THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA

CCTV is not amused, sir.

I just spent a few days in London, where one would have to be blind not to notice the 500,000 surveillance cameras that notoriously monitor the Brits. A friend remarked that London has the world record for most cameras monitoring its citizens.

Turns out that fact will soon be history -- not because the Big Smoke is dismantling Big Brother, but because a city in China is about to quadruple that number in a few months.

On the plane ride home, I was blown away by Naomi Klein's superb piece in Rolling Stone: China's All-Seeing Eye. She reports, among other startling revelations, she reports that the city of Shenzhen will soon install two million CCTVs.

The cameras are part of China's high-tech surveillance and censorship combo that is known as "Golden Shield," which will soon use face-detection technology to monitor the every movement of billions of Chinese citizens, including its political dissidents.

Especially its political dissidents, perhaps.

The most explosive aspect of Klein's piece is her exposing the American corporations who are exporting much of the crime-control technology to China in violation of a federal law -- passed after the Tiananmen Square massacre -- that bars U.S. companies from selling products in China that involve "crime control or detection instruments or equipment."

L-1 Identity Solutions, an American company, is arguably the most guilty of laying the technological foundation to China's Golden Shield. (Read Klein's article to learn why she writes, "You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you.") At the moment, L-1 seems to be getting away with their exports, however, because "face prints" aren't listed in the Commerce Department's list of banned products.

But even if the federal loophole is closed, it's too late, because the technology is already there.

Klein doesn't just detail how Western investors are complicit in helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. She amply supports her conclusion that "This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China."

In my opinion, this is yet another example of how China's warming relations with "the West" is not only doing little to curb the Chinese government's repressive regime, but in some cases, is making things worse.

The U.S. may have more people behind bars than China (despite having only a fourth of China's population), but something tells me that record is about to be broken, too.

--Junichi