With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.
[naomiklein.org] Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn’t exist. Back in those
days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run
rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples.
That was before the Communist Party chose it — thanks to its location
close to Hong Kong’s port — to be China’s first "special economic
zone," one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a
trial basis. The theory behind the experiment was that the "real" China
would keep its socialist soul intact while profiting from the
private-sector jobs and industrial development created in Shenzhen. The
result was a city of pure commerce, undiluted by history or rooted
culture — the crack cocaine of capitalism. It was a force so addictive
to investors that the Shenzhen experiment quickly expanded, swallowing
not just the surrounding Pearl River Delta, which now houses roughly
100,000 factories, but much of the rest of the country as well. Today,
Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance
that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops,
sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair,
possibly your car and almost certainly your printer.Hundreds of luxury
condominiums tower over the city; many are more than 40 stories high,
topped with three-story penthouses. Newer neighborhoods like Keji Yuan
are packed with ostentatiously modern corporate campuses and decadent
shopping malls. Rem Koolhaas, Prada’s favorite architect, is building a
stock exchange in Shenzhen that looks like it floats — a design
intended, he says, to "suggest and illustrate the process of the
market." A still-under-construction superlight subway will soon connect
it all at high speed; every car has multiple TV screens broadcasting
over a Wi-Fi network. At night, the entire city lights up like a
pimped-out Hummer, with each five-star hotel and office tower competing
over who can put on the best light show.
Many of the big American players have set up shop in Shenzhen, but they
look singularly unimpressive next to their Chinese competitors. The
research complex for China’s telecom giant Huawei, for instance, is so
large that it has its own highway exit, while its workers ride home on
their own bus line. Pressed up against Shenzhen’s disco shopping
centers, Wal-Mart superstores — of which there are nine in the city —
look like dreary corner stores. (China almost seems to be mocking us:
"You call that a superstore?") McDonald’s and KFC appear every few
blocks, but they seem almost retro next to the Real Kung Fu fast-food
chain, whose mascot is a stylized Bruce Lee.
American commentators like CNN’s Jack Cafferty dismiss the Chinese as
"the same bunch of goons and thugs they’ve been for the last 50 years."
But nobody told the people of Shenzhen, who are busily putting on a
24-hour-a-day show called "America" — a pirated version of the
original, only with flashier design, higher profits and less
complaining. This has not happened by accident. China today, epitomized
by Shenzhen’s transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a
new way to organize society. Sometimes called "market Stalinism," it is
a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian
communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant
surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.
Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the
upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a
laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social
experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras
have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces,
disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be
connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that
will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its
range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment.
Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they
will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make
it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts
only half a million surveillance cameras.)
The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech
surveillance and censorship program known in China as "Golden Shield."
The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology —
thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and
General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where
Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald’s Happy
Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the
official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the
unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking
out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government
hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent
before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the
world’s attention at Tiananmen Square.
Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people
go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient
delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police
state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies,
pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric. And the global corporations
currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely
to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities
such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American
parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.
Zhang Yi points to an empty bracket on the dashboard of his black
Honda. "It used to hold my GPS, but I leave it at home now," he says.
"It’s the crime — they are too easy to steal." He quickly adds, "Since
the surveillance cameras came in, we have seen a very dramatic decrease
in crime in Shenzhen."
After driving for an hour past hundreds of factory gates and industrial
parks, we pull up to a salmon-color building that Zhang partly owns.
This is the headquarters of FSAN: CCTV System. Zhang, a prototypical
Shenzhen yuppie in a royal-blue button-down shirt and black-rimmed
glasses, apologizes for the mess. Inside, every inch of space is lined
with cardboard boxes filled with electronics parts and finished
products.
Zhang opened the factory two and a half years ago, and his investment
has already paid off tenfold. That kind of growth isn’t unusual in the
field he has chosen: Zhang’s factory makes digital surveillance
cameras, turning out 400,000 a year. Half of the cameras are shipped
overseas, destined to peer from building ledges in London, Manhattan
and Dubai as part of the global boom in "homeland security." The other
half stays in China, many right here in Shenzhen and in neighboring
Guangzhou, another megacity of 12 million people. China’s market for
surveillance cameras enjoyed revenues of $4.1 billion last year, a jump
of 24 percent from 2006.
