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Naomi Klein: China's Hi-Tech Surveillance State Is Ready for Export

By Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, Democracy Now!
Posted on August 18, 2008

With 300,000 security cameras in Beijing alone, China is at the forefront of the surveillance boom -- and U.S. corporations are reaping the profits.

Juan Gonzalez: China deported five international activists [last week] for unfurling a "Free Tibet" banner over the top of an Olympic Games billboard. It's the latest incident in what has become an almost daily crackdown on both domestic and international protesters who have had to contend with a brand new surveillance system that China set up ahead of the games. This includes 300,000 security cameras and an estimated 100,000 security officers on duty in Beijing.

But it's not just Beijing that's gotten a security upgrade. There are now over 600 "safe" cities in China that have received new surveillance gear. The equipment and integrated security systems will remain long after the Olympics, to be used, many fear, on China's own population. The domestic surveillance market in China is expected to reach $33 billion next year. And some of the biggest beneficiaries of this boom are U.S. hedge funds and corporations, such as Cisco, General Electric and Google.

Amy Goodman: Award-winning journalist and bestselling author Naomi Klein calls this "McCommunism." Her latest article published in the Huffington Post is called "The Olympics: Unveiling Police State 2.0." Naomi Klein is author of The Shock Doctrine. She joins us on the phone from Canada.

We're also joined in our firehouse studio by investigative journalist and author Christian Parenti, who's also just back from China. His latest piece for The Nation magazine is called "Class Struggle in the New China".

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Naomi Klein, let's begin with you. Lay out what you also called in Rolling Stone the "all-seeing eye."

Naomi Klein: Well, there's an incredible operation going on in China to use the latest, what's now called homeland security technology -- networked surveillance cameras, biometric identification cards, facial recognition software -- networking all of these cameras and running the software through it as a way to control an increasingly rebellious population. There's an incredible statistic from 2005 that there were 87,000 mass incidents, which means protests and riots, across the country.

So it is already being used as a way to control the population and also to keep an eye on what in China is called the floating population, the migrant population, who are displaced by mega projects, who travel to cities like Beijing and Guangzhou and Shenzhen looking for work. This is a mobile population that is right now 130 million people. And this technology is used to keep track of those people, because in a sort of Maoist time in China, you had -- where people stayed in their communities, you had networks of control and surveillance that were really about people snitching on their neighbors. When people are moving across long distances, the technology is replacing that. So "Police State 2.0" is really about upgrading the surveillance system, with the help, as you said earlier, of U.S. companies like Cisco, General Electric, who have been providing these technologies.

Juan Gonzalez: Your article talks about -- calls it the "Golden Shield," as the Chinese refer to it, and you focus especially on the city of Shenzhen, in terms of the enormous reach of this. I was struck that you mentioned, for instance, that every internet cafe in China has surveillance cameras that are hooked up to local police stations so that they can keep an eye on who is using the internet cafes?

Naomi Klein: Yeah, and the internet cafes are -- you know, they're really like internet bowling alleys. They're huge. An average-size internet cafe has 600 terminals. And there are dozens of cameras in the -- not just obviously the cameras on the computers, but surveillance cameras. And this is a huge market. You mentioned that it's worth $33 billion a year now. It's actually -- that's even increased since I wrote that article. The latest estimate is that it's going to be worth $43 billion, and -- a year within two years.

And the reason why this is such a fast-growing market is that it's not just that the internet cafes are installing these cameras; it's that it's a law now in China that they are required to install the cameras. So are at religious sites, so are entertainment sites, karaoke bars, restaurants. So, the government passes a law and says you must install these surveillance cameras, the companies comply, and then you have another set of companies who are connected to the party and also, as you said, to American companies. Many of them are listed on the NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange. And they are benefiting directly from this created market, this mandated market. You must install security cameras, so no wonder this is such a fast-growing market.

And we know that the global homeland security industry, which is now worth $200 billion globally, it really follows the money. So, after September 11th, that money was, in the U.S., in these huge expenditures on surveillance technology. It then moved to Iraq, and now it's really moved to China.

Amy Goodman: Can you talk about the significance of when the Olympics was awarded to China?

