Title: In China, Beware: A Camera May Be Watching You : NPR
Headings: In China, Beware: A Camera May Be Watching You
Asia
In China, Beware: A Camera May Be Watching You
Life Under Surveillance
Cameras Everywhere
Some Feel Safer, Many Feel Dread
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Content: After uprisings in the western regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, the authorities also installed cameras in mosques and temples. In recent years, the southwestern city of Chongqing set a goal to install a half-million cameras. Police there boasted that during Chinese New Year in 2010, their surveillance apparatus identified 4,000 undesirables who had entered town. According to SWeekly, a Chinese magazine, the police confronted most of them within six hours and forced them to leave. Human rights activists say the implications of so much surveillance in the hands of an authoritarian regime operating without the rule of law are scary. "The greatest fear is the state uses its surveillance and technology to curtail the modest freedoms that Chinese enjoy today," says Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong-based researcher for Human Rights Watch. Bequelin says the Communist Party's ultimate goal is highly accurate, facial-recognition technology that would allow the government to visually track critics in real time. "That would be a game changer," he says, one that could "prevent the emergence of any challenge to the party in the short and long term." China already uses facial recognition in places like immigration checkpoints. Bo Zhang, who follows China's surveillance camera market for IMS Research, says facial recognition is much less effective on the street, where lighting varies.