Zhang escorts me to the assembly line, where rows of young workers,
most of them women, are bent over semiconductors, circuit boards, tiny
cables and bulbs. At the end of each line is "quality control," which
consists of plugging the camera into a monitor and making sure that it
records. We enter a showroom where Zhang and his colleagues meet with
clients. The walls are lined with dozens of camera models: domes of all
sizes, specializing in day and night, wet and dry, camouflaged to look
like lights, camouflaged to look like smoke detectors, explosion-proof,
the size of a soccer ball, the size of a ring box.
The workers at FSAN don’t just make surveillance cameras; they are
constantly watched by them. While they work, the silent eyes of
rotating lenses capture their every move. When they leave work and
board buses, they are filmed again. When they walk to their
dormitories, the streets are lined with what look like newly installed
streetlamps, their white poles curving toward the sidewalk with black
domes at the ends. Inside the domes are high-resolution cameras, the
same kind the workers produce at FSAN. Some blocks have three or four,
one every few yards. One Shenzhen-based company, China Security &
Surveillance Technology, has developed software to enable the cameras
to alert police when an unusual number of people begin to gather at any
given location.
In 2006, the Chinese government mandated that all Internet cafes (as
well as restaurants and other "entertainment" venues) install video
cameras with direct feeds to their local police stations. Part of a
wider surveillance project known as "Safe Cities," the effort now
encompasses 660 municipalities in China. It is the most ambitious new
government program in the Pearl River Delta, and supplying it is one of
the fastest-growing new markets in Shenzhen.
But the cameras that Zhang manufactures are only part of the massive
experiment in population control that is under way here. "The big
picture," Zhang tells me in his office at the factory, "is
integration." That means linking cameras with other forms of
surveillance: the Internet, phones, facial-recognition software and GPS
monitoring.
This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be
watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote
monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls,
monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet
access will be aggressively limited through the country’s notorious
system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their
movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable
computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police
databases and linked to their holder’s personal data. This is the most
important element of all: linking all these tools together in a
massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information,
work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there
will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3
billion faces.
Shenzhen is the place where the shield has received its most extensive
fortifications — the place where all the spy toys are being hooked
together and tested to see what they can do. "The central government
eventually wants to have city-by-city surveillance, so they could just
sit and monitor one city and its surveillance system as a whole," Zhang
says. "It’s all part of that bigger project. Once the tests are done
and it’s proven, they will be spreading from the big province to the
cities, even to the rural farmland."
In fact, the rollout of the high-tech shield is already well under way.
When the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was set alight in March, the world
caught a glimpse of the rage that lies just under the surface in many
parts of China. And though the Lhasa riots stood out for their ethnic
focus and their intensity, protests across China are often shockingly
militant. In July 2006, workers at a factory near Shenzhen expressed
their displeasure over paltry pay by overturning cars, smashing
computers and opening fire hydrants. In March of last year, when bus
fares went up in the rural town of Zhushan, 20,000 people took to the
streets and five police vehicles were torched. Indeed, China has seen
levels of political unrest in recent years unknown since 1989, the year
student protests were crushed with tanks in Tiananmen Square. In 2005,
by the government’s own measure, there were at least 87,000 "mass
incidents" — governmentspeak for large-scale protests or riots.
This increased unrest — a process aided by access to cellphones and the
Internet — represents more than a security problem for the leaders in
Beijing. It threatens their whole model of command-and-control
capitalism. China’s rapid economic growth has relied on the ability of
its rulers to raze villages and move mountains to make way for the
latest factory towns and shopping malls. If the people living on those
mountains use blogs and text messaging to launch a
mountain-people’s-rights uprising with each new project, and if they
link up with similar uprisings in other parts of the country, China’s
dizzying expansion could grind to a halt.
At the same time, the success of China’s ravenous development creates
its own challenges. Every rural village that is successfully razed to
make way for a new project creates more displaced people who join the
ranks of the roughly 130 million migrants roaming the country looking
for work. By 2025, it is projected that this "floating" population will
swell to more than 350 million. Many will end up in cities like
Shenzhen, which is already home to 7 million migrant laborers.
