When surveillance meets incompetence
(WorldNews China)

Last week brought an extraordinary demonstration of the dangers of operating a surveillance state - especially a shabby one, as China’s apparently is. An unsecured database exposed millions of records of Chinese Muslims being tracked via facial recognition - an ugly trifecta of prejudice, bureaucracy, and incompetence. The security lapse was discovered by Victor Gevers at the GDI Foundation, a security organization working in the public’s interest. Using the infamous but useful Shodan search engine, he found a MongoDB instance owned by the Chinese company SenseNets that stored an ever-increasing number of data points from a facial recognition system apparently at least partially...