August 12, 2007
Chinese
Launch High-Tech Plan to Track People
By KEITH BRADSHER
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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/business/worldbusiness/
