Made in China, exported to the world: surveillance states

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This was published 4 years ago

Made in China, exported to the world: surveillance states

By Paul Mozur, Jonah Kessel and Melissa Chan

Quito: The squat gray building in Ecuador's capital commands a sweeping view of the city's sparkling sprawl, from the high-rises at the base of the Andean valley to the pastel neighbourhoods that spill up its mountainsides.

The police who work inside are looking elsewhere. They spend their days poring over computer screens, watching footage that comes in from 4300 cameras across the country.

The high-powered cameras send what they see to 16 monitoring centres in Ecuador that employ more than 3000 people. Armed with joysticks, the police control the cameras and scan the streets for drug deals, muggings and killings. If they spy something, they zoom in.

A control room of camera feeds and workers, part of Ecuador's Emergency Response System.

A control room of camera feeds and workers, part of Ecuador's Emergency Response System.Credit: Jonah Kessel/The New York Times

This voyeur's paradise is made with technology from what is fast becoming the global capital of surveillance: China.

Ecuador's system, which was installed beginning in 2011, is a basic version of a program of computerised controls that Beijing has spent billions to build out over a decade of technological progress. According to Ecuador's government, these cameras feed footage to the police for manual review.

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But a New York Times investigation found that the footage also goes to the country's feared domestic intelligence agency, which under the previous president, Rafael Correa, had a lengthy track record of following, intimidating and attacking political opponents. Even as a new administration under President Lenin Moreno investigates the agency's abuses, the group still gets the videos.

Pedestrians wait to cross a road as surveillance cameras operate in Tianjin, China.

Pedestrians wait to cross a road as surveillance cameras operate in Tianjin, China.Credit: Bloomberg

Under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has vastly expanded domestic surveillance, fuelling a new generation of companies that make sophisticated technology at ever lower prices. A global infrastructure initiative is spreading that technology even further.

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Ecuador shows how technology built for China's political system is now being applied — and sometimes abused — by other governments. Today, 18 countries — including Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates and Germany — are using Chinese-made intelligent monitoring systems, and 36 have received training in topics like "public opinion guidance," which is typically a euphemism for censorship, according to an October report from Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group.

With China's surveillance know-how and equipment now flowing to the world, critics warn that it could help underpin a future of tech-driven authoritarianism, potentially leading to a loss of privacy on an industrial scale. Often described as public security systems, the technologies have darker potential uses as tools of political repression.

A man is detained by police blocking protesters from advancing closer to the presidential palace in Quito, Ecuador, last week.

A man is detained by police blocking protesters from advancing closer to the presidential palace in Quito, Ecuador, last week.Credit: AP

"They're selling this as the future of governance; the future will be all about controlling the masses through technology," Adrian Shahbaz, research director at Freedom House, said of China's new tech exports.

Companies worldwide provide the components and code of dystopian digital surveillance and democratic nations like Britain and the United States also have ways of watching their citizens. But China's growing market dominance has changed things. Loans from Beijing have made surveillance technology available to governments that could not previously afford it, while China's authoritarian system has diminished the transparency and accountability of its use.

For locals seeking to push back, there is little recourse. Chinese companies operate with less scrutiny and regard for corporate social responsibility than their Western counterparts. Activists in Ecuador say that while they have succeeded in working with civil society groups in Europe and the United States to oppose sales of surveillance technologies, similar campaigns in China have not been possible.

Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno addresses the Permanent Council of the Organisation of American States last week.

Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno addresses the Permanent Council of the Organisation of American States last week.Credit: AP

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"We don't have the capacity to demand information from China — it's really difficult," said former Ecuadorean legislator Martha Roldos.

Ecuador's system, called ECU-911, was largely made by two Chinese companies, the state-controlled CEIEC and Huawei.

Replicas of the network have been sold to Venezuela, Bolivia and Angola, according to government announcements and Chinese state media.

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CEIEC and China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, Huawei said: "Huawei provides technology to support smart city and safe city programs across the world. In each case, Huawei does not get involved in setting public policy in terms of how that technology is used."

In Ecuador, the cameras that are part of ECU-911 hang from poles and rooftops, from the Galapagos Islands to the Amazonian jungle. The system lets authorities track phones and may soon get facial-recognition capabilities. Recordings allow the police to review and reconstruct past incidents.

While ECU-911 was sold to the public as a way to get a grip on dizzying murder rates and drug-related petty crime, it also served Correa's authoritarian streak, supporting his feared National Intelligence Secretariat, or SENAIN, according to a former head of the group. In a rare interview last year at SENAIN's headquarters in a bunker outside Quito, its leader at the time, Jorge Costa, confirmed that the domestic intelligence group had access to a mirror of the Chinese-built surveillance system.

Cameras on a street in Ecuador in 2018. Cameras across the country send footage to monitoring centres to be examined by police and domestic intelligence.

