“What are you two Asians doing in a black neighborhood?” the driver asked.
“We are reporters.” I answered.

The driver, an immigrant from Pakistan, pointed to a row of houses that were either burned down or boarded up and asked: “Do you think this is America?”

I don’t know the answer. Austin, and other neighborhoods on the west and south sides, is obviously part of America. But it is not the America that I pictured.

I began to search for answer to the question, and through this process I learned. a shocking fact – that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to the International Center for Prison Studies, the country houses 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. So what happens to “land of the free, home of the brave?”

As I talked to community leaders, a lot of them mentioned the “war on drugs,” and especially how it applies to African-Americans.

It all started in 1971 when then-President Richard Nixon declared that, “America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.” Since then, the U.S. has been spending more and more money on drug enforcement. According to a story in Quartz, the U.S. now spends more than $40 billion each year on drug prohibition.

In fact, some current and former law enforcement officers have begun to question the effectiveness of the war on drugs.

James Gierach, a former Cook County assistant state’s attorney in the 1970s and now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, believes the war on drugs creates the very problem it tried to prevent.

“Al Capone was in favor of the prohibition of liquor. Why? Because it was the foundation of his business. It enabled him to make $2 billion dollars a year in today’s currency…. Drug cartels around the world are in favor of the war on drugs… because when you outlawed something that people want, it makes that commodity the most valuable commodity in the face of the earth. We tell the kids don’t do drugs and we slide a pot of gold next to the choice we tell them not to take,”

David Simon, a former crime reporter with the Baltimore Sun and creator of the TV show “The Wire,” said in the documentary “The House I Lived In” that the war on drugs undermines the law enforcement’s ability of fighting crime.
“There are lots of detectives I admired for their professionalism, for their craft. The drug war created an environment in which none of that was rewarded,” he said. “A drug arrest does not require anything other than getting out of your radio car and jacking people up against the side of a liquor store. Probable cause? Are you kidding?”

According to Simon, the “simplicity” of a drug arrest means a police officer can make more arrests and get paid for the extra hours he worked.

“Compare that guy to the one guy doing police work—solving a murder, a rape, a robbery, a burglary. If he gets lucky, he makes one arrest for the month… At the end of the month, when they look and when they see officer A, he made 60 arrests. Officer B, he made one arrest. Who do you think they make the sergeant?” Simon said.

Therefore the war on drugs creates an incentive for law enforcement to go into a neighborhood and arrest people while interring with other police works. In the long run, it creates the distrust between police and the community.

In my opinion, drug abuse is a public health issue instead of a criminal justice issue. The tax money should go to prevention and treatment instead of building prisons.

Drugs do not dignify individuals, and there is no argument. But the war on drugs that lasts for more than 40 years do not accomplish any of its original goals.

When we first entered Hong Kong, my mother and I were led into a room near the border checkpoint by an operative of the Special Branch of the Royal Hong Kong Police, then a front office for MI5, the feared British police and intelligence agency.

“What is your business in Hong Kong?” the agent asked.

It turns out my grandfather was an intelligence officer of the Chinese Communist Party posted as a school principal in Hong Kong in the 1940s, and the Special Branch had been watching him the whole time.

Luckily my mother and I walked out of the room that day, and I continued to be a normal kid growing up in Hong Kong.

But it was after I became a journalist in Hong Kong that I realized how this Asian financial hub is also the spy hub of the Far East. And despite the fact that Hong Kong has been under Chinese rule since 1997, its law enforcement agencies still have close contact with U.S. and British law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

“What is your business in Hong Kong?” the agent asked.

It turns out my grandfather was an intelligence officer of the Chinese Communist Party posted as a school principal in Hong Kong in the 1940s, and the Special Branch had been watching him the whole time.

Luckily my mother and I walked out of the room that day, and I continued to be a normal kid growing up in Hong Kong.

But it was after I became a journalist in Hong Kong that I realized how this Asian financial hub is also the “spy hub of the Far East.” And despite the fact that Hong Kong has been under Chinese rule since 1997, its law enforcement agencies still have close contact with U.S. and British law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

According to the Guardian and the South China Morning Post, in 2004 Sami al-Saadi, a vocal opponent of late Libya dictator Muammar Gaddafi also known as Abu Munthir, was detained in the Hong Kong International Airport for a week before forced onto a flight to Tripoli. After the fall of Gaddafi’s regime, Human Rights Watch obtained fax correspondence between CIA and Tripoli, which revealed Hong Kong government’s role in al-Saadi’s rendition to Libya.

This CIA fax to Libya authority shows the Hong Kong Government offering advices to ensure the rendition of al-Saadi. (Screenshot of documents released by The Guardian via DocumentCloud at http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2011/sep/09/libya#document/p6)

The fax shows that the Hong Kong government offered suggestions to Libyan authority on how to assume control of al-Saadi.

The segment of the fax shows the Hong Kong Government requesting the details about the purposed rendition of al-Saadi. (Screenshot of documents released by The Guardian via DocumentCloud at http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2011/sep/09/libya#document/p6)

It also shows Stanley Ying, the then Principle Secretary for Security, is listed as a key contact in the Hong Kong government.

But that does not mean the Hong Kong government is always an ally for Western governments. In the case of Edward Snowden, we saw the opposite.

Edward Snowden came to Hong Kong on May 20, 2013 from Hawaii, and he seemed to have faith in Hong Kong’s judicial system.

“Hong Kong has a strong tradition of free speech. People think China, Great Firewall … but the people of Hong Kong have a long tradition of protesting on the streets, making their views known … and I believe the Hong Kong government is actually independent in relation to a lot of other leading Western governments.”

— Edward Snowden

Despite numerous protests from the U.S. government, the Hong Kong government allowed Snowden to fly to Moscow.

From Snowden’s case, we can see that the decision of whether to hand over a valuable person to Western intelligence really depends on what kind of information that particular person possesses.

Ben Lam, a local news editor who was assigned to cover Snowden’s case and has numerous encounters with Chinese intelligence in Mainland China, said Hong Kong becomes a hub for intelligence activities because of historical and geographical reasons.

“Back in the days of British rule, it was the West’s window to Mainland China and vice versa for the Chinese,” he said.

“I would say the major players in Hong Kong right now are the MI6, CIA and also Chinese intelligence agencies,” he said. “The Japanese government also has an extensive intelligence network in Hong Kong, and their operatives often use journalists as their covers.”

Hong Kong is a city known for its financial activities, tourism and political tension between locals and the Chinese government. But it is also a place where an invisible war on national interests happen everyday.