Repost: : interview with Naomi Klein, more on China's police state technology
author: Joe Blow
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Excerpt from Democracy Now broadcast
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Excerpt: Naomi Klein's article on China's police-state tech for Rollingstone (Amy Goodman's democracynow interview)
AMY GOODMAN: Naomi Klein, we only have five minutes, and I really want to get to the piece you did in Rolling Stone—you just returned from China—"China's All-Seeing Eye." "With the help of US defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export." Tell us what you found?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, yeah, I was in China a couple months ago, and the piece came out recently, and you can read it still on the Rolling Stone website. And I concentrated on the Pearl River Delta, on the city of Shenzhen. And, you know, this is the part of China that is really the—I guess the sweatshop to the world, their workshop to the world. This is where probably half of everything most us own is made. Hundreds of thousands of factories, a lot of technology, a lot of garments. It is now a new kind—it's always been a laboratory for this manufacturing model, for the globalization manufacturing model, and it was born as a laboratory. The city of Shenzhen didn't exist in 1980. It was a collection of fishing villages. And now it's a city of more than 12 million people.
And there's a new experiment happening in Shenzhen, where a high-tech police state is being built. And there are hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras, of surveillance cameras, in the city. There are plans to have two million cameras in the city of Shenzhen and to network them, which is the key, so that they're all part of the same network. They can be monitored from a centralized police location. And it isn't just the cameras on the streets. It's cameras in internet cafes, cameras in private restaurants, so a total convergence between the private and the public when it comes to putting the people under surveillance.
And the money for building this high-tech police state—and it includes also biometric IDs, facial recognition software. It's sort of the future that has already been imagined in multiple sort of science fiction films, but that we actually don't yet have in North America yet, because there are still some civil liberties and privacy protections that prevent all of the technologies from being networked together to create this all-seeing eye. In China, you have the perfect situation, because you have a government that actually makes no claims for the rights to privacy of its citizens. And so, corporations like General Electric, Honeywell, have been flocking to China, and they've been delighted that, first of all, they've been able to get contracts—
AMY GOODMAN: And General Electric, which owns NBC.
NAOMI KLEIN: Which owns NBC. A lot of the contracts have been issued in the name of Olympic security. Olympic security is—you know, we know the Olympics are always massive corporate welfare endeavors, with new stadiums, new infrastructure. Well, now, in the post-9/11 context, Olympics are also huge business for the security industry. The Olympics provides the excuse for massive new investments in cameras on public transit, checkpoints and subways, biometric identification cards. And we're seeing this in Vancouver, which has the 2010 Olympic Games. But in China, it's completely out of control.
Just to put this in context, the estimate is that China is spending $13 billion in the name of security for the Olympics. And let's remember, all of these toys that are being sold to the Chinese government by companies like General Electric are staying after the Olympics and to be used against the domestic population. So it gets installed in the name of protecting the athletes, protecting the foreign dignitaries, but it stays and is able to be used against the local population, and I think in violation of the sanctions policies that were passed after the Tiananmen Square massacre, which actually made it illegal for American companies to sell police equipment to the Chinese government, precisely because it can be used to repress the population. But now, because it's being packaged as antiterrorism security in the context of an international event, they've sort of found a backdoor way into it. But, yeah, once again, to put it in context, Amy—and I know we're running out of time—$13 billion for Olympic security in Beijing this summer. The first Olympics after 9/11 were in Athens, and they spent $1.5 billion. So, since Athens, the increase in security spending has gone from $1.5 billion to $13 billion.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about Police State 2.0 not looking good from the outside, but on the inside it appears to have passed the first major test.
NAOMI KLEIN: Right. And that was a reference to the ways in which these technologies were used in Tibet during the crackdown against protesters in riots. What we saw is that the Chinese government really let the riots get out of hand in Lhasa. And what they did is they just concentrated on filming. So there was a lot of violence, and the CCTV cameras that had been installed in Lhasa—
AMY GOODMAN: Closed-circuit TV.
NAOMI KLEIN: The closed-circuit TV cameras. Also the police and military did a lot of their own filming. And then they cut together this sort of "Tibetans Gone Wild" videos, and that's what passed for journalism, because, of course, they kept the foreign journalists out of Lhasa, and so it was just the surveillance footage that they showed to the world to try to turn public opinion against the Tibetans.
But more than that, we also saw the ways in which the internet companies cooperated with the Chinese government. So they used the surveillance cameras to extract photographs and made a most-wanted list of twenty-one Tibetans who they wanted to arrest, and then those wanted lists were posted on all of the portals in China, including briefly Yahoo's portal and MSN's portal.
AMY GOODMAN: And what does that mean? They posted them, and then... ?
NAOMI KLEIN: And then they took them down, because, of course, there's been a lot of controversy about American companies, like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft, cooperating with the Chinese government to go after dissidents and so on. So they've been called before Congress on this. It's been a public relations disaster for Yahoo. And this was another example of that kind of cooperation.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, as we move into the Olympics, we're going to have you back, Naomi. Thank you so much for being here. Her book is called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, just out in paperback.
 http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/15/with_crises_in_fuel_food_housing
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