The Chinese government is brutalizing its Muslim Uyghur population in the western province of Xinjiang, in what Omer Kanat, the director of the Uyghur Human Rights Watch, calls a “genocide without the gas chambers.” Up to two million Uyghurs are reportedly being held in detention centers, where they have allegedly been separated from their families and in many cases tortured.

This horrifying situation is built on the scaffolding of mass surveillance. Cameras fill the marketplaces and intersections of the key city of Kashgar. Recording devices are placed in homes and even in bathrooms. Checkpoints that limit the movement of Muslims are often outfitted with facial recognition devices to vacuum up the population’s biometric data. As China seeks to export its suite of surveillance tech around the world, Xinjiang is a kind of R&D incubator, with the local Muslim population serving as guinea pigs in a laboratory for the deprivation of human rights.

Nothing in the U.S. compares. But the use of novel surveillance tools to monitor, terrify, and even oppress minority citizens is not a foreign concept.

The latest episode of Crazy/Genius, produced by Jesse Brenneman and Patricia Yacob, tells the tale of two surveillance states. The first is Xinjiang, China. The second is Brooklyn, New York.

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