But while China’s cities need these displaced laborers to work in
factories and on construction sites, they are unwilling to offer them
the same benefits as permanent residents: highly subsidized education
and health care, as well as other public services. While migrants can
live for decades in big cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, their
residency remains fixed to the rural community where they were born, a
fact encoded on their national ID cards. As one young migrant in
Guangzhou put it to me, "The local people want to make money from
migrant workers, but they don’t want to give them rights. But why are
the local people so rich? Because of the migrant workers!"
With its militant protests and mobile population, China confronts a
fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system based on two
dramatically unequal categories of people: the winners, who get the
condos and cars, and the losers, who do the heavy labor and are denied
those benefits? More urgently, how can it do this when information
technology threatens to link the losers together into a movement so
large it could easily overwhelm the country’s elites?
The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests recently,
the surveillance system was thrown into its first live test, with every
supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age — cellphones,
satellite television, the Internet — transformed into a method of
repression and control. As soon as the protests gathered steam, China
reinforced its Great Firewall, blocking its citizens from accessing
dozens of foreign news outlets. In some parts of Tibet, Internet access
was shut down altogether. Many people trying to phone friends and
family found that their calls were blocked, and cellphones in Lhasa
were blitzed with text messages from the police: "Severely battle any
creation or any spreading of rumors that would upset or frighten people
or cause social disorder or illegal criminal behavior that could damage
social stability."
During the first week of protests, foreign journalists who tried to get
into Tibet were systematically turned back. But that didn’t mean that
there were no cameras inside the besieged areas. Since early last year,
activists in Lhasa have been reporting on the proliferation of
black-domed cameras that look like streetlights — just like the ones I
saw coming off the assembly line in Shenzhen. Tibetan monks complain
that cameras — activated by motion sensors — have invaded their
monasteries and prayer rooms.
During the Lhasa riots, police on the scene augmented the footage from
the CCTVs with their own video cameras, choosing to film — rather than
stop — the violence, which left 19 dead. The police then quickly cut
together the surveillance shots that made the Tibetans look most
vicious — beating Chinese bystanders, torching shops, ripping metal
sheeting off banks — and created a kind of copumentary: Tibetans Gone
Wild. These weren’t the celestial beings in flowing robes the Beastie
Boys and Richard Gere had told us about. They were angry young men,
wielding sticks and long knives. They looked ugly, brutal, tribal. On
Chinese state TV, this footage played around the clock.
The police also used the surveillance footage to extract mug shots of
the demonstrators and rioters. Photos of the 21 "most wanted" Tibetans,
many taken from that distinctive "streetlamp" view of the domed
cameras, were immediately circulated to all of China’s major news
portals, which obediently posted them to help out with the manhunt. The
Internet became the most powerful police tool. Within days, several of
the men on the posters were in custody, along with hundreds of others.
The flare-up in Tibet, weeks before the Olympic torch began its global
journey, has been described repeatedly in the international press as a
"nightmare" for Beijing. Several foreign leaders have pledged to
boycott the opening ceremonies of the games, the press has hosted an
orgy of China-bashing, and the torch became a magnet for protesters,
with anti-China banners dropped from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden
Gate Bridge. But inside China, the Tibet debacle may actually have been
a boon to the party, strengthening its grip on power. Despite its
citizens having unprecedented access to information technology (there
are as many Internet users in China as there are in the U.S.), the
party demonstrated that it could still control what they hear and see.
And what they saw on their TVs and computer screens were violent
Tibetans, out to kill their Chinese neighbors, while police showed
admirable restraint. Tibetan solidarity groups say 140 people were
killed in the crackdown that followed the protests, but without
pictures taken by journalists, it is as if those subsequent deaths
didn’t happen.
Chinese viewers also saw a world unsympathetic to the Chinese victims
of Tibetan violence, so hostile to their country that it used a
national tragedy to try to rob them of their hard-won Olympic glory.
These nationalist sentiments freed up Beijing to go on a full-fledged
witch hunt. In the name of fighting a war on terror, security forces
rounded up thousands of Tibetan activists and supporters. The end
result is that when the games begin, much of the Tibetan movement will
be safely behind bars — along with scores of Chinese journalists,
bloggers and human-rights defenders who have also been trapped in the
government’s high-tech web.
