Though I don’t often read it, as my recent post shows, I occasionally stumble upon a great piece of journalism in Rolling Stone. Naomi Klein’s recent piece about Chinese surveillance is one of those. In it, she confronts the massive, systematic effort by the Chinese government to maintain stability through the surveillance of its country.

Like most of the facts that come out of China, the scale is staggering. The megacities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou have become the test cases for centralized governmental networks of cameras which are often camouflaged as street lights and installed in the tens of thousands on streets, in Internet cafes and even Tibetan monasteries. The $4.1 billion Chinese market for surveillance cameras is growing rapidly as the government seeks ways to sustain its “command-and-control capitalism” which produces enormous wealth disparity and social upheaval: in 2005 alone, the government reported 87,000 large-scale protests.

“With its militant protests and mobile population, China confronts a fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system based on two dramatically unequal categories of people: the winners, who get the condos and cars, and the losers, who do the heavy labor and are denied those benefits? More urgently, how can it do this when information technology threatens to link the losers together into a movement so large it could easily overwhelm the country’s elites?”

It turns out that the government is becoming adept at using the same technologies as dissidents to monitor and punish those who threaten their regime. Even while cell phone cameras and text messages shed some light on the March 2008 protests in Tibet, police were using the same systems to capture images of protesters and spread government messages. Further, footage of particularly violent dissidents were spliced together and aired on state-controlled media.

The issue then, becomes “freedom after speech.” Entrepreneurial Chinese, increasingly aided by American biometric firms like L-1 are utilizing facial recognition advances to mine government databases for those captured by “internal security.” One business man who is competing for lucrative government contracts says that 95% of government use is “regular security,” but admits he receives interest from the secret police who come looking to identify grainy images of protesters.

Klein’s article takes special interest in American firms who see the massive Chinese market for surveillance technologies as a potential pot of gold. Although laws passed after the Tienanmen Square massacre ban the sale of crime control devices or technology to the Chinese, Klein finds that L-1 has been able to use intermediary companies in China to raise their profile there. There have been recent hearings concerning technology giants such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco but it seems these lesser-known biometric firms are receiving little scrutiny due to their ties with American government agencies.

This is, however, a two way street and Klein notes that the American government is observing Chinese techniques as they continue to tighten security in the name of counter-terrorism.

What emerges from the article is a frightening picture of a future where Big Brothers in disparate countries share information and techniques in a spiral towards increasingly perfect enforceability of law and order.