AMERICAN CORPORATIONS BUILD HIGH TECH CHINESE POLICE STATE

ROLLING STONE
<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye/2>

- As China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming
Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is . . . serving as a laboratory, a testing
ground for the next phase of [a] 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. . .

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. . .

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.





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