Hightower Lowdown

George W claims that his military occupation of Iraq is about exporting freedom throughout the world.

In China, U.S. high-tech corporations and investment bankers are enthusiastically exporting freedom's opposite: suppression. U.S. firms are selling surveillance technology to dictators in Beijing, where the "market" for electronic police-state gadgets is expected to be worth more than $43billion.

In the city of Shenzhen alone, police are installing 20,000 surveillance cameras guided by advanced computer software with face-recognition and behavior-detection technologies. China Public Security Technology, which is implementing the program, is a Chinese company, but it's incorporated in Florida and receives financial backing from such U.S. investment funds as Pinnacle, Roth Capital, and Oppenheimer.

The same consortium is putting into operation a new system of residency ID cards in Chinese cities. These mandatory cards bear computer chips that divulge not just the names and addresses of bearers, but also their work history, religion, education, ethnicity, medical status, reproductive history, police record, landlord's phone number, credit history, purchases...and whatever else authorities decree.

The head of the Chinese company said, "We have a very good relationship with U.S. companies like IBM, Cisco, HP [and] Dell. All of [them] work with us to build our system together."

A Bush spokesman said, "It's not appropriate to interfere in the private decisions of Americans to invest in legally incorporated firms." Apparently, ethics stop when profit walks in.