China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People
Pastor Dale Morgan
August 12, 2007
*China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People*
By KEITH BRADSHER
SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 12 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras
are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon
be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed
company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and
detect unusual activity.
Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across
Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with
powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to
most citizens.
Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address
but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity,
police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number.
Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of
China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add
credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to
the card.
Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to
meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the
activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology
can be used to violate civil rights.
The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology
to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million
people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.
Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better
controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10
million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also
help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on
an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are
becoming more common.
“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they
cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to
control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice
president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology,
the company providing the technology.
Incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the
money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano,
Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks —
Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in
New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong — helped raise the
money.
Shenzhen, a computer manufacturing center next to Hong Kong, is the
first Chinese city to introduce the new residency cards. It is also
taking the lead in China in the large-scale use of law enforcement
surveillance cameras — a tactic that would have drawn international
criticism in the years after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989.
But rising fears of terrorism have lessened public hostility to
surveillance cameras in the West. This has been particularly true in
Britain, where the police already install the cameras widely on lamp
poles and in subway stations and are developing face recognition
software as well.
New York police announced last month that they would install more than
100 security cameras to monitor license plates in Lower Manhattan by the
end of the year. Police officials also said they hoped to obtain
financing to establish links to 3,000 public and private cameras in the
area by the end of next year; no decision has been made on whether face
recognition technology has become reliable enough to use without the
risk of false arrests.
Shenzhen already has 180,000 indoor and outdoor closed-circuit
television cameras owned by businesses and government agencies, and the
police will have the right to link them on request into the same system
as the 20,000 police cameras, according to China Public Security.
Some civil rights activists contend that the cameras in China and
Britain are a violation of the right of privacy contained in the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Large-scale surveillance in China is more threatening than surveillance
in Britain, they said when told of Shenzhen’s plans.
“I don’t think they are remotely comparable, and even in Britain it’s
quite controversial,” said Dinah PoKempner, the general counsel of Human
Rights Watch in New York. China has fewer limits on police power, fewer
restrictions on how government agencies use the information they gather
and fewer legal protections for those suspected of crime, she noted.
While most countries issue identity cards, and many gather a lot of
information about citizens, China also appears poised to go much further
in putting personal information on identity cards, Ms. PoKempner added.
Every police officer in Shenzhen now carries global positioning
satellite equipment on his or her belt. This allows senior police
officers to direct their movements on large, high-resolution maps of the
city that China Public Security has produced using software that runs on
the Microsoft Windows operating system.
“We have a very good relationship with U.S. companies like I.B.M.,
Cisco, H.P., Dell,” said Robin Huang, the chief operating officer of
China Public Security. “All of these U.S. companies work with us to
build our system together.”
The role of American companies in helping Chinese security forces has
periodically been controversial in the United States. Executives from
Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems testified in February 2006 at
a Congressional hearing called to review whether they had deliberately
designed their systems to help the Chinese state muzzle dissidents on
the Internet; they denied having done so.
China Public Security proudly displays in its boardroom a certificate
from I.B.M. labeling it as a partner. But Mr. Huang said that China
Public Security had developed its own computer programs in China and
that its suppliers had sent equipment that was not specially tailored
for law enforcement purposes.
The company uses servers manufactured by Huawei Technologies of China
for its own operations. But China Public Security needs to develop
programs that run on I.B.M., Cisco and Hewlett-Packard servers because
some Chinese police agencies have already bought these models, Mr. Huang
said.
Mr. Lin said he had refrained from some transactions with the Chinese
government because he is the chief executive of a company incorporated
in the United States. “Of course our projects could be used by the
military, but because it’s politically sensitive, I don’t want to do
it,” he said.
Western security experts have suspected for several years that Chinese
security agencies could track individuals based on the location of their
cellphones, and the Shenzhen police tracking system confirms this.
When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global
positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the
location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest
cellphone towers. Mr. Huang used a real-time connection to local police
dispatchers’ computers to show a detailed computer map of a Shenzhen
district and the precise location of each of the 92 patrolling officers,
represented by caricatures of officers in blue uniforms and the routes
they had traveled in the last hour.
All Chinese citizens are required to carry national identity cards with
very simple computer chips embedded, providing little more than the
citizen’s name and date of birth. Since imperial times, a principal
technique of social control has been for local government agencies to
keep detailed records on every resident.
The system worked as long as most people spent their entire lives in
their hometowns. But as ever more Chinese move in search of work, the
system has eroded. This has made it easier for criminals and dissidents
alike to hide from police, and it has raised questions about whether
dissatisfied migrant workers could organize political protests without
the knowledge of police.
Little more than a collection of duck and rice farms until the late
1970s, Shenzhen now has 10.55 million migrants from elsewhere in China,
who will receive the new cards, and 1.87 million permanent residents,
who will not receive cards because local agencies already have files on
them. Shenzhen’s red-light districts have a nationwide reputation for
murders and other crimes.