Police State 2.0 might not look good from the outside, but on the inside, it appears to have passed its first major test.
In Guangzhou, an hour and a half by train from Shenzhen, Yao Ruoguang
is preparing for a major test of his own. "It’s called the
10-million-faces test," he tells me.
Yao is managing director of Pixel Solutions, a Chinese company that
specializes in producing the new high-tech national ID cards, as well
as selling facial-recognition software to businesses and government
agencies. The test, the first phase of which is only weeks away, is
being staged by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing. The idea is
to measure the effectiveness of face-recognition software in
identifying police suspects. Participants will be given a series of
photos, taken in a variety of situations. Their task will be to match
the images to other photos of the same people in the government’s
massive database. Several biometrics companies, including Yao’s, have
been invited to compete. "We have to be able to match a face in a 10
million database in one second," Yao tells me. "We are preparing for
that now."
The companies that score well will be first in line for lucrative
government contracts to integrate face-recognition software into Golden
Shield, using it to check for ID fraud and to discover the identities
of suspects caught on surveillance cameras. Yao says the technology is
almost there: "It will happen next year."
When I meet Yao at his corporate headquarters, he is feeling confident
about how his company will perform in the test. His secret weapon is
that he will be using facial-recognition software purchased from L-1
Identity Solutions, a major U.S. defense contractor that produces
passports and biometric security systems for the U.S. government.
To show how well it works, Yao demonstrates on himself. Using a camera
attached to his laptop, he snaps a picture of his own face, round and
boyish for its 54 years. Then he uploads it onto the company’s
proprietary Website, built with L-1 software. With the cursor, he marks
his own eyes with two green plus signs, helping the system to measure
the distance between his features, a distinctive aspect of our faces
that does not change with disguises or even surgery. The first step is
to "capture the image," Yao explains. Next is "finding the face."
He presses APPLY, telling the program to match the new face with photos
of the same person in the company’s database of 600,000 faces.
Instantly, multiple photos of Yao appear, including one taken 19 years
earlier — proof that the technology can "find a face" even when the
face has changed significantly with time."
It took 1.1 milliseconds!" Yao exclaims. "Yeah, that’s me!"
In nearby cubicles, teams of Yao’s programmers and engineers take each
other’s pictures, mark their eyes with green plus signs and test the
speed of their search engines. "Everyone is preparing for the test,"
Yao explains. "If we pass, if we come out number one, we are guaranteed
a market in China."
Every couple of minutes Yao’s phone beeps. Sometimes it’s a work
message, but most of the time it’s a text from his credit-card company,
informing him that his daughter, who lives in Australia, has just made
another charge. "Every time the text message comes, I know my daughter
is spending money!" He shrugs: "She likes designers."
Like many other security executives I interviewed in China, Yao denies
that a primary use of the technology he is selling is to hunt down
political activists. "Ninety-five percent," he insists, "is just for
regular safety." He has, he admits, been visited by government spies,
whom he describes as "the internal-security people." They came with
grainy pictures, shot from far away or through keyhole cameras, of
"some protesters, some dissidents." They wanted to know if Yao’s
facial-recognition software could help identify the people in the
photos. Yao was sorry to disappoint them. "Honestly, the technology so
far still can’t meet their needs," he says. "The photos that they show
us were just too blurry." That is rapidly changing, of course, thanks
to the spread of high-resolution CCTVs. Yet Yao insists that the
government’s goal is not repression: "If you’re a [political]
organizer, they want to know your motive," he says. "So they take the
picture, give the photo, so at least they can find out who that person
is."
Until recently, Yao’s photography empire was focused on consumers —
taking class photos at schools, launching a Chinese knockoff of Flickr
(the original is often blocked by the Great Firewall), turning photos
of chubby two-year-olds into fridge magnets and lampshades. He still
maintains those businesses, which means that half of the offices at
Pixel Solutions look like they have just hosted a kid’s birthday party.
The other half looks like an ominous customs office, the walls lined
with posters of terrorists in the cross hairs: FACE MATCH, FACE PASS,
FACE WATCH. When Beijing started sinking more and more of the national
budget into surveillance technologies, Yao saw an opportunity that
would make all his previous ventures look small. Between more powerful
computers, higher-resolution cameras and a global obsession with crime
and terrorism, he figured that face recognition "should be the next
dot-com."
