Another Chinese Import for America

This from the keen mind of Naomi Klein

China's Hi-Tech Surveillance State Is Ready for Export
Ms. Klein's views about "McCommunism"
in an interview at Democracy Now!
A snippet from it below:

Amy Goodman: Well, Naomi Klein, following your line on surveillance in China, let's go back to the United States. We're moving into the conventions. And by the way, Democracy Now! will be there for the Democratic convention in Denver -- we're expanding to two hours -- and in St. Paul, where also we'll be broadcasting two hours every day. But we're just getting word out of Denver, for example, CBS 4 exposed that there are warehouses prepared with pens and barbed wire for jailed protesters, with warnings on the wall: stun guns -- beware of stun gun use.

Naomi Klein: Yeah. And I mean, I think the timing of this is really interesting, that -- you know, that the global sort of media spotlight is going to move from Beijing to Denver to Minneapolis. And we're really going to have an opportunity to actually see how globalized this surveillance state is. And, you know, I really think we're seeing a kind of a global middle ground emerge, where China is becoming more like the United States in very visible ways, and the United States is becoming more like China in less visible ways. So, many of the things that people are really ready to condemn about the surveillance and police state tactics being used in Beijing right now -- the surveillance cameras everywhere, the banning of protests or the pushing of protesters into these protest pens that are empty because people are too afraid to use them, pre-emptive arrests -- you know, we are going to see this in Denver -- unmanned drones and so on. So I think we are very vividly going to see this meeting in the middle, if you will, of these tactics.

Amy Goodman: And in China, the corporations that are involved with supplying China with this surveillance equipment that will be there long after the Olympics?

Naomi Klein: Exactly. This -- you know, one of the things that I think people forget is that it's actually illegal to sell police equipment to China. This was a law passed after Tiananmen Square, precisely to prevent American technology from being used for repressive purposes. And the Olympics have really been just this incredible opportunity for high-tech -- American high-tech surveillance firms, because they've been able somehow to sell police equipment to China, very high-tech police equipment to China, not in the name of domestic policing, but in the name of securing an international sporting event, which of course is attended by the President of the United States, and nobody wants anything bad to happen to him. So, you know, in many ways, the Olympics have provided this backdoor way for all of this American technology and equipment, policing equipment, to flow into China.

And of course, as people like Sharon Hom, head of Human Rights in China, have been saying now for months, all of this equipment is staying in China after the Games. And it will be directed at many of the workers who Christian is talking about.

Amy Goodman: And the corporations involved?

Naomi Klein: Honeywell, IBM, General Electric, Google, Yahoo -- I mean, we've heard about this. But in terms of building the surveillance state, one company to really watch is L1. They are doing the fingerprinting and iris scanning in the United States, and they've been selling this software to Chinese companies that are embedding it in their Golden Shield network.

More here

Another fine article by Ms. Klein about how the path of
the Chinese Police State leads right to Wall Street, here

"The goal of all this central planning and spying is not to celebrate the glories of Communism, regardless of what China's governing party calls itself. It is to create the ultimate consumer cocoon for Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cell phones, McDonald's happy meals, Tsingtao beer, and UPS delivery -- to name just a few of the official Olympic sponsors. But the hottest new market of all is the surveillance itself. Unlike the police states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, China has built a Police State 2.0, an entirely for-profit affair that is the latest frontier for the global Disaster Capitalism Complex.

"Chinese corporations financed by U.S. hedge funds, as well as some of American's most powerful corporations -- Cisco, General Electric, Honeywell, Google -- have been working hand in glove with the Chinese government to make this moment possible: networking the closed circuit cameras that peer from every other lamp pole, building the "Great Firewall" that allows for remote internet monitoring, and designing those self-censoring search engines.

"By next year, the Chinese internal security market is set to be worth $33-billion. Several of the larger Chinese players in the field have recently taken their stocks public on U.S. exchanges, hoping to cash in the fact that, in volatile times, security and defense stocks are seen as the safe bets. China Information Security Technology, for instance, is now listed on the NASDAQ and China Security and Surveillance is on the NYSE. A small clique of U.S. hedge funds has been floating these ventures, investing more than $150-million in the past two years. The returns have been striking. Between October 2006 and October 2007, China Security and Surveillance's stock went up 306 percent.

"Much of the Chinese government's lavish spending on cameras and other surveillance gear has taken place under the banner of "Olympic Security." But how much is really needed to secure a sporting event? The price tag has been put at a staggering $12-billion -- to put that in perspective, Salt Lake City, which hosted the Winter Olympics just five months after September 11, spent $315 million to secure the games. Athens spent around $1.5-billion in 2004. Many human rights groups have pointed out that China's security upgrade is reaching far beyond Beijing: there are now 660 designated "safe cities" across the country, municipalities that have been singled out to receive new surveillance cameras and other spy gear. And of course all the equipment purchased in the name of Olympics safety -- iris scanners, "anti-riot robots" and facial recognition software -- will stay in China after the games are long gone, free to be directed at striking workers and rural protestors."