Under Surveillance: Q&A With Naomi Klein

Could you explain the link between U.S. taxpayers who are subsidizing technology and the crackdown on public dissidence in China.
The homeland security economy is not a free market. It relies almost entirely on government contracts. In the '90s you had all these startups, indentured capitalists trying to get in on the Internet boom; post-9/11 you had the same kind of phenomenon with security startups trying to get a piece of the venture capital. But the venture capital was coming from the government now, it was our money, taxpayer dollars and limitless amounts of it because the Bush administration has shown itself willing to spend far into the future to pay for the so-called War on Terror. So this is an interesting business model that they have, which is entirely dependent on who you know and political contacts and lobbying, and if you become one of the favorite companies you get access to a huge amount of taxpayer dollars to develop the technology.

One of the companies vying for these government dollars after September 11th and before was Identix, a company selling facial recognition software. In 2006, the field of biometrics consolidated greatly with the creation of this company called L-1, which represented a merger of two of the largest biometrics companies as well as a buy-up of a half a dozen smaller companies to create this mega-biometric company that would be sort of one-stop shopping, fingerprinting, iris scanning, facial recognition, and it would sell themselves that way. [Identix's head] had been getting grants from the Pentagon, I believe since 1994 as an academic researcher. Obviously these are tools, that if they work, represent a powerful law-enforcement tools and applications in warfare. So there's always a great deal of funding for this type of research. The technology that ultimately was sold through L-1 to Yao's company benefited from all of these years of public financing of taxpayer dollars.

It was striking that Pixel Solutions bought it for so little. I was surprised by that, but the more I think about it, it makes sense. The company can afford to sell it at these fairly low consumer prices seeing that so much of the overhead was paid with public dollars. When you look at the situation where Yao decides to compete in what's called "The 10 million faces test" which is being organized by the Chinese central police to see which private company has the best facial recognition software. It's a very intensive practice where each company has to sync up their software with the government's database with apparently 10 million faces and then they're given photographs, fed into their system and they have to show that their software matches for that photograph quickly and accurately because facial recognition software is notorious for making mistakes, for making false IDs. L-1 brags that they've had technological breakthroughs and that they've narrowed the number of false IDs and that's the trajectory.

The money comes from taxpayers, it funds research and development from the earliest stages, from when it's still an academic project then it gets turned into a private company, then the company merges and becomes a mega-company until that company sells for a very low amount, technology that was very expensive to produce, and then that local Chinese company hands the software over directly to the Chinese police and syncs up their system.