About
U.S.-China Surveillance is edited by Kenneth Farrall, Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where he studies the social impact of electronic network communication technologies in four general areas: surveillance, social networks, social instability, and voting. Ken served as a research fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in 2004, where he designed and produced the web site for the National Committee for Voting Integrity (votingintegrity.org) and drafted congressional testimony on the privacy implications of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology. In the summer of 2005, he attended the Oxford Internet Institute in Beijing, where he presented his ongoing work in web graph analysis and the Internet’s role in episodes of political instability. More recently, Ken has been developing the framework for his doctoral dissertation, which compares the deployment of national identification systems and their associated databases in the United States and China.
Prior to his doctoral work, Ken was an Internet publishing entrepreneur and consultant focused on Internet development in China. Ken resided in China for 5 years, studying Internet use in business and the home, as well as the evolution of state Internet policy and censorship practices. Creator of China-focused web sites including The China Matrix (archive) and Virtual China (@ archive.org), the subject of a Harvard Business Case study published in January, 2000, Ken has been quoted in major news media including the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and Salon magazine and appeared on CNN’s Moneyline and China Central Television (CCTV). More recently, he has been interviewed on surveillance, law and technology issues by IEEE Spectrum, MIT’s Technology Review, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Why U.S.-China Surveillance?
Though at political poles, the surveillance systems of the U.S. and China often appear to be more synergistic than they are in conflict. China remains a major market for Western producers of highly sophisticated surveillance hardware, software and services, for which these companies have been widely criticized. The United States Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) played a significant role in the deployment of telecom switches (largely Nortel Communications’ hardware) with built in back doors in China. The same Narus Corporation that recently signed a contract with Shanghai Telecom to help monitor its Internet traffic for VOIP activity has been implicated, along with AT&T, in a much broader domestic surveillance case in the United States.
In addition to exploring these direct links, this blog makes use of the comparison to improve our understanding of surveillance in a global context.