, a reporter with the South China Morning Post, filmed protesters dismantling a lamppost. Holding umbrellas, a handful of them obscured the person holding the saw, while others circled the group, likely lookouts for intervening police. In the footage, sparks fly and protesters exclaim, then cheer, when the lamppost falls. Last week, TickTack Technology Limited, a local firm that was supplying parts for the smart lampposts, announced that it was with the Hong Kong government after furnishing supplies for only 50 of the 200 posts it promised. TickTack representatives said in addition to the property damage the company has suffered, its employees threats. (TickTack did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Atlantic.)
The Hong Kong government that the lampposts have enough hardware to spy on citizens, but says protesters’ fears are unfounded. In July, as the first wave of lampposts were installed around the region, federal officials promised to disable some surveillance features, including license-plate recognition and continuous audiovisual surveillance. Tony Wong, an assistant government chief information officer in Hong Kong, that the posts aren’t capable of the invasive facial recognition deployed in China.
That hasn’t stopped the buzz saws. On , , and , protesters have uploaded photos of the sawed-open guts of lamposts. It’s risky to take crowdsourced information at face value in an environment so rife with , but the that these lamp innards reveal tracking technologies similar to the surveillance systems the Chinese government uses as part of its the Uighurs, China’s Sunni Muslim minority group.
Of course, “proving” that the smart lamps use the same repressive technologies wielded against Uighurs requires dismantling and analyzing Chinese surveillance equipment, not just Hong Kong’s. Pictures of RFID cards and ethernet cables don’t demonstrate a direct connection. But suspicions of surveillance are compounding Hong Kongers’ anxieties over the proposed extradition policy. They fear that easier extradition is a step toward second-class citizenship in a Chinese-controlled state.
Protesters reference the Uighurs often in part because surveillance is an enormous part of China’s campaign against them. New York Times reporters covering Uighur repression in the Xinjiang region of western China say China turned life into a prison. Chinese police set up facial-scan checkpoints, mandated that Uighurs install monitoring software on their phones, and encouraged neighbors to report one another’s daily activities to the police. Although the bill’s been suspended, protests continue amid calls for Chief Executive Carrie Lam to resign and radical changes to the region’s election system. Whether or not Hong Kong’s lampposts actually transmit data as some believe, for protesters, the threat of Chinese surveillance and an unrestrained police state is politically compelling. It’s the perfect conspiracy theory.
