Chinese bystanders peeking at a Shanghai reporter's laptop. (Photo : Getty Images News)
China's Internet and public opinion monitoring company Knowlesys aims to make it in the international market after over a decade of domestic success.
Knowlesys intends to get ready going up against U.S., Russian and Western competitors by attending several major surveillance industry trade shows in 2017. Representatives of Knowlesys will be present at such events as ISS World in Europe and the Milipol in the Middle East to make sales pitches to potential customers in Asia and Europe.
In Knowlesys' industry, being "Made in China" carries a lot of weight as the country produces the most effective Internet surveillance systems. A key facet of what Knowlesys supplies is the close and deep monitoring of public opinion and open source content.
The Knowlesys Intelligence System (KIS) sells social media and open source Internet monitoring and analysis tools.
A couple of years ago, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Toronto claimed that China is using a powerful tool that could intercept and redirect Web traffic.
This happened after China flooded American websites with heavy Internet traffic with the intention to take out websites that are blocked in China.
Governmental customers use the KIS to censor websites and platforms.
Knowlesys is available in several languages including Arabic, English, Chinese and Uyghur, the language in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
The surveillance industry trade shows have grown rapidly over the last seven years due not only to technological advancement but also to a widespread fear of an Arab Spring repeating elsewhere, according to ISS World founder Jerry Lucas. Those protests and upheavals were driven in large part by the quick and innovative adoption of social media among new communities in the Middle East.
As a result, the ability to effectively monitor and analyze social media has tempted governments to buy products like the Knowlesys Web Data Miner System and Knowlesys Intelligence System.
Knowlesys is used by major Western companies, including Virgin Media, and Chinese corporate behemoths like Alibaba and Sina. The company is used extensively to watch platforms like Twitter and Sina Weibo, China's leading microblogging service.
