- Chinese Police are preparing to monitor VPN and Telegram users with AI-powered tools
- AI -Technology was a key element of the largest police technology expo held in Beijing in May last year
- People in China cannot access telegram, the most popular app on social media and international news site Without a VPN
When considering the future of the police, China reserves the limelight for AI-driven surveillance and VPN and telegram users is among the goals.
As reported by South China Morning Post, AI technology was the key element throughout the 12th China International Exhibition on Police Equipment, the largest political EXPO held in Beijing last May.
Alongside Deepseek-inspired LLM models that support criminal investigations and identify people at high risk, two tools are set to make the lives of millions of Chinese who regularly use the best VPNs even more difficult.
China’s AI breakdown to online dissent and censorship
Although it is difficult to estimate the number of people using a virtual private network (VPN) in China, we know well that the tool is crucial to accessing them as WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook as well as international and independent news sites – the South China Morning Post included.
As Freedom House wrote in his latest report, “Chinese Internet users have faced the world’s worst conditions for internet freedom in a decade.”
Serious legal consequences for online activities and strict censorship, the report explains, supplemented by the authority’s work, which limits access to anticensure tools such as VPNs.
Today, only a handful of VPN services work to China under these adverse conditions. Despite this, however, China’s law enforcement is trying to become even more effective in blocking them.
This is at least what a technology company from Nanjing, a city in eastern China, plans to do. During the event, the company showed “A tool capable of detecting such use [of VPNs]“Reported South China Morning Post.
Most of the people who use a VPN are likely to do so to access Telegram, among other things. The popular Messaging app and its official website has been blocked since 2015 in China after a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on its servers.
If you can’t prevent it, you can check it, right? This is what the third research institute for the Ministry of Public Security – the country’s top police car – suggested to do with its new tools, as they say, can monitor telegram.
This surveillance software is said to be able to monitor all telegram accounts with Chinese mobile phone numbers as these include strict requirements for the real name.
“To date, the tool has collected more than 30 billion messages and monitored 70 million telegram accounts as well as 390,000 public channels and groups,” the group said, according to South China Morning Post.
Most crucial, however, this tool is also seeking to target online dissens by scanning all telegram distributions related to politics and Hong Kong.
“The institute quoted the widespread use of telegram of anti-government protesters in Hong Kong in 2019 as one of the reasons for developing the tool,” wrote South China Morning Post.