Naomi Klein: Yeah. I think this is really important for us to look at, at this point, because, in many ways, I think this moment provides us with a benchmark to understand exactly how much the standards on human rights have been eroded since September 11th, because China was awarded the Games exactly seven years ago, in July 2001, so right before the September 11th attacks. And, of course, it was very controversial. But there was of virtual consensus, among U.S. officials, at least, that the global scrutiny that would be placed on China in the lead-up to the Olympics would lead to an opening up, would force a democratization process, would lead to a freer press, would lead to more freedoms for human rights activists.

And that really hasn't happened. In fact, I think it's quite surprising how little scrutiny there has been on China's human rights record. And part of that has been that there -- any kind of moral suasion that there could have been, certainly from the United States -- and obviously one has to temper this, because I don't think that the U.S. -- the human rights record pre-September 11th was anything to brag about -- but any ability to sort of put moral pressure on China on human rights has really been eroded since September 11, and particularly when you see that China has moved to this high-tech version of repression and surveillance, which means it's much less in your face, it's four security cameras on a block as opposed to tanks.

And it looks a lot like what's happening in London, what's happening in New York, with the normalization of these technologies, and also, in the U.S., with the normalization of the loss of habeas corpus, of indefinite detention, of the normalization of torture. So, what we see in this timeline, from when China was awarded the Games to now in this moment when they are staging the Games, is not just that human rights have taken a step back in China, but that globally we've really lost our bearings.

Juan Gonzalez: And, of course, with China, there is the reality that the country has become the industrial heartland of worldwide capitalism, in terms of the sheer number of production workers that are churning out goods. And, Christian, your article deals with what's happened to the workers in China and to all -- in all of these factories, and what is life like in this surveillance state, but also a state that has become critical to worldwide capitalism.

Christian Parenti: Yeah, and despite a long history of repression under Chinese communism and the legacy of the Cultural Revolution in this increasing use of surveillance, there's actually quite a lot of class struggle, to use an old-fashioned term. By one estimate, supposedly from the Chinese government leaked to independent labor activists, a thousand people a day in Shenzhen, the main industrial city in the south, are involved in some sort of labor action.

So, what I looked at in this article was peasant and worker resistance. And there is actually evidence that despite the odds against them, they're having some success. And one major measure of this is the fact that the new government that came in 2002, 2003, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, have responded to the growing discontent, not necessarily out of some sort of enlightened set of theories, but pragmatically they've actually passed a number of laws, which may or may not pan out to be good, but on paper give greater rights to peasants. They removed one of the main taxes on them, giving them more legal rights to oppose displacement, passed a very good labor law that gives workers basically tenure status. They used to be basically serving at the pleasure of their employers, could be fired without cause. Now they have to have cause, and after a certain period of time they have long-term contracts. Business pundits condemn the law as introducing European-style inflexibility. And this is giving workers some leverage and is actually raising wages.

And, interestingly, there's a long tradition, dating from Tiananmen days, of trying to create an independent trade union movement in China. That has been crushed. That is a non-starter. But the current government has encouraged workers -- well, it said that it wants to see all private -- 80 percent of private firms unionize, but through the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. So I thought this was kind of ridiculous as a state union. But when you actually go to Shenzhen and connect with the underground labor movement, many of whom are suffering from severe repression, usually from local authorities in league with Hong Kong, Taiwanese and local capitalists producing stuff on contract for Wal-Mart, Kmart, everybody else, surprisingly, these underground labor activists and their allies in Hong Kong, some of whom are veterans of Tiananmen, have actually -- their position is that now what has to happen is that they have to renovate the official union and, you know, not take it over, but actually work within it to turn it into a real union that will defend workers' rights.

So there's something interesting going on in response to this rising discontent over the last couple years, whereby the central government is growing concerned about the really wild brutality and corruption of many local governments, the way that's antagonizing workers, the way workers are pushing, pushing, pushing, and they realize there has to be something given to the working class of China. Wages have to rise. And there has to be some modicum of rights for that class, which is, as you say, absolutely essential to the engine of global capitalism.

Juan Gonzalez: But yet, the vast majority of people in China are still in the countryside, right? So what is happening in terms of the peasantry of China?

Christian Parenti: Yeah, in the countryside, one of the main problems people face is, along with environmental degradation is, these continued land grabs. One of the -- the village I profiled in the article was fighting to keep its land because a big state-owned coal company wanted to strip mine it. And so, this is one cause of displacement.

