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Home > Window on Washington > Archives > 2008 > June > 19 > Entry
Beijing Olympics Draws Electronic Eyes
Less than two months before the start of the summer Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese government has installed 300,000 new surveillance cameras in subways, parks and other public places, a human rights activist said Thursday.
The cameras have “vastly increased” the government’s ability to monitor citizens’ activities and to thwart potential protests, said Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, a non-profit watchdog group.
“There are real dangers,” she said during a panel discussion sponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington advocacy group.
Beijing expects the games to draw half a million tourists, largely foreign, and the government will collect fingerprints and other biometric data from each one, said Hom.
Her group has asked the government what safeguards it would use to protect the privacy of visitors. The government response, she said, was that the biometric data would be “only released to the appropriate people.”
Coming from the architects of the Tiananmen Square crackdown 19 years ago, that’s hardly a comforting thought.
China has fallen short on its vows to respect human rights and press freedoms in its bid to host the Olympics, said another panelist, Minky Worden, spokeswoman for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, and editor of the new book, “China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges.”
“At this point,” said Worden, “a lot of promises have been broken.”
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