A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities, Giving Police Vast Powers

Recognize this guy? How about this one? Him? They all have something in common. They govern like autocrats. These leaders are rising in an age where technology can make their lives much easier. And leading the way is China. At home, they’re pouring billions into the most sophisticated censorship and surveillance apparatus the world has ever known. I spent nearly a decade here. And halfway through that period, something changed. Xi Jinping took power, and cameras started appearing — a lot of them. Now, the cameras are everywhere. They hang from traffic lights, intersections, crosswalks; on trees, fences, and subway cars; even inside your taxi or your apartment building. These are, in fact, government surveillance cameras, and there are over 200 million of them here. The government says the cameras are used to fight crime, squash protests and maintain control. It’s all designed to make sure the Communist Party of China never loses power. Basically, they want to know what their citizens are doing all the time, and their actions are being judged. Most of the time, it’s just police watching on the other end of these cameras. But the idea is that one day soon, artificial intelligence will be able to automate that job, analyzing the day-to-day lives of hundreds of millions of citizens. You might think, well, that’s just China. But it’s not only in China. See that? That camera is in Ecuador. This is Ecuador’s emergency response system, which is known as ECU-911. The government peddles it as a crime fighting tool. Ecuador has around 4,000 national security cameras across the entire country. The cameras all feed into a few centralized rooms, like this. The system was not only made in China, but it was installed by Chinese companies and workers. The Chinese even trained the Ecuadoreans how to use it. Reporter: “They’re telling the public that this is for safety. We went back, we can see what the surveillance looks like. So this is, what, 30 people in a room surveilling society.” “Wow.” Reporter: “Now my question, though, is: If you wanted to stop crime, would you have 30 people in a room? To me, that number, 30, does not seem like a lot of people.” “So 30 people, perhaps monitoring a nationwide camera system might seem little, but it’s the deterrent effect of the cameras which impact on people. It’s them moderating their behavior based on the fact that they know that they might be being surveilled, and they don’t know how that information might be being used.” And that’s the point. This might be able to fight crime. But just like in China, the cameras have potential for other use. “Surveillance technology exporting this kind of surveillance capabilities to a country like Ecuador makes money.” This is Edin, a global surveillance expert in the U.K. I asked him, so what has China actually exported here? “Well it secures our diplomatic relationship with China, and it exports their model of internet governorship and how our security infrastructure is going to look like in the future.” Chinese surveillance systems are increasingly showing up all around the world. Some of those countries have stronger government institutions to regulate than others, but they all need money to buy it. Turns out, the Chinese can help with that, too. We know it started at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Behind the scenes, China was selling its state-of-the-art security setup to visiting delegations. This is where Ecuadorian officials first saw it. So, China and Ecuador made a deal. This is Martha, a former politician turned investigative journalist. This all happened under the former president Rafael Correa, who was widely seen as an autocrat. He rewrote Ecuador’s Constitution. He erased term limits. He took control of the courts and silenced the press. Helping him each step of the way was money from China. So, China got Ecuador’s oil and Ecuador got things like roads and hospitals. It also got a nationwide surveillance system. And this is what it looks like today. Rafael Correa has been out of office for more than two years now, and Lenín Moreno has taken the country back in a more democratic direction. But even after autocrats leave office, their legacies can live on. After all, there is a system in place with a sinister potential. It just depends how it’s being used. Lidia lives in a high-crime neighborhood on the city’s mountainside. She says the police rarely respond to crimes that happen directly in front of cameras and that some of the most dangerous neighborhoods, like hers, don’t have any cameras at all. While Lidia’s neighborhood has none, there’s unexpectedly one here, in a safe neighborhood. It’s the only camera around, and it can see right into this man’s house. Colonel Pazmino was a vocal critic of former president Rafael Correa, and he was often followed by government spies. He says when the Chinese camera system came in, the spies went home. In other words, Colonel Pazmino thinks the system is used for more than emergencies. He believes the state’s intelligence unit uses it to track political dissidents like him. In China, authorities have also installed cameras outside of dissidents’ homes. We brought this claim to Francisco Robayo, who was ECU-911’s director at the time. He said, the system isn’t for spying on or intimidating political opponents. He deflected, and so did the country’s intelligence chief. We were in a secret, unmarked bunker outside of the capital, and we were not allowed to point our camera at anything outside of this single frame. We came to ask Mr. Costa if the intelligence agency uses the public security cameras to spy on citizens. Midway through our interview, we took a break. Remember how we were only allowed to take this one single frame? Well, that’s because they didn’t want us filming the background that’s deliberately out of focus right now. But when not looking through the lens of the camera, we could still see it clearly. Once we pointed out the feeds from ECU-911, they admitted they also could access the public security cameras. Ecuador’s officials maintain the system is a crime-fighting tool. But why the system also feeds into the intelligence agency raises the same concerns that human rights advocates raise in China. These cameras are easier to abuse than use. It just depends what your goals are. And remember, China’s goal is political control. That’s what these systems were designed for. In effect, China is exporting more than cameras. They are exporting the way they use their cameras. And while other countries also offer systems, including the U.S., many say China is thought to be the most dangerous because it provides funding, even to known dictators, and provides them with a sinister model for how to use it. “We’ve seen cases where governments around the world have used surveillance technology to infiltrate and spy on dissidents, on activists, on lawyers, on opposition parties. So this actually, fundamentally undermines democracy.” More and more leaders like Rafael Correa appear to be rising. Now they have access to technology, undreamt of even 20 years ago. And China seems willing to give them cheap loans to buy it. The more countries that install China’s centralized surveillance technology, the more that China’s very own autocratic use of it may be normalized. And like in Ecuador, the infrastructure for autocracy stays even as leaders come and go. “What the question for us now as people who are now more surveilled than ever, is how we want to live in this world, how we want to regulate that, and what kind of surveillance we want to be put under?” [question asked in Spanish]

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