China embraces Georgetown Law report: U.S. runs dragnet surveillance
With comments from author Bruce Ramsey
We have all heard a lot about how China has become a surveillance state, along with terms such as techno-authoritarianism, digital dictatorship or digital Orwellian State describing China. According to Human Rights Watch, the Chinese government, especially police agencies, collect an extraordinary amount of data about its citizens to monitor them, control them, blacklist them, or nudge them in their behaviors. In Xinjiang especially, HRW said, the authorities collect biometric data, such as voice samples, iris scans, and DNA of Uighur and other Muslim ethnic minorities.
We have also heard a lot about how China has in recent years adopted a sophisticated Covid monitoring system, a “health code” app that tracks an individual’s travel, contact history, body temperature, etc. on their smartphone. The code shows up in three colors, green, which allows one to travel, or yellow, which requires 14-day home quarantine, or red, which requires hospital treatment or centralized quarantine. The system, however, has also been abused as a tool of surveillance to suppress dissent, as Reuters reported. This summer, for instance, angry depositors in various parts of China were traveling or preparing to travel to Henan province to protest a bank there for freezing their accounts. In the end, many of them were prevented from going as local authorities had simply turned their health codes red.
China’s surveillance was also the topic of a new book, “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control” by Josh Chin and Liza Lin, two veteran international reporters for The Wall Street Journal. According to a review, the book profiles China’s techno-repression in Xinjiang as well as smart city Hangzhou utilizing surveillance data, it also tells individual stories of living under ubiquitous surveillance in China as well as Chinese companies introducing such surveillance to other countries, such as in Africa.
The Chinese government, of course, didn’t like one bit any such characterizations or criticisms of China by U.S. media, NGOs, or anyone else. It wanted to point the finger back at the United States as a surveillance state. Turned out it could and did without having to do any work to be able to do it.
On July 20, People’s Daily, Communist Party’s leading mouthpiece, carried a long “in- depth observation” titled “U.S. media: U.S. runs mass surveillance, draws criticism from all sides – ‘Americans live in a country with omnipresent surveillance.’” The editors must have cheered for such a find: a report titled AMERICAN DRAGNET-DATA DRIVEN DEPORTATION IN THE 21 CENTURY published in May by Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology.
The report listed among its key findings: ICE has scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults; ICE has access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults; ICE tracks the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults; ICE could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records. It concluded that ICE now operated as a domestic surveillance agency.
The People’s Daily piece went on to call the U.S. the real “surveillance empire, hacking empire, and stealing empire.” The remainder of the piece was basically a translation of an LA Times story “ICE officials spying on majority of Americans” along with a quote from Nina Wang, a co-author of the Georgetown Law study, “… anyone’s information can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they’ve applied for driver’s licenses, driven on the roads or signed up with their local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.”
Well, this was just another case where China’s official media cleverly used an American report to deflect criticisms and turn them around at the U.S.
Guest comments: Once again we ask another of our old friends, author of historical Washington and former Seattle Times editorial writer Bruce Ramsey this question: What do you think of China's official media lifting or borrowing stories or reports from America's free press to help make their point about the evil United States, either as a war criminal or a "surveillance empire"?
Bruce Ramsey: I agree with Steve Harrell you quoted (in last issue.) We have a free press. Not all of it behaves that way; much of it is as nationalistic as China's. Only part of it runs stories critical of U.S. government and society, and that part is crucial to American freedom. The possibility of "handing a knife" to critics is part of the cost of a free press, and it is a cost worth paying, at least in peacetime, which this is. A press that barks only for the government is the government's dog.