The other thing is that the countryside is still very, very poor. There has been, in the last two decades, the rise of what are called the township and village enterprises, which are these usually kind of hybrid local-, state- plus foreign capital-owned firms, which are providing some industrial work. But due to displacement by industry and poverty, people are leaving the countryside, and they're organizing there. In last year in Anhui, a group of villages refused to pay taxes, and that actually led to the government saying, "OK, we're going to abolish this, this tax law, because the peasants are clearly under serious pressure, and we can, you know, use repression to force them to continue to live in poverty and pay their taxes and ask for serious trouble, or we can just remove this tax and, you know, force employers to actually pay a little bit more." And, you know, ten percent growth for ten years in a row means there is enough money to go around for the working class to -- you know, for there to be greater redistribution through higher wages.

Amy Goodman: Do you feel the Olympics has had an effect on what is going on now in China, this increased international scrutiny, or is there?

Christian Parenti: In terms of international scrutiny, it seems mostly to be around the issue of Tibet and broad human rights stuff. And the issue of labor has not come up that much.

In China, I was struck by the way that the earthquake and the Olympics really re-instilled or reignited an intense nationalism and almost a defensiveness around people who, in many cases, were actually involved in struggles against local authorities and were very apologetic about it. In the article, I discuss these guys who organized basically an independent trade union and had these wildcat strikes, but they're, "Well, no, they weren't protests. They were just big meetings at the factory. We just wanted to communicate with the bosses." And they were like, you know, almost apologetic about opposing the country and causing troubles for the country. So that's one main effect that the Olympics is having internally, is to sort of, you know, change the subject and instill this kind of national state of mind.

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.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

© 2008 Democracy Now! All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/95310/

Oh Really.....................

Drawing by R Crumb

July 30, 2008
Tricycle's Daily Dharma

Yes, Really

Practice can be stated very simply. It is moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others. That seems so simple--except when we substitute for real practice some idea that we should be different or better than we are, or that our lives should be different from the way they are. When we substitute our ideas about what should be (such notions as "I should not be angry or confused or unwilling") for our life as it truly is, then we're off base and our practice is barren.


-- Charlotte Joko Beck, in Everyday Zen
from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book

I'm So Grateful...I Made It Out Of My Mooning Days Alive....

Dutch man injures posterior in mooning accident


Utrecht police say a 21-year-old Dutch man is recovering after a "mooning" that went horribly wrong.

A police statement says the man and two others had run down a street in Utrecht with their pants pulled down in the back "for a joke."

It says that at one point the 21-year-old "pushed his behind against the window of a restaurant" that broke and resulted in "deep wounds to his derriere."

The statement released Tuesday says police detained the three men after the incident Sunday morning. But the cafe owner decided not to press charges after the men agreed to pay for the broken window.

The injured man was treated for his injuries at a nearby hospital.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press

The Real Pornographers.....

The Pornography of Power: Lust for Empire Has Weakened America

By Emily Wilson, AlterNet Posted on July 25, 2008


Robert Scheer has been a journalist for 30 years, over which time he has interviewed presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, as well as other major political figures. For years a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and now for the San Francisco Chronicle, he's currently the editor-in-chief at Truthdig.com and represents the left point of view on KCRW's political radio show "Left, Right and Center." In addition to print and radio, Scheer has also worked in movies: He played a reporter in Warren Beatty's "Bullworth" and was a project consultant for Oliver Stone's "Nixon."

Scheer is the author of eight books, among them, Playing President: My Close Encounters with Nixon, Carter, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton -- And How They Did Not Prepare Me for George W. Bush (Akashic Books, 2006). His latest is The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. In it, Scheer takes on the United States' foreign policy, arguing that our military budget, which amounts to more than the rest of the world's combined, has gotten completely out of control. AlterNet writer Emily Wilson recently sat down with Scheer at a restaurant in San Francisco to hear his views on the federal government, the media's complicity in war, the rise of the neocons and how even Nixon got some things right.

Emily Wilson: You write in the acknowledgements that you had one book in mind, but your editor wanted you to do this book. Why did he want this book?

