China = ‘Big Brother’ for its surveillance tech. But US uses it too

China caught some bad press recently when US media reported that railway police in Henan Province had used “sunglasses” equipped with facial recognition tech at train stations during the New Year’s rush to nab suspected criminals.The Wall Street Journal, among others, noted that the glasses in the pilot project can identify individuals from a database of 10,000 faces in 100 milliseconds. The photos of a Chinese policewoman wearing “smart” shades was termed another Orwellian move by a government that has already installed 170 million CCTV cameras to monitor its citizens.

The problem with such stories is that Americans have been living in this brave new world of facial recognition in law enforcement for years. They just don’t know it, thanks to the “blind journalism” of an increasingly unfocused US press.

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