Not a computer scientist himself — he studied English literature in
school — Yao began researching corporate leaders in the field. He
learned that face recognition is highly controversial, with a track
record of making wrong IDs. A few companies, however, were scoring much
higher in controlled tests in the U.S. One of them was a company soon
to be renamed L-1 Identity Solutions. Based in Connecticut, L-1 was
created two years ago out of the mergers and buyouts of half a dozen
major players in the biometrics field, all of which specialized in the
science of identifying people through distinct physical traits:
fingerprints, irises, face geometry. The mergers made L-1 a one-stop
shop for biometrics. Thanks to board members like former CIA director
George Tenet, the company rapidly became a homeland-security heavy
hitter. L-1 projects its annual revenues will hit $1 billion by 2011,
much of it from U.S. government contracts.
In 2006, Yao tells me, "I made the first phone call and sent the first
e-mail." For a flat fee of $20,000, he gained access to the company’s
proprietary software, allowing him to "build a lot of development
software based on L-1’s technology." Since then, L-1’s partnership with
Yao has gone far beyond that token investment. Yao says it isn’t really
his own company that is competing in the upcoming 10-million-faces test
being staged by the Chinese government: "We’ll be involved on behalf of
L-1 in China." Yao adds that he communicates regularly with L1 and has
visited the company’s research headquarters in New Jersey. ("Out the
window you can see the Statue of Liberty. It’s such a historic place.")
L1 is watching his test preparations with great interest, Yao says. "It
seemed that they were more excited than us when we tell them the
results."
L-1’s enthusiasm is hardly surprising: If Yao impresses the Ministry of
Public Security with the company’s ability to identify criminals, L-1
will have cracked the largest potential market for biometrics in the
world. But here’s the catch: As proud as Yao is to be L-1’s Chinese
licensee, L-1 appears to be distinctly less proud of its association
with Yao. On its Website and in its reports to investors, L-1 boasts of
contracts and negotiations with governments from Panama and Saudi
Arabia to Mexico and Turkey. China, however, is conspicuously absent.
And though CEO Bob LaPenta makes reference to "some large international
opportunities," not once does he mention Pixel Solutions in Guangzhou.
After leaving a message with the company inquiring about L-1’s
involvement in China’s homeland-security market, I get a call back from
Doni Fordyce, vice president of corporate communications. She has
consulted Joseph Atick, the company’s head of research. "We have
nothing in China," she tells me. "Nothing, absolutely nothing. We are
uninvolved. We really don’t have any relationships at all."
I tell Fordyce about Yao, the 10-million test, the money he paid for
the software license. She’ll call me right back. When she does, 20
minutes later, it is with this news: "Absolutely, we’ve sold testing
SDKs [software development kits] to Pixel Solutions and to others [in
China] that may be entering a test." Yao’s use of the technology, she
said, is "within his license" purchased from L-1.
The company’s reticence to publicize its activities in China could have
something to do with the fact that the relationship between Yao and L-1
may well be illegal under U.S. law. After the Chinese government sent
tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989, Congress passed legislation
barring U.S. companies from selling any products in China that have to
do with "crime control or detection instruments or equipment." That
means not only guns but everything from police batons and handcuffs to
ink and powder for taking fingerprints, and software for storing them.
Interestingly, one of the "detection instruments" that prompted the
legislation was the surveillance camera. Beijing had installed several
clunky cameras around Tiananmen Square, originally meant to monitor
traffic flows. Those lenses were ultimately used to identify and arrest
key pro-democracy dissidents.
"The intent of that act," a congressional staff member with
considerable China experience tells me, "was to keep U.S. companies out
of the business of helping the Chinese police conduct their business,
which might ultimately end up as it did in 1989 in the suppression of
human rights and democracy in China."
Pixel’s application of L-1 facial-recognition software seems to fly in
the face of the ban’s intent. By his own admission, Yao is already
getting visits from Chinese state spies anxious to use facial
recognition to identify dissidents. And as part of the 10-million-faces
test, Yao has been working intimately with Chinese national-security
forces, syncing L-1’s software to their vast database, a process that
took a week of intensive work in Beijing. During that time, Yao says,
he was on the phone "every day" with L-1, getting its help adapting the
technology. "Because we are representing them," he says. "We took the
test on their behalf."
