Ken Paxton recounts his 1999 Beijing visit, detailing suspected surveillance where his backpack was tampered with and hotel cameras allegedly recorded him. He describes aggressive passport demands by a travel aide and avoids returning to China due to fears of total government data theft from devices. Paxton asserts these tactics mirror FBI and DOJ actions under Biden and Obama, concluding that such pervasive spying creates an environment where visitors are treated as enemies subject to aggressive information gathering. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, you mentioned something at the beginning.
You said that you felt the oppressive nature when you went to just something oppressive about how it was in communist China.
I'm a bit like that too.
When I sense this kind of totalitarian impulse, I feel it.
I feel it very listening.
Do you have a sense where that came from?
I'm guessing this wasn't the first time you felt this.
This was back in 2000, I think it was 19.
And I was in Beijing in my hotel room.
And look, I watched probably a little too much James Bond growing up, still like James Bond.
And I set up a little thing to see if I felt like somebody was in my room with my backpack and the way I structured.
If somebody got into it, I would know it.
I put a few papers on my door to see if that.
So all the things that I did, it appeared that somebody had messed with my stuff, which made me realize, as soon as I went to dinner, that they were searching my room, and they likely had recording cameras in my room.
And that really disturbed me.
And then, of course, I was walking around Beijing, and I realized people were taking pictures of me that seemed really odd.
And then I had a travel aide with me, and they came and asked for his passport for a drawing, and he said, I don't want to participate.
Escaping Information Extraction00:01:21
And they said, we don't care.
You're participating.
Just very strange, sort of aggressive things that occurred that made me feel like I'm being watched and I'm very uncomfortable with this.
That's fascinating.
I was expecting you to say, oh, I just sort of felt it, but wow.
And so, I mean, like, do you warn people that this is what's going to happen to them when they're going, when they go over there?
Yeah, well, so I don't want to go back.
My goal is not to go back.
I went other places in China where it didn't feel like that.
You get away from Beijing, and it's less like that.
But I still, I realize this is the world where the government controls everything.
And if you're viewed as not a friend of theirs, they're trying to get as much information from you as they can.
And look, anybody that goes over there, they're trying to gather as much information off your computers.
Of course, I didn't take my laptop.
I didn't take my regular phone because I knew they would break into it and steal all my contacts and all my emails and all my text messages.
So we were all warned not to do that because you can't trust the government of China not to do that.
They will absolutely do it.
We're not used to that in this country, although we've had a little experience with that under the Biden administration, the Obama administration, where the FBI and Department of Justice did that stuff.