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China's All-Seeing Eye : Naomi Klein

Tags: china, 911, homeland_security, communism, capitalism, olympics, microsoft, google, civil_liberties on 2008-08-08 and saved by10 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.rollingstone.com

China today, epitomized by Shenzhen's transition from mud to
megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society.
Sometimes called "market Stalinism," it is a potent hybrid of the
most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism —
central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance
— harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.
security cameras are just one part of a much broader
high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as
"Golden Shield." The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking
technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants
increased unrest — a process aided by access to
cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security
problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model
of command-and-control capitalism. China's rapid economic growth
has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move
mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping
malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text
messaging to launch a mountain-people's-rights uprising with each
new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other
parts of the country, China's dizzying expansion could grind to a
halt.
130 million
migrants roaming the country looking for work. By 2025, it is
projected that this "floating" population will swell to more than
350 million.
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?

The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests
recently, the surveillance system was thrown into its first live
test, with every supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age
— cellphones, satellite television, the Internet —
transformed into a method of repression and control. As soon as the
protests gathered steam, China reinforced its Great Firewall,
when the games begin, much
of the Tibetan movement will be safely behind bars — along
with scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human-rights
defenders who have also been trapped in the government's high-tech
web.
The company's reticence to publicize its activities in China
could have something to do with the fact that the relationship
between Yao and L-1 may well be illegal under U.S. law. After the
Chinese government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989,
Congress passed legislation barring U.S. companies from selling any
products in China that have to do with "crime control or detection
instruments or equipment."
The crackdown in Tibet has set off a wave
of righteous rallies and boycott calls. But it sidesteps the
uncomfortable fact that much of China's powerful surveillance state
is already being built with U.S. and European technology. In
February 2006, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on "The
Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?" Called on
the carpet were Google (for building a special Chinese search
engine that blocked sensitive material), Cisco (for supplying
hardware for China's Great Firewall), Microsoft (for taking down
political blogs at the behest of Beijing) and Yahoo (for complying
with requests to hand over e-mail-account information that led to
the arrest and imprisonment of a high-profile Chinese journalist,
as well as a dissident who had criticized corrupt officials in
online discussion groups). The issue came up again during the
recent Tibet uproar when it was discovered that both MSN and Yahoo
had briefly put up the mug shots of the "most wanted" Tibetan
protesters on their Chinese news portals.
"If you walk out of this building, you
will be under surveillance in five to six different ways," he says,
staring at me hard. He lets the implication of his words linger in
the air like an unspoken threat. "If you are a law-abiding citizen,
you shouldn't be afraid," he finally adds. "The criminals are the
only ones who should be afraid."
New
York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with
linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police
use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now
routine, and the images collected can be mined for "face prints,"
then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases.
"Bush helped me get
my vision," he has said. Similarly, when challenged on the fact
that dome cameras are appearing three to a block in Shenzhen and
Guangzhou, Chinese companies respond that their model is not the
East German Stasi but modern-day London.

Human-rights activists are quick to point out that while the
tools are the same, the political contexts are radically different.
The global homeland-security business is
now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and
the music industry combined.

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Profiles: Stealing Life: The Crusader Behind "The Wire"

Tags: baltimore, capitalism, david_simon, journalism, poverty, the_wire, tv, urban, writer on 2008-04-14 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.newyorker.com

“The Wire,” Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unencumbered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm—the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”
Chris Partlow, said, “This is David’s domain. He gets the streets of Baltimore better than we do.” The novelist Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River”), whom Simon hired to write several scripts, agrees: “When you hear the really authentic street poetry in the dialogue, that’s David, or Ed Burns. Anything that’s literally 2006 or 2007 African-American ghetto dialogue—that’s them. They are so much further ahead of the curve on that.”
Simon is an authenticity freak. He said, “I’m the kind of person who, when I’m writing, cares above all about whether the people I’m writing about will recognize themselves. I’m not thinking about the general reader. My greatest fear is that the people in the world I’m writing about will read it and say, ‘Nah, there’s nothing there.’ ”
“The Wire” would be “a novel for television. Not in a ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’ sense. Each episode would be like a chapter in a book. You could digress, in the way a novel does. And it would be about the social aspects of crime.” Pelecanos, who wrote seven episodes for the show, said, “That struck home, because if it’s not about something more than the mystery, the thriller part, I’m not going to do it. Life’s too short.”
‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” He also likes to say that “The Wire” is a story about the “decline of the American empire.”
In creating “The Wire,” Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”

When Simon pitched “The Wire” to Carolyn Strauss, now the president of HBO Entertainment, he did not mention Greek tragedy or the decline of the American empire.
Jacob Weisberg, writing in Slate, went even further, declaring that “The Wire” was the best American television series that had ever been broadcast: “No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.” Sometimes the fan base of “The Wire” seems like the demographics of many American cities—mainly the urban poor and the affluent élite, with the middle class hollowed out.
Simon’s gift is in recognizing an anecdote like that for the found parable that it is—“stealing life,” as he once described it to me—and knowing which parts to steal.
Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals—stories that have a clean moral. “It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing,” Simon said at one point. “That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems—newspapers are not designed to understand it.”
Simon can be scathing, even righteous, about other television shows that presume to depict urban America without the benefit of direct knowledge.
The American entertainment industry gets poverty so relentlessly wrong. . . . Poor people are either the salt of the earth, and they’re there to exalt us with their homespun wisdom and their sheer grit and determination to rise up, or they are people to be beaten up in an interrogation room by Sipowicz. . . . How is it that there’s nobody actually on a human scale from the other America?
“We don’t have a lot of victories,” Simon told his colleagues. “As cynically as the rest of this stuff is ending, it will validate the one place we put any of our sincerity, which is individual action.” It’s hard to classify Simon politically, but anytime you start thinking of him as some sort of bleeding-heart socialist you’re brought up short by his unremitting skepticism about institutions.
“To be a decent city reporter, I had to listen to people who were different from me,” Simon explained. “I had to not be uncomfortable asking stupid questions or being on the outside. I found I had a knack for walking into situations where I didn’t know anything, and just waiting. A lot of reporters don’t want to be the butt of jokes. But sometimes it’s useful to act as if you couldn’t find your ass with both hands.”