[DAC] Coming to your town

[Lucilda Cooper]

Very interesting Uncle Sam turned Big Brother action on the horizon -  
coming soon to your neighborhood.

Love,
Lucilda
www.Lucilda.com



Begin forwarded message:

> From: sukhdevsingh puri <iamsspuri at hotmail.com>
>
> Subject: China's All-Seeing Eye
>
>
>
>
> Printer Friendly
> URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/ 
> chinas_allseeing_eye
> Rollingstone.com
> Back to China's All-Seeing Eye
> China's All-Seeing Eye
>
> With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the  
> prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.
>
> NAOMI KLEIN
> Posted May 29, 2008 3:24 PM
> Advertisement
>
> • Photo Gallery: A View of (and From) the Security Cameras Watching  
> Over China as Part of the Golden Shield
> • Naomi Klein Speaks About Her Experiences Reporting "China's All- 
> Seeing Eye"
> • Read a Q&A With Author Naomi Klein About Her Book The Shock  
> DoctrineThirty 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."
> 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.
> [From Issue 1053 — May 29, 2008]
>
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/ 
> chinas_allseeing_eye/print
>
>
> __._,_.___
> Messages in this topic (1) Reply (via web post) | Start a new topic
> Messages | Files | Photos | Links | Database | Polls | Members
>
> “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the  
> result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the  
> enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If  
> you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every  
> battle.”
>
>
> --Sun Tzu, Art of War
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
> Change settings via email: Switch delivery to Daily Digest | Switch  
> format to Traditional
> Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | Unsubscribe
> Recent Activity
> 16
> New Members
> 1
> New Files
> Visit Your Group
> Moderator Central
> An online resource
> for moderators
> of Yahoo! Groups.
> Yahoo! Groups
> Join people over 40
> who are finding ways
> to stay in shape.
> Learn to live
> a full life with these
> healthy living
> groups on Yahoo!
> .
>
> __,_._,___
>
> WL Messenger : Stay connected to friends and family with the New  
> Windows Live Messenger. Get it now. Try it now!

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.thedac.org/pipermail/dacmail_thedac.org/attachments/20080526/dc431577/attachment-0001.html