In other words, this controversial U.S. "crime control" technology has
already found its way into the hands of the Chinese police. Moreover,
Yao’s goal, stated to me several times, is to use the software to land
lucrative contracts with police agencies to integrate facial
recognition into the newly built system of omnipresent surveillance
cameras and high-tech national ID cards. As part of any contract he
gets, Yao says, he will "pay L-1 a certain percentage of our sales."
When I put the L-1 scenario to the Commerce Department’s Bureau of
Industry and Security — the division charged with enforcing the
post-Tiananmen export controls — a representative says that software
kits are subject to the sanctions if "they are exported from the U.S.
or are the foreign direct product of a U.S.-origin item." Based on both
criteria, the software kit sold to Yao seems to fall within the ban.
When I ask Doni Fordyce at L-1 about the embargo, she tells me, "I
don’t know anything about that." Asked whether she would like to find
out about it and call me back, she replies, "I really don’t want to
comment, so there is no comment." Then she hangs up.
You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it
has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive
information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It
boasts a database of 60 million records, and it "captures" more than a
million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the
company does: produces passports and passport cards for American
citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the
Department of Homeland Security’s massive U.S.-Visit program; equips
U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with "mobile iris and multimodal
devices" so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the
State Department’s "largest facial-recognition database system"; and
produces driver’s licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In
addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called
SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in "extremely
general" terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth
roughly $100 million, the company’s CEO would only say, "Stay tuned."
It is L-1’s deep integration with multiple U.S. government agencies
that makes its dealings in China so interesting: It isn’t just L-1 that
is potentially helping the Chinese police to nab political dissidents,
it’s U.S. taxpayers. The technology that Yao purchased for just a few
thousand dollars is the result of Defense Department research grants
and contracts going as far back as 1994, when a young academic named
Joseph Atick (the research director Fordyce consulted on L-1’s China
dealings) taught a computer at Rockefeller University to recognize his
face.
Yao, for his part, knows all about the U.S. export controls on police
equipment to China. He tells me that L-1’s electronic fingerprinting
tools are "banned from entering China" due to U.S. concerns that they
will be used to "catch the political criminals, you know, the
dissidents, more easily." He thinks he and L-1 have found a legal
loophole, however. While fingerprinting technology appears on the
Commerce Department’s list of banned products, there is no explicit
mention of "face prints" — likely because the idea was still in the
realm of science fiction when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place.
As far as Yao is concerned, that omission means that L-1 can legally
supply its facial-recognition software for use by the Chinese
government.
Whatever the legality of L-1’s participation in Chinese surveillance,
it is clear that U.S. companies are determined to break into the
homeland-security market in China, which represents their biggest
growth potential since 9/11. According to the congressional staff
member, American companies and their lobbyists are applying "enormous
pressure to open the floodgates."
The crackdown in Tibet has set off a wave of righteous rallies and
boycott calls. But it sidesteps the uncomfortable fact that much of
China’s powerful surveillance state is already being built with U.S.
and European technology. In February 2006, a congressional subcommittee
held a hearing on "The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or
Suppression?" Called on the carpet were Google (for building a special
Chinese search engine that blocked sensitive material), Cisco (for
supplying hardware for China’s Great Firewall), Microsoft (for taking
down political blogs at the behest of Beijing) and Yahoo (for complying
with requests to hand over e-mail-account information that led to the
arrest and imprisonment of a high-profile Chinese journalist, as well
as a dissident who had criticized corrupt officials in online
discussion groups). The issue came up again during the recent Tibet
uproar when it was discovered that both MSN and Yahoo had briefly put
up the mug shots of the "most wanted" Tibetan protesters on their
Chinese news portals.
In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same
defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and
censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in
China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit
access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of
freedom in China. It’s a story that glosses over the much larger
scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding
into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole
purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars
building Police State 2.0. This isn’t an unfortunate cost of doing
business in China: It’s the goal of doing business in China. "Come help
us spy!" the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world’s
leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.
