goofy glasses that can spot you in a crowd

The occasion was presented during a reporting trip to the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou several months ago. A colleague and I had gone there to try to learn facial recognition glbades that the police had experienced before the big Chinese New Year holidays.

When we arrived at the city's train station, a police officer nicely compared the specifications to a pair in Mission Impossible . But press officials rejected requests to try them. The glbades had been exposed, but not anymore, they said.

We traveled the cavernous train station, hoping to catch sight of them while taking in the scenes. Often in China, the bbad contains a bit of absurdity.

On the second floor, the military was decamped to help control crowds before the holidays. Their green camouflage tents, erected inside the building, stood within the greyish station. On the outside of the camp, there was a sign warning everyone who was approaching that they were entering a battlefield. On the ground floor, the janitors had attached mops to the front of the motorized scooters, cleaning the wide marble floors.

In a few hours, we saw Shan Jun, a deputy police chief, demonstrating the glbades in the middle of the crowds. travelers coming home for the holidays. It turned out that they were always exposed to the news media, but only the kind controlled by the state that Beijing controls.

We followed and took a break. Shan, who bravely stood in the courtyard, gave him the camera with pleasure.

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One of the most dystopian tools of industrial and industrial surveillance in China. Complex, it was not exactly smooth or really all that functional. A small camera is mounted on a pair of sunglbades. The camera is then connected by wire to a mini-computer that looks and works a bit like an oversized smartphone. The camera checks the images captured by the camera against a database. In fact, it's a mobile version of the photo systems that some countries have at customs checkpoints.

With a bit of strabismus and fit, I found my right eye through a viewfinder as on an old video camera. I was first instructed to aim for a female officer. A small rectangle appeared around his head, and after a few seconds, the screen displayed his name and national identification number. I then repeated the process on Shan.

Emboldened, I tried the glbades on a group standing about six feet away. For a moment, the glbades locked a man's face. But then the group noticed me, and the man blocked his face with his hand. The minicomputer failed to record a match before moving. Seconds later, the people dispersed.

Their reaction was somewhat surprising. The Chinese often report that they are comfortable with government surveillance, and the stations are known to be closely watched. The logic often expressed is that those who abide by the law have nothing to fear.

Men fleeing my techno-reinforced gaze clearly felt differently – and I suppose they were not criminals on the lam. Like me who was eyeing them was certainly unusual. But later, as I watched the police continue to demonstrate the device, I noticed a similar pattern, if less exaggerated. The curious grouped together to check out this brave new technology, but many others moved away quickly, faces turned.

In a way, a lack of information has conditioned such behavior. The capacities and intentions of the authorities are rarely clear and uncertainty is part of the problem. The less people know, the more they need to use their imagination. The state of China's surveillance is far from perfect, but if people do not know where it excels and where it collapses, there is a better chance that they badume that it works and behaves.

Later, we learned that rejected our request to see the glbades to avoid unmasking too much on the databases that powered it. Someone from Beijing, said the press officer, had called and said that the show could show shortcomings in their new methods of tracking down criminals.

With so much darkness, many Chinese see the authorities for what they are – erratic, unrestrained and now equipped with new, unpredictable powers. The group in the station was simply making a careful choice and giving ample space to the police, their crazy electronic glbades and their strange foreign friend.

Many critics call the surveillance ambitions of China, Orwellian, and they are. But for today's China, the world devised by Franz Kafka offers a narrower vision: bureaucratic, unknowable and governed by uncertainty as much as by fear.

New York Times