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Post by Christ is My Life! Sat Aug 25, 2007 3:28 am

China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People



By KEITH BRADSHER - NYT



August 12, 2007





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 alreadyinstall 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.

--
Christ is My Life!
Christ is My Life!
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Post by Christ is My Life! Sat Aug 25, 2007 3:31 am

The Need to Know



New York Times Editorial



August 11, 2007





Like many in this country who were angered when Congress

rushed to rubber-stamp a bill giving President Bush even

more power to spy on Americans, we took some hope from the

vow by Congressional Democrats to rewrite the new law after

summer vacation. The chance of undoing the damage is slim,

unless the White House stops stonewalling and gives

lawmakers and the public the information they need to

understand this vital issue.



Just before rushing off to their vacations, and campaign

fund-raising, both houses tried to fix an anachronism in the

1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires

the government to get a warrant to eavesdrop on

conversations and e-mail messages if one of the people

communicating is inside the United States. The court that

enforces the law concluded recently that warrants also are

required to intercept messages if the people are outside the

United States, but their communications are routed through

data exchanges here.



The House and Senate had sensible bills trying to fix that

Internet-age problem, which did not exist in 1978. But that

wasn't enough for Mr. Bush and his aides, who whipped up

their usual brew of fear to kill off those bills. Then they

cowed the Democrats into passing a bill giving Mr. Bush

powers that go beyond even the illegal wiretapping he has

been doing since the 9/11 attacks.



The new measure eviscerates the protections of FISA,

allowing the attorney general to decide when to eavesdrop -

without a warrant - on any telephone call or e-mail message,

so long as one of the people communicating is "reasonably

believed" to be outside the country. The courts have no real

power over such operations.



The only encouraging notes were that the new law has a

six-month expiration date, and that leaders of both houses

of Congress said they would start revising it immediately.

But there's a big catch: most lawmakers have no idea what

eavesdropping is already going on or what Mr. Bush's

justification was in the first place for ignoring the law

and ordering warrantless spying after 9/11.



The administration has refused to say how much warrantless

spying it has been doing. Clearly, it is more than Mr. Bush

has acknowledged, but Americans need to know exactly how far

their liberties have been breached and whether the operation

included purely domestic eavesdropping. And why did Mr. Bush

feel compelled to construct an outlaw eavesdropping

operation - apart, that is, from his broader effort to

expand presidential power and evade checks and balances?



It's not that FISA makes it too hard; the court approves

virtually every warrant request. It's not an issue of speed.

The law allows the government to initiate surveillance and

get a warrant later if necessary.



Instead of answering these questions, the administration has

done its best to ensure that everyone stays confused. It has

refused repeated requests by Senator Jay Rockefeller, the

Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee,

for documents relating to the president's order creating the

spying program, and the Justice Department's legal

justifications for it.



When this issue resurfaces, Mr. Bush will undoubtedly claim

executive privilege, as he has done whenever he has been

asked to come clean with Americans about his

decision-making. But those documents should be handed overwithout delay for review by all members of Congress. We also

agree with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has

petitioned the FISA court, which normally works in secret,

to make public its opinion on the scope of the government's

wiretapping powers.



If Mr. Bush wants Americans to give him and his successors

the power to spy on them at will, Americans should be

allowed to know why it's supposedly so necessary and how

much their freedoms are being abridged. If Congress once

again allows itself to be cowed by Mr. Bush's

fear-mongering, it must accept responsibility for

undermining the democratic values that separate this nation
from the terrorists that Mr. Bush claims to be fighting.
Christ is My Life!
Christ is My Life!
Administrator
Administrator

Female Number of posts : 895
Age : 54
Location : Somewhere between here and there...and praying.
Humor : yup, I have some!
Registration date : 2007-05-18

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile

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