Surveillance and countersurveillance in China: the former private detective who went from installing spy cameras to rooting them out
- Following China’s crackdown on private detective agencies, He Zhihui spied a niche in the market and now uncovers the very devices he used to hide away
A visit to He Zhihui’s office is like a scavenger hunt. The Antebao Group team leader dwells behind a glass door in a nondescript part of town, tucked away in an industrial estate not 2km (1.2 miles) from the gates of Apple’s main assembly complex at Foxconn.
Swing the door open and the office seems like any other: a potted plant in a corner, a fake flower basket on the wall and, on a large, central conference table, a phone charger, a clock, a tea set. Pretty standard stuff. Or so you would think.
“There are several spy cameras and tapping devices in the room,” He says. He is wearing a black Antebao shirt and black trousers, the kind of anonymous outfit that would make it easy to disappear in a crowd. “See if you can find them all.”
A Shenzhen-based company of 200 employees, Antebao develops and sells monitoring cameras, as well as anti-surveillance equipment and tracking devices. To demonstrate, He picks up a pager-like object with a thumb-sized, red-glass peephole in the middle and clips it to his phone, aligning the peephole with his phone’s camera. He flicks a switch, triggering red LED bulbs around the device’s peephole, and hands it to me.
“Go on,” he gestures, “see if you can spot the white dot.”
He explains that the red glass over the peephole filters out all other colour waves of light, so the screen on his phone will reveal a small, nearly imperceptible white dot on the everyday objects in the office, representing light refracted off the spheres of tiny camera lenses.
“What if I told you there’s a camera in the flower basket,” He asks, “would that make it easier?”
