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Exporting the technology of authoritarianism: China has been selling its surveillance to the world. In Ecuador, where a camera and phone-tracking system was supposed to be used by police, we found a feared domestic intelligence agency also had access: nytimes.com/2019/04/24/tec…
The group tracked and intimidated political opponents. Activists suspected the system was used to keep tabs on them and events like demonstrations. In an interview with the intel group, we learned they did have access to the country-wide camera network sold as a way to stop crime
Below is how it's supposed to work. A thief grabs a purse and takes off. The cameras follow him. He ditches a hoodie and slows to a walk to fake out cops. They see all from above and are not fooled. They nab him.
Bought to solve the country's crime problems, the system was expensive. China loaned Ecuador hundreds of millions of dollars, which went right back to the tech companies building the system: Huawei and state-run CEIEC. Now Ecuador looks a bit like China.
Here is what police see from the other side of the lens. In a command center high on a hill in Quito, dozens look at screens beaming in footage. They use joysticks to control the cameras, and zoom in if they think they see trouble.
Most are men. One was fired for zooming in on women exercising in a park. The system is all manual, and there aren't enough police to look at all the cameras. That means crimes often happen in front of cameras with no police response. 
Soon much of the work can be automated. There are tentative plans to add facial recognition to Ecuador's system. In China, Beijing has flooded cities with cameras. In some cases they run algorithms that single out ethnic minorities and the mentally ill. nytimes.com/2019/04/14/tec…
As China sells its version of public security, it's hastening a world in which video surveillance blankets whole countries. It's not an inevitability that every street corner has a camera, yet financing from China makes it more likely in many places. (Like Quito’s old town below)
Ecuador has bought dystopian tech spying systems from other places, including Israel and Italy. The China system dwarfs those in scope and scale though. Its cost was more than $300 million compared to the single digit millions spent on other systems.
One way to think about this is as an OS for surveillance. China's includes a lot of cameras, with centralized command centers to watch. Once the cameras are in, it's easy enough to plug in other analytics, like facial recognition or alarms that detect crowds massing.
Here’s Quito’s command center next to an old shot of a Shanghai Public Security Bureau emergency response command center. (From Shanghai’s PSB museum). Kind of similar eh?
In many places there's real risk for abuse. In Ecuador the government assured us only emergency responders had access. Yet when we visited a secretive bunker of the country's domestic intelligence group, we found they had access too.
Activists had long suspected it was being used against them. Mario Pazmino, a retired military intelligence officer, had a camera installed just outside his apartment. After it went in, details of secret police dispatched to follow him backed off.
The move matches what has happened in China, where high-profile activists get cameras put in just outside their door to help authorities keep up with them. Here’s an old shot of a camera outside Ai Weiwei’s house.
Yet in Ecuador, the cameras are not unpopular. They have their own Twitter account @ECU911_ With the surveillance genie out of the bottle, many choose safety over privacy.
Lidia Rueda, a community organizer, has pushed for cameras in her neighborhood even though she was once robbed in front of a camera with no police response. Her first concern is the safety of her neighborhood, not the long-term privacy of the country.
In Quito's old town cameras have made invisible boundaries. Drug dealers backed off to new corners. Yet many residents still don't feel safe. One shop owner, who kept a crow bar nearby for safety, said he tried to leave before nightfall.
In some ways it's easier to use cameras for following targets than for stopping crime. To follow Pazmino requires a small team. To stop crime requires a whole police force coordinating.
On the ground, police said that wasn't happening very well. After a ride along in which we saw a bust of a small-time Colombian cocaine dealer, an officer told us that the cameras were too far away. If he had more control of the ones in his area he could do his job much better.
So what is China selling? The ability to know what people are doing, and therefore power, on a mass scale. The question of how it will be used comes down to local context. Cameras could help stop crime, but they could also help cement the rule of an authoritarian.
For our article Huawei told us they don't care how their surveillance systems are used. They have sold to many countries with questionable human rights records. They've sold parts of the same system Ecuador has to Venezuela, as well as Bolivia and Angola.
Ecuadorian activists told us with China it's much harder to push back. The system is opaque. There's no civil society and no free media. Companies are backed by the government.
What Ecuador has is very basic. China's AI startups are selling more advanced tech abroad already. CloudWalk, which outlined a technology to automate racial profiling, has a contract in Zimbabwe.
It's a dangerous direction. With Beijing happy to finance tech purchases, it's likely to continue. What it represents is a dark new turn that shows how easily tech can become an enabler of authoritarian impulses. And how citizens in unsafe places might choose it.
