In China, a High-Tech Plan to Track People
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In China, a High-Tech Plan to Track People
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/business/worldbusiness/12security.html
SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 - 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.