Houston Community News >> Chinese City High Tech Surveillance
8/12/2007 SHENZHEN, China - At
least 20,000 police-surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here
in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software
from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police
suspects and detect unusual activity.
The program will start this month in a port neighborhood and then spread across
Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people. Most citizens will also be issued a
residency card fitted with a powerful computer chip programmed by the same
company.
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. Even personal reproductive
history will be included, to enforce China's controversial "one-child" policy.
Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway-travel payments and
small purchases charged to the card.
Security experts describe China's plans as the world's largest effort to meld
cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a
population and fight crime, but they say the technology can be used to violate
civil rights.
The Chinese 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 to a city but have not yet acquired permanent residency
there.
Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls
on a mobile population.
(Contributed by New York Times)