"The body camera hung from the top of the IV drip, recording the slightest twitch made by Yang Guoliang as he lay bloody and paralyzed in a hospital bed after a police beating with bricks. By then, surveillance was nothing new for the Yang family in rural China, snared in an intricate network based on U.S. technology that spies on them and predicts what they'll do."
"Their train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, text messages and phone calls are forwarded to the government. Their house is ringed with more than a dozen cameras. They've tried to go to Beijing 20 times in the past few years, but masked men show up and grab them, often before they depart. And last year, Yang's wife and younger daughter were detained and now face trial for disrupting the work of the Chinese state - a crime carrying a sentence of up to a decade"
A rural Chinese family faces constant, invasive surveillance after local officials seized their land. Cameras, body cams and data feeds from train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, texts and calls feed authorities and restrict movement. Masked men intercept attempts to travel and family members have been detained and charged with disrupting state work. Physical violence, including a police beating with bricks, has harmed family members. American technology and companies supplied much of the hardware and software underpinning the network. The surveillance apparatus broadly monitors, predicts and constrains daily life for those tagged as troublemakers.
Read at Fortune
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