Cameras on a street in Ecuador in 2018. Cameras across the country send footage to monitoring centres to be examined by police and domestic intelligence.Credit: Jonah Kessel/The New York Times

The irony is that ECU-911 has not been effective at stopping crime, many Ecuadoreans said, though the system's installation paralleled a period of falling crime rates. Ecuadoreans cite muggings and attacks that happened in front of the cameras without police response. Still, police have built public support, partly by releasing clips on Twitter and television of thieves and muggers caught on camera.

Left to choose between privacy and safety, many Ecuadoreans opt for the unblinking gaze of the electronic eyes. With the mass surveillance genie out of the bottle, community leaders have called for cameras to help secure their neighbourhoods, even when their own experiences are that the devices do not work well. Concerns about the long-term political implications trail behind the pressing realities of violence and drugs.

Moreno, who came to power in 2017 and has walked back some of Correa's autocratic policies, has vowed to investigate SENAIN's abuses and is remaking the intelligence collection agency under a new name. His government helped open up ECU-911 and SENAIN to The Times.

"The government viewed espionage as a toolbox, and they could use any tool they wanted," Roldos said. "They could spy on your emails, your phone calls, they would set microphones on your vehicle. At the same time, you had people following you. It was a whole system."

Designed by China, financed by China

For a system that was supposed to fight drug dealers and killers, ECU-911 traces its origins to a different security challenge: the 2008 Olympics.

Before those games, a delegation from Ecuador visited Beijing and toured the Chinese capital's surveillance system. At the time, Beijing was pulling footage from 300,000 cameras to keep tabs on 17 million people. The Ecuadoreans left impressed.

"For the Olympics, China developed emergency response centres which had state-of-the-art technology for its time," Francisco Robayo, then the general director of ECU-911, said in an interview last year. "Our authorities saw these as ideal to bring to Ecuador."

The timing was fortuitous. Correa was newly in power and facing high crime rates. In January 2011, he made surveillance a priority.

Correa's ministers turned to China. In two months, details to install a Chinese-made technology system were ironed out with the help of military attaches from the Chinese Embassy in Quito, according to a person familiar with the process and to publicly available documents from Ecuador's comptroller. Ecuadorean officials travelled again to Beijing to scope out the system, which featured technology made by the parent company of the state-backed CEIEC.

By February 2011, with guarantees of state funding from the attaches, Ecuador signed a deal with no public bidding process. The country got a Chinese-designed surveillance system financed by Chinese loans. In exchange, Ecuador provided one of its main exports, oil. The money for the cameras and computing flowed straight to CEIEC and Huawei.

"The money always ends up going back to China," Rolos said.

It became a pattern. In exchange for credit facilities that totalled more than $US19 billion ($27 million), Ecuador signed away large portions of its oil reserves. A surge of Chinese-built infrastructure projects, including hydroelectric dams and refineries, followed.

By comparison, ECU-911 was a small line item.

With an initial sticker price of more than $US200 million, construction started near Guayaquil, a booming coastal city where crime rates are high, Robayo said. Over the next four years, the system expanded across Ecuador.

Cameras were hung anywhere that provided a good view. Operation centres were set up. Top Ecuadorean officials travelled to China for training, and Chinese engineers visited to teach their Ecuadorean counterparts how to work the system.

The activity attracted attention from Ecuador's neighbours. Venezuelan officials came to see the system, according to a 2013 account from an Ecuadorean official working on the project. In an effort led by the onetime head of intelligence for Hugo Chávez, Venezuela then sprang for a larger version of the system, with a goal of adding 30,000 cameras. Bolivia followed.

A Zoom With a View

To the government of Correa, Mario Pazmino was a known man.

A retired Ecuadorean army colonel who adopted stray dogs — more than a dozen — to keep himself busy in the twilight of his career, Pazmino kept up another pet hobby: criticising the government of Correa.

A seasoned intelligence officer, Pazmiño, 59, said even he was surprised when, in 2013, a video camera that was part of ECU-911 was installed directly outside his house. It hung from a pole on a traffic divider in the middle of the street, with a full view through a window into his second-story apartment.

"There is a direct collaboration between ECU-911, the Intelligence Secretariat and also those who surveil and persecute political or social actors," said Pazmino, citing his own experience, as well as documents and people who had worked in SENAIN.

Pazmino said that after the camera went in, surveillance teams following him backed off. The camera otherwise made no real sense where it was. Pazmino lives in a relatively safe neighbourhood and no other ECU-911 cameras were installed nearby. It was a move out of the police playbook in China, where cameras are positioned outside the doors of high-profile activists.

A visit to SENAIN's headquarters confirmed Pazmiño's suspicion. On a wall of screens that served as a sort of agency control room, Times reporters recognised footage from the ECU-911 system.

Costa, who was in charge of the transition between SENAIN and its successor, acknowledged the transmissions — but said he was not responsible for how they had been used in Correa's administration.

Pazmino said he had an idea of who should be held accountable: China. He said the country had supported and emboldened Correa, just as it had leaders in neighbouring Venezuela. As conditions deteriorated in Venezuela last year, Huawei engineers helped train Venezuelan engineers on how to maintain their version of Ecuador's system.

"I believe what the Chinese model generates is control over society," he said. "A rigid control."

The New York Times

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