Robert Scheer: I had just given a lecture to this libertarian convention. It was called "Ike was Right," and it reflected some of the evolution of my own thinking. I no longer am enamored of the big federal state, because most of what it does I oppose -- particularly once Clinton cut the welfare program. We no longer have a federal program to aid poor people. We don't have a poverty program. And Clinton, with his Financial Services Modernization Act, managed to give the banks everything they wanted and take away more rights from the state. It used to be that in California we had a limit on interest payments. States had reasonable, populist-inspired controls over corporations. And then there's the Telecommunications Act. We used to believe communications should be in part locally owned to have diversity and so forth; that's all gone bye-bye with the Telecommunications Act. So there you go: You have three things the Clinton administration, presumably a progressive administration, did that took away three reasons that I would care about the federal government.

… Now, as my book lays out, six out of ten dollars of the discretionary budget go to the military, and in Congress they're scrambling over how to use the other four out of ten for the other things we care about. So my concern is, all right, let's let California keep its money, let's keep it on a state level -- and in my book I even argue that's what the founders had in mind. I quote George Washington, who's my great hero in this book: They knew if you got into empire you weren't going to have representative democracy. Because when you're on the local level, people can be informed, they can demand the truth, there isn't classification, there isn't national security -- and when you get to empire and foreign adventures (being) the norm, not the exception, is to be lied to and not to discover the truth for 20, 30, 40 years or whatever. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which Johnson and McNamara said was the basis for expanding the war to North Vietnam, was based on a lie, that they knew to be a lie when they went to the nation and said we were attacked. They knew there was no evidence of an attack. We didn't learn that for 20 years.

So my feeling before I went to the libertarian convention was … what do I think about the federal government? We needed the federal government when a guy like Roosevelt was our president and we could set some standards of child labor and the right to organize unions, and pay people adequately, and health and safety and so forth. But what the federal government has come to mean is basically an arm of the military industrial complex that favors big business and big agriculture. We'd be better off with the states just keeping their tax dollars and using them to educate their people, and fix their levies, and deal with their subprime mortgage scandals, and all the other things we want money for.

EW: You say the administration used 9/11 as an excuse for this military spending.

RS: Most of the pundits make themselves stupid in the interest of their careers. They devote very little time to looking back at what happened, what are the lessons to be learned, and so forth. I was at one conference at the University of California at Berkeley, sponsored by the journalism school, and they had this one panel titled "Did we get it wrong?" I pointed out: You guys got it wrong, but some of us got it right, and a good chunk of people in the streets around the world got it right. Really, the more interesting question is: "Why did you let yourselves be had in this way? Why were you so easy to co-opt?" And it has to do with fear. It was the trauma of 9/11: You didn't want to be on the wrong side of it, and the people who own your broadcasting stations and your newspapers were afraid if they lost viewers and readers, they wouldn't come back. And these cable lunatics of the right, the O'Reillys and Rush Limbaughs, they might be picking up this big fan base and you forgot your obligations under the Constitution to inform the public. And I said: More importantly you didn't look back at anything. You didn't look at the history of Iraq; where does Saddam Hussein come from? … You went along with the crap about weapons of mass destruction, but also, you didn't look carefully at the politics of that area. Didn't you know that if you invade Iraq, all you're going to do is strengthen Iran?

The whole fallacy, the lie that most people subscribe to in the media and the elite, is that adults are watching the store. Sensible, solid people are making sensible, solid decisions. They may get it wrong from time to time, but it was not for lack of effort and work and serious discussion of NBC and "Meet the Press." The fact is, you look at what they've been reporting on for most of my adult life since World War II, and it's mostly gibberish.

EW: But you make it sound in The Pornography of Power like our foreign policy was more sane before this Bush was president, and that people like his father and Nixon were more moderate on defense.

RS: We've had a struggle between the realists and the adventurists, as I call them, going back to Nixon's opening to China. I wrote a Nixon re-evaluation for the L.A. Times in the '80s. That does not make Nixon a great man. I think he was a war criminal. Once he went and visited China and was making peace with bloody communist dictators like Mao; how in the world could you justify escalating a war to stop the spread of communism? It was absurd. But he did -- and millions of Indo-Chinese died as a result. I'm not trying to exonerate Nixon, but in opening to China and in developing detente with the Soviets, he undermined the whole basis of the Cold War. He said, communist is nationalist, not internationalist, and it's capable of change. And he was right. That's why the communist governments of Vietnam and China are competing for shelf space at Wal-Mart.

