Investigating Chinese surveillance is a rather lonely job. For all the dissidents yammering about dramatic arrests and torture and harvesting of organs, you can’t really guarantee publication or much of an audience unless you can prove that there are links to America: brand name corporations, scary cutting-edge U.S. technology, insidious Washington collusion. That’s the trifecta—and, now, if you could somehow squeeze the elections in there somehow…

Last Friday, it looked like the New York Times had what the English bookies call a quadpot.  “Firm Romney Founded Is Tied to Chinese Surveillance,” the headline beckoned, and the household name part checks out. Bain Capital, specifically the Bain Capital Asia Fund, purchased the video surveillance division of Uniview Technologies, which is supplying the usual cocktail of cameras with a central surveillance collection point. They will be aimed into what the Chinese consider to be public places—you know, universities, mosques, Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, and the like.