TrendChinese city to deploy world's most comprehensive tracking system

The Year of Big Brother: The authorities in the port city of Shenzhen, a city of about 12.5 million people in southern China, are planning to install some 20,000 surveillance cameras along city streets. These cameras will be equipped with “intelligence” — a connnection to a centralized database containing the photos of crime suspects, and software designed to recognize suspicious behavior. The authorities will also distribute residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company designing the cameras’ software. This is China, so the data on the chip will include not only the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status, and landlord’s phone number. The International Herald Tribune’s Keith Bradhser reports that even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s one-child policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card. Experts call this plan the world’s largest — and most intrusive — effort to marry sophisticated computer technology with police work to track criminals and terrorists. The same technology can also be used to tighten the grip of the authorities on the population and engage in massive violations of basic human rights.

The Shenzhen experiment is part of a more comprehensive effort by the Beijing government to gain better control of a society in which people are increasingly on the move: The central government has ordered all large cities across the country to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved from rural areas to the cities but not yet acquired permanent residency. The Chinese government estimates that about ten million people a year leave their villages to seek work in cities.

The company behind the surveillance and identification technology is

China Public Security Technology. The company is incorporated in Florida, and raised funds from two funds from Plano, Texas — Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks helped it raise the money: Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, California; Oppenheimer & Co. in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong.

Shenzhen, a computer manufacturing center next to Hong Kong, already has 180,000 indoor and outdoor CCTVs 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.

Western analysts have learned that for several years now Chinese security agencies could track individuals based on the location of their cellphones, and the Shenzhen police tracking system confirms this. The system can be used to assist law enforcment personnel. For example: When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system automatically switches to tracking the location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. The same system can be used to track the location and movement of anybody using a cellphone, and Chinese government agencies do not need a court order to do so.