KKR’s Cue and the personal company of Cue’s CEO Shi Kan 施侃 partnered with the Chinese state security apparatus between 2018 and 2020 [2] —Cue and Shi Kan’s personal company developed technology for government surveillance programs jointly with a subsidiary of China’s Ministry of Public Security.
A technology example is the “CUE Real-time AI Facial & Body Temperature Detector” – which integrates facial recognition, heat detection, and identity matching to identify individuals in crowds. Cue and Zhuhai Zhongdun Star Technology (Shi Kan’s personal company) jointly developed this technology with the Video National Engineering Laboratory (Zhuhai) Innovation Center, an arm of China’s First Research Institute of the Ministry of Public Security, according to a posting on Cue’s website in 2021 [2].
This technology of Cue’s is used for pandemic surveillance in places like train stations, bus stations, government agencies and businesses. It tracks 14-day migration of individuals and identifies “companions.”
It also has non-pandemic uses for recognizing “blacklisted persons” and surveillance of “mass gatherings”, according to news that was posted on Cue’s website in 2021.
Cue’s public security collaboration was profiled in a February 20, 2022 report by The Wire China entitled “The Surveillance Stake”. KKR and Cue denied the collaboration to The Wire, however “…the Zhuhai lab confirmed in an email to The Wire that it had at one time collaborated with Cue and one of its wholly-owned subsidiaries.”[3]
As one expert tells The Wire:
“’Look at the players integral to this Center,’ says Jeffrey Stoff, a former U.S. government official who worked on critical technology protection and recently published a report with Stanford’s Hoover Institution about CASIA. Given the Center’s acknowledgement of the collaboration, ‘KKR is directly associating with parts of the state that develop surveillance that is responsible for human rights abuses. Even if the particular technology that [KKR] is investing in is deployed for the notionally benign use of temperature detection and Covid detection, it can be easily diverted to reprehensible applications. That needs to be assumed.’”
[1] https://cue.group/index.html link inactive since Cue revised its website. Images and video of All-in-one Machine downloaded from Cue’s website on 5/26/2021.
[2] https://cue.group/#/newsdetails?id=2020_005 2020年04月02日, (posting removed as of 4/4/2022), originally accessed at https://cue.group/news/index.html accessed and downloaded 7/3/21, professional translation. Also a news story posted here: https://www.36kr.com/newsflashes/3280086532097. Zhuhai Zhongdun’s partnership is described in a 2019 article here: https://tech.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201910/28/WS5db690e7a31099ab995e8371.html dated 10/28/2019, professional translation.
[3] The Wire China, “The Surveillance Stake,” 2/20/2022, p. 2. https://www.thewirechina.com/2022/02/20/the-surveillance-stake/