In response to Nixon, you had the development of the neoconservatives. This is where they come from. They were grouped around Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the senator from Washington who was called the "Senator from Boeing." Richard Perle worked for him, and Paul Wolfowitz, and so forth. These people were very angry with Nixon, and they started all this threat inflation, and fear of the enemy, and so forth -- and Nixon was suddenly seen as a pinko or something or weak on defense. That's where it all starts. And then the Soviet Union did collapse -- and not because we invaded, but because the economy sucked.

The neocons used every trick in the book to attack Nixon. All of it was aimed at undermining the detente with the Soviets and the opening to China and bringing us to a much more primitive imperialist position, which they favored. These people are mostly ex-Trotskyists, or there fathers are … and they believe in permanent revolution, only now it's from the right rather than from the left. But it's the same notion: You have to make turmoil, you have to break eggs to make an omelet, and they've combined that with a Pax Americana mission that Reagan had, that we are the keepers of the flame, we are the sanest, smartest, most wonderful people in the world; everything we do, even when it's all screwed up, is done for good reasons -- and we're the indispensable agent to human progress. So they become the neocons. They're not really conservative in any way at all; they're betraying the conservative tradition of this country as defined by Washington and Eisenhower, and they get us into these incredible adventures.

Well, they were going nowhere fast because the facts were undermining them. The fact was, the world was becoming multipolar; we didn't have an enemy in sight, and George Bush's father in 1992 gave a speech that was of historic significance. He said the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is dead, and I've ordered my secretary of defense to cut defense spending by 30 percent. And Dick Cheney, who was his secretary of defense, went along.

EW: You write about how McCain launched a Mr. Smith-style crusade against a deal with Boeing and the Air Force. Do you think he would cut the military budget? How about Obama?

RS: I don't know what McCain or Obama will do when one becomes president. I am quite enthusiastic about Barack Obama. I like his freshness. I like that he can think out loud, and I like that he has been tough in his opposition to the Iraq War. I like his willingness to advance negotiation rather than conquest -- as opposed to Hillary, who was talking about obliterating Iran. I mean, what God-given right do we have to obliterate 80 million people? A country that we have screwed around with ever since we overthrew Mohammed Mosaddeq 54 years ago? Obama said he would talk to them. He didn't say, "I'd give away the store." He didn't say, "I'll endorse anything they do." He said he would talk to them. And then you have McCain acting the total fool, saying, "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran," like it's some kind of game. You know, metal piercing the skins of children -- and that's a game?

So I think Barack Obama has been a good candidate, and I respect his ability to engage young people. So (it's not that) I don't think there is a big difference between Obama and McCain. I do.

… I'm very worried about McCain on … a very critical issue, because it really goes to the heart of … the prospect for peace and war. The Democrats scare me a little. Republicans scare me more because I don't see any Eisenhowers or even Nixons in the ranks of the Republicans. The Republican Party has moved very far right, and people like Nixon would be considered flaming peacenik liberals by today's standards. After all, Nixon believed in a guaranteed annual income for everyone. Imagine if Clinton had done that instead of wiping out welfare. And Nixon believed in the Environmental Protection Agency. He did many sensible things. He did terrible things in escalating the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, but he broke the whole momentum of the Cold War by opening to China. By today's standard there are no Republicans like that.

On the other hand, Barack Obama has shown a freshness of approach to a complex world. He doesn't feel the need to impose values he's taken from Illinois on everybody in the world. He's lived out there. So there is something very exciting about Barack Obama. However, I find it unnerving that the Democrats and Republicans at this time both want to expand military spending rather than cut it. I understand all the arguments why you can't do that as a Democratic candidate and why you have to be strong on defense, but that's how we get into this madness. And if you listen to the tapes of Lyndon Johnson, he said, I cannot get out of Vietnam because Barry Goldwater will have me for lunch -- he will wipe the floor with me.

So that's the problem with the Democrats. And I think people who support Obama should say they expect him not to get us into wars like Iraq but also to question all this enormous spending on the military, which is making for a more dangerous world.

Emily Wilson is a freelance writer and teaches basic skills at City College of San Francisco.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/92418/