[Infowarrior] - In China, a High-Tech Plan to Track People

[Richard Forno]

August 12, 2007
In China, a High-Tech Plan to Track People
By KEITH BRADSHER

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/business/worldbusiness/12security.html?ei=
5065&en=2d7edb61ed14cb4d&ex=1187496000&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print
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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 citizen¹s name and address but
also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police
record, medical insurance status and landlord¹s phone number. Even personal
reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China¹s
controversial ³one child² policy. Plans are being studied to add credit
histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Security experts describe China¹s plans as the world¹s 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.

³If 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,² 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 Shenzhen¹s plans.

³I don¹t think they are remotely comparable, and even in Britain it¹s quite
controversial,² 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.

³We have a very good relationship with U.S. companies like I.B.M., Cisco,
H.P., Dell,² said Robin Huang, the chief operating officer of China Public
Security. ³All of these U.S. companies work with us to build our system
together.²

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. ³Of course our projects could be used by the military,
but because it¹s politically sensitive, I don¹t want to do it,² 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
officer¹s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. Mr. Huang
used a real-time connection to local police dispatchers¹ 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 citizen¹s
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. Shenzhen¹s
red-light districts have a nationwide reputation for murders and other
crimes.