China’s state-run Global Times on Friday inveighed against the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was set to expire on December 31 unless renewed, although Congress gave the law a short-term extension on Thursday.
The Chinese Communist Party newspaper complained about America’s alleged “tradition of monitoring other countries with absolute superiority” and using that intel to launch “color revolutions” against governments it dislikes.
The Global Times claimed the U.S. has “attracted increasing attention from the global community” for its surveillance tactics and will “lose more and more” support, which is a bit rich coming from the world’s top cyber-threat. The “global community” is currently wondering how many of its vital power and water systems might have been sabotaged by Chinese hackers.
The Global Times pontificated:
A U.S. that distrusts any country simply cannot gain the trust of other nations. A U.S. that constantly feels insecure is incapable of bringing genuine security to the world. U.S. approach of monitoring the entire world in pursuit of hegemony contradicts the simple desires of countries worldwide for security and prosperity.
“Over the past three decades, the U.S. intelligence agencies have largely deviated from the professional ethics of pursuing accuracy and truthfulness, embarking on a dangerous path of politicization of intelligence,” the editorial charged.
The Global Times accused the U.S. intelligence community of leaving America “ill-prepared and in disarray” before 9/11 because it was too busy trying to implement a “containment strategy against major powers” like China. The Chinese editorialists also slammed the intel community for launching “a war against Iraq with extremely absurd excuses” and suffering “a string of failures” in the Middle East and North Africa.
The worst sin of “politicized” U.S. intelligence was, of course, forcing a “serious step backward” in U.S. policy toward China, but the Global Times also opportunistically picked up on domestic American opposition to abusive government surveillance. The Chinese propagandists unconvincingly pretended to be concerned about the “core values the U.S. claims to uphold” and found the growing surveillance state to be an existential threat to them.
The Global Times smugly concluded:
As long as the illegal surveillance and monitoring by the U.S. on the whole world exist, it will inevitably make the world more vigilant toward the U.S., and the U.S. itself will also suffer backlash, ultimately finding it difficult to extricate itself from the situation.
The Chinese Internet, a locked-down backwater that shields captive citizens from information and opinion originating in the outside world, is patrolled by a million-strong army of censors and informants. The dystopian nightmare of China’s “social credit system” uses heavy surveillance of individuals and corporations to detect and punish politically incorrect behavior.
The region of East Turkestan, which China calls Xinjiang province, is a massive open-air concentration camp where the oppressed Uyghur Muslims are monitored around the clock. If they leave “Xinjiang,” the Uyghurs get picked up by artificial intelligence (AI) camera networks that can spot their faces by searching for certain racial characteristics.
Chinese surveillance extends far beyond its borders. Over the past year, China has been caught maintaining secret “police stations” in other countries to monitor and harass Chinese nationals living overseas.
The Economist noted in November that China’s titanic surveillance state is still growing. Various entities of the Communist government have ordered cameras and AI systems that can detect faces almost twice as fast, analyzing billions of images from cities that have populations measured in the hundreds of thousands. By some estimates, there are now hundreds of millions of government surveillance cameras pointed at Chinese subjects.
“Surveillance in China is not limited to cameras. A wide range of activities, from buying train tickets and SIM cards to hailing a DiDi (China’s version of Uber), require citizens to use their identity cards and, therefore, make them susceptible to tracking,” the Economist reported.
There is a vigorous debate in the U.S. about surveillance and laws like FISA, but at least Americans are allowed to have that debate. The Economist observed that China “censors news” that “might cast its surveillance efforts in a negative light,” so many Chinese have no idea how extensive government spying actually is.