Please note that Naomi is working on a new book and
updating this site very infrequently.
China's All-Seeing Eye
By Naomi Klein - May 14th, 2008
Published in Rolling Stone
#1 International
Bestseller
Translated into over 30
languages
Watch Naomi's TED
talk on our culture of
reckless risk taking
Naomi talks to Bill
Moyers about
Hurricane Sandy,
climate change, and
capitalism
THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM
More about the Book | Reviews | Disaster Capitalism in Action
"The only book of the last few years in American publishing that I
would describe as a mandatory must-read. Literally the only one."
-Rachel Maddow
Around the world in Britain, the United States, Asia and the Middle East, there are
people with power who are cashing in on chaos; exploiting bloodshed and
catastrophe to brutally remake our world in their image. They are the shock
doctors. Thrilling and revelatory, The Shock Doctrine cracks open the secret
history of our era. Exposing these global profiteers, Naomi Klein discovered
information and connections that shocked even her about how comprehensively
the shock doctors' beliefs now dominate our world - and how this domination has
been achieved. Raking in billions out of the tsunami, plundering Russia, exploiting
Iraq - this is the chilling tale of how a few are making a killing while more are
getting killed.
Read More at ShockDoctrine.com.
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
1 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21
With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech
police state. It is ready for export.
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,
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
2 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21
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 blackrimmed
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, explosionproof,
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
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
3 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21
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!"
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
4 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21
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.
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
5 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21
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
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
6 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21
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 homelandsecurity
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
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
7 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21
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.
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
8 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21
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."
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
9 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21
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 Englishlanguage
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 humanrights
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
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
10 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21
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
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
11 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21
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.
Read a Q & A with Naomi about her experiences reporting on this story.
See Thomas Lee's slideshow documenting Shenzhen's special surveillance zone.
China's All-Seeing Eye | Naomi Klein http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008/05/chinas-all-seeing-eye
12 of 12 12/Feb/13 15:21