MCLC: US is no China in domestic spying

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rowena He <rowenahe at gmail.com>
Subject: US is no China in domestic spying
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Source: Washington Post (7/19/13):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-it-comes-to-domestic-spying-the
-us-is-no-china/2013/07/19/39d247ec-eb36-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html

When it comes to domestic spying, the U.S. is no China
By Wang Lixiong

Wang Lixiong is an author and political commentator. His novels include
³Yellow Peril.² This op-ed was translated from Chinese by Perry Link, who
teaches Chinese literature at the University of California at Riverside.

Last month I boarded a train with my wife, Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan poet
and activist, to travel from Beijing to Lhasa, Tibet, where her mother
lives. Plainclothes police were waiting for us at the platform in Lhasa.
They ushered us to a nearby police station, where they spent an hour going
through our belongings. They were thrilled to find in my backpack a ³probe
hound,² as we call it in Chinese ‹ a little electronic device that can
detect wireless eavesdropping. They asked me why I, a writer, was carrying
it. I told them I needed to know whether my home in Lhasa was being
monitored.

They confiscated the device.

At the time, U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke was visiting Lhasa. My wife and I
had not planned our trip to coincide with Locke¹s, but domestic security
officials, taking no chances, held us under house arrest. Woeser is a
soft-spoken person with a gentle nature, but she does have a record of
speaking truth to power on the topic of Tibet. In March, she was honored
with the U.S. secretary of state¹s International Women of Courage Award.
Chinese authorities, it seemed, wanted to ensure that Locke heard no voice
that might spoil the perfect image of Tibet they had arranged for his
controlled itinerary. And that meant they needed to keep Woeser at a
distance.

We were released after Locke departed, but plainclothes police followed
us. One of our friends, noticing them, tried to take a photo, and they,
noticing him, smashed his camera. Anyone who dared to speak with us got a
threatening ³visit² from domestic security. And I was ³invited² to the
police station for more interrogation about that probe hound.

So I told them the full story. In the 1960s, Woeser¹s father, now
deceased, had taken a large number of photos in Lhasa. Woeser thought it
would be an interesting project ‹ artistically, if nothing else ‹ to
revisit the same spots and take photos, half a century later, from the
same angles. To make the project as nearly perfect as possible, she found
her father¹s camera and bought film for it. Within a few days, she had
taken 19 rolls of photos.

When a young friend who was headed back to coastal China came to say
goodbye, Woeser asked her to carry the film and get it developed. The
friend agreed. The next day at airport security, agents ³discovered² in
her luggage a knife she had never seen before. The ³discovery² triggered
an ³enhanced examination² of her belongings, which the police took away
and then returned to her just as she was boarding the plane.

She checked on the film. The boxes were the same but not the contents.
Woeser had given her 19 rolls of exposed Fuji 120 film; the boxes now
contained 15 rolls of unexposed Kodak 135 film.

That led Woeser to suspect that listening devices had been planted in our
home. Her request to her friend had been made orally and to her alone. No
one else had been involved; no telephone or Internet communications were
used. That was why I was carrying the probe hound. We wanted to know
whether our home was bugged.

I told all this to the police and then asked them to return the probe
hound. They refused. It was ³counterespionage equipment,² I was told.
Citizens have no right to own such a device.

These things happened as the Edward Snowden revelations were attracting
the world¹s attention. The Chinese government seemed gratified, even
pleased. Look! The United States is no better than China, so let¹s all
just stop the mutual carping.

But let¹s not jump to conclusions. How comparable are the cases? Is it
conceivable that the United States would tell a citizen that he has no
right to a probe hound? In China, the government can enter any space of
any citizen anytime it wants. It is the ³counterespionage² of citizens
that is prohibited.