As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing
has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working
with Chinese police to "set up an elaborate computer monitoring system
to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing’s
most populated districts." General Electric is providing Beijing police
with a security system that controls "thousands of video cameras
simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or
fast-moving objects, like people running." IBM, meanwhile, is
installing its "Smart Surveillance System" in the capital, another
system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United
Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a "2,000-camera
network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a
citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian
Games in 2010." By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will
be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has
allocated for reconstructing Iraq.
"We’re at the start of a massive boom in Chinese security spending,"
according to Graham Summers, a market analyst who publishes an investor
newsletter in Baltimore. "And just as we need to be aware of how to
profit from the growth in China’s commodity consumption, we need to be
aware of companies that will profit from ’security consumption.‘ . . .
There’s big money to be made."
While U.S. companies are eager to break into China’s rapidly expanding
market, every Chinese security firm I come across in the Pearl River
Delta is hatching some kind of plan to break into the U.S. market. No
one, however, is quite as eager as Aebell Electrical Technology, one of
China’s top 10 security companies. Aebell has a contract to help secure
the Olympic swimming stadium in Beijing and has installed more than
10,000 cameras in and around Guangzhou. Business has been growing by
100 percent a year. When I meet the company’s fidgety general manager,
Zheng Sun Man, the first thing he tells me is "We are going public at
the end of this year. On the Nasdaq." It also becomes clear why he has
chosen to speak with a foreign reporter: "Help, help, help!" he begs
me. "Help us promote our products!"
Zheng, an MBA from one of China’s top schools, proudly shows me the
business card of the New York investment bank that is handling Aebell’s
IPO, as well as a newly printed English-language brochure showing off
the company’s security cameras. Its pages are filled with American
iconography, including businessmen exchanging wads of dollar bills and
several photos of the New York skyline that prominently feature the
World Trade Center. In the hall at company headquarters is a poster of
two interlocking hearts: one depicting the American flag, the other the
Aebell logo.
I ask Zheng whether China’s surveillance boom has anything to do with
the rise in strikes and demonstrations in recent years. Zheng’s deputy,
a 23-year veteran of the Chinese military wearing a black Mao suit,
responds as if I had launched a direct attack on the Communist Party
itself. "If you walk out of this building, you will be under
surveillance in five to six different ways," he says, staring at me
hard. He lets the implication of his words linger in the air like an
unspoken threat. "If you are a law-abiding citizen, you shouldn’t be
afraid," he finally adds. "The criminals are the only ones who should
be afraid."
One of the first people to sound the alarm on China’s upgraded police
state was a British researcher named Greg Walton. In 2000, Walton was
commissioned by the respected human-rights organization Rights &
Democracy to investigate the ways in which Chinese security forces were
harnessing the tools of the Information Age to curtail free speech and
monitor political activists. The paper he produced was called "China’s
Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance
Technology in the People’s Republic of China." It exposed how big-name
tech companies like Nortel and Cisco were helping the Chinese
government to construct "a gigantic online database with an
all-encompassing surveillance network — incorporating speech and face
recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records and
Internet surveillance technologies."v
When the paper was complete, Walton met with the institute’s staff to
strategize about how to release his explosive findings. "We thought
this information was going to shock the world," he recalls. In the
midst of their discussions, a colleague barged in and announced that a
plane had hit the Twin Towers. The meeting continued, but they knew the
context of their work had changed forever.
Walton’s paper did have an impact, but not the one he had hoped. The
revelation that China was constructing a gigantic digital database
capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening
to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases sparked
neither shock nor outrage. Instead, Walton says, the paper was "mined
for ideas" by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies
hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools. For
Walton, the most chilling moment came when the Defense Department tried
to launch a system called Total Information Awareness to build what it
called a "virtual, centralized grand database" that would create
constantly updated electronic dossiers on every citizen, drawing on
banking, credit-card, library and phone records, as well as footage
from surveillance cameras. "It was clearly similar to what we were
condemning China for," Walton says. Among those aggressively vying to
be part of this new security boom was Joseph Atick, now an executive at
L-1. The name he chose for his plan to integrate facial-recognition
software into a vast security network was uncomfortably close to the
surveillance system being constructed in China: "Operation Noble
Shield."
Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams hatched by men
like Atick have already been put into practice at home. New York,
Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with linking
surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police use of
surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now routine, and the
images collected can be mined for "face prints," then cross-checked
with ever-expanding photo databases. Although Total Information
Awareness was scrapped after the plans became public, large pieces of
the project continue, with private data-mining companies collecting
unprecedented amounts of information about everything from Web browsing
to car rentals, and selling it to the government.
Such efforts have provided China’s rulers with something even more
valuable than surveillance technology from Western democracies: the
ability to claim that they are just like us. Liu Zhengrong, a senior
official dealing with China’s Internet policy, has defended Golden
Shield and other repressive measures by invoking the Patriot Act and
the FBI’s massive e-mail-mining operations. "It is clear that any
country’s legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal
information," he said. "We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job
on this front." Lin Jiang Huai, the head of China Information Security
Technology, credits America for giving him the idea to sell biometric
IDs and other surveillance tools to the Chinese police. "Bush helped me
get my vision," he has said. Similarly, when challenged on the fact
that dome cameras are appearing three to a block in Shenzhen and
Guangzhou, Chinese companies respond that their model is not the East
German Stasi but modern-day London.
Human-rights activists are quick to point out that while the tools are
the same, the political contexts are radically different. China has a
government that uses its high-tech web to imprison and torture peaceful
protesters, Tibetan monks and independent-minded journalists. Yet even
here, the lines are getting awfully blurry. The U.S. currently has more
people behind bars than China, despite a population less than a quarter
of its size. And Sharon Hom, executive director of the advocacy group
Human Rights in China, says that when she talks about China’s horrific
human-rights record at international gatherings, "There are two words
that I hear in response again and again: Guantánamo Bay."
The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure
made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters
understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to
trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any
government can change rapidly — which is why the Constitution places
limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could
never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today. The global
homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion —
more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that
size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found —
which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new
enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.
In Shenzhen one night, I have dinner with a U.S. business consultant
named Stephen Herrington. Before he started lecturing at Chinese
business schools, teaching students concepts like brand management,
Herrington was a military-intelligence officer, ascending to the rank
of lieutenant colonel. What he is seeing in the Pearl River Delta, he
tells me, is scaring the hell out of him — and not for what it means to
China.
"I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration
who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed
here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home," he
says. "We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras. Once you
have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful
tracking system. I’m worried about what this will mean if the U.S.
government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies
more than they are already. I’m worried about the threat this poses to
American democracy."
Herrington pauses. "George W. Bush," he adds, "would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could."
China-bashing never fails to soothe the Western conscience — here is a
large and powerful country that, when it comes to human rights and
democracy, is so much worse than Bush’s America. But during my time in
Shenzhen, China’s youngest and most modern city, I often have the
feeling that I am witnessing not some rogue police state but a global
middle ground, the place where more and more countries are converging.
China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks,
Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming
more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping,
indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).
What is most disconcerting about China’s surveillance state is how
familiar it all feels. When I check into the Sheraton in Shenzhen, for
instance, it looks like any other high-end hotel chain — only the lobby
is a little more modern and the cheerful clerk doesn’t just check my
passport but takes a scan of it.
"Are you making a copy?" I ask.
"No, no," he responds helpfully. "We’re just sending a copy to the police."
Up in my room, the Website that pops up on my laptop looks like every
other Net portal at a hotel — only it won’t let me access human-rights
and labor Websites that I know are working fine. The TV gets CNN
International — only with strange edits and obviously censored
blackouts. My cellphone picks up a strong signal for the China Mobile
network. A few months earlier, in Davos, Switzerland, the CEO of China
Mobile bragged to a crowd of communications executives that "we not
only know who you are, we also know where you are." Asked about
customer privacy, he replied that his company only gives "this kind of
data to government authorities" — pretty much the same answer I got
from the clerk at the front desk.
When I leave China, I feel a powerful relief: I have escaped. I am home
safe. But the feeling starts to fade as soon as I get to the customs
line at JFK, watching hundreds of visitors line up to have their
pictures taken and fingers scanned. In the terminal, someone hands me a
brochure for "Fly Clear." All I need to do is have my fingerprints and
irises scanned, and I can get a Clear card with a biometric chip that
will let me sail through security. Later, I look it up: The company
providing the technology is L-1.
Source: http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
