Under Surveillance: Q&A With Naomi Klein

We were calling and calling China Security and Surveillance and there was another one, China Public Security. These were the big ones that weren't returning our calls. Finally, one company gave us the address of their factory and then it turned out that they had just lied and we were driving around and realized they gave us a fake address to get us to stop calling. So that's the way it was until we got to Yao. Yao is chatty. He studied English in the U.S. He's a very unlikely security executive. He got into it because he was in the business of taking photographs of school kids. It was a phenomenon he had seen in the United States and the way he told it to me, in China, before he started doing it, it wasn't a practice to take school pictures. He thought this was a great idea and he brought it back to China. Because of this, he [started up a] company that had developed a lot of software for storing large numbers of photographs. He came into it from a commercial standpoint and then when the market for these high-tech ID cards opened up and then the facial recognition software, it was a logical extension of the photography work. But he's not a spook, he doesn't have that mentality. A lot of people in the surveillance field are ex-police, ex-military and they're a lot cagier. Yao has a commercial photography business and he'd be just as happy to talk to you about making fridge magnets of two-year olds as talking about facial recognition software.

I was struck that here you are in the middle of this Marxist/Stalinist city and the people you're talking to seem so eager to get their story out, and then you call the company in New Jersey and you get hung up on.
[Laughs] Well, because the Chinese companies are really into breaking into the U.S. homeland security market and more than that, the big trend is to get your company broken into the NASDAQ and understanding that, in order for that to work, they have to have some profile in North America. I think that's why these particular security companies opened up the door for me. Once I met Yao, he introduced me to several other colleagues who introduced me to other colleagues. And then suddenly, after banging our heads on the wall after being sent on all these wild goose chases, it changed completely and we kept getting handed over to another security executive where a black car would pull up with leather interior and we would just get in. We would be driven somewhere and we wouldn't know where we were going and it would be another factory at another company. At one point I started to get worried because even though I wasn't misrepresenting who I was, these companies were talking to me because they thought it would be good for their business, to have an article in a high-profile American publication. I was a little alarmed that these surveillance companies seemingly hadn't discovered Google, because it doesn't take all that much to find out that I'm quite critical of this whole thing.

In reporting on this, did you feel like someone was watching you?
Well, we were being photographed all the time, going in and out. Obviously there are cameras everywhere in the surveillance-camera factories and headquarters. I was given sort of VIP treatment. There was this excitement about the idea of having a Western journalist come and visit. After I visited Aebell, I told them that I really wanted to go see a factory and that's how I ended up at FSAN, because FSAN makes the cameras for Aebell. We were in Guangzhou and the head of Abell called his friend in Shenzhen and said, "There's a journalist that I think can help us, will you show her around the factory tomorrow?" And the owner of the factory showed up at our hotel the next morning and drove us to the suburbs, to his factory. The first thing he had said to me was that he was sorry that he hadn't gotten any notice because he would have made a sign welcoming me to the factory, which is what they do for guests. So I had a terrible flash of a sign saying, "Welcome, Naomi Klein."