US tech companies enabled Chinese surveillance state

Over the past quarter-century, U.S. technology companies have significantly designed and built the Chinese surveillance state, playing a role in enabling far greater human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation has found.

The companies in question sold billions of dollars worth of technology to the Chinese government, police, and surveillance organizations, despite warnings from Congress and the media that such tools would be used to suppress dissent, persecute religious groups, and attack minorities.

Critically, US surveillance technology companies have enabled the brutal mass detention campaign in China's Xinjiang region, targeting, tracking, and classifying virtually the entire indigenous Uyghur population for assimilation and subjugation.

The contribution of US companies to this result was to provide technology that analyzes information aimed at preventing crimes, protests and violent attacks.

These systems analyze a wide range of information—texts, phone calls, payments, flights, videos, DNA, email, internet, and even water and energy consumption—to identify suspicious individuals and predict their behavior.

But it also allows Chinese police to threaten friends and family and detain people for crimes they didn't commit.

IBM, Dell, Thermo Fisher, Seagate, Motorola, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft are some of the companies mentioned in the AP investigation.

What began in China more than a decade ago can be seen as a warning to other countries, as the use of surveillance technology worldwide is rapidly accelerating, including in the US.

Backed by the Trump administration, tech companies feel more powerful than ever, and the White House even rescinded an executive order from President Joe Biden aimed at protecting civil rights from new surveillance technologies.

As the capability and sophistication of such technologies has grown, so has their reach.

Current surveillance technologies already include artificial intelligence systems that help detect and detain immigrants in the US and identify people to kill in the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, China has used what it learned from the US to become a surveillance superpower itself and sell technologies to countries like the Russian Federation and Iran.

The AP's investigation was based on tens of thousands of emails and databases from one of the Chinese surveillance companies, tens of thousands of confidential corporate and government documents, official Chinese marketing materials, and thousands of orders. The AP also relied on dozens of information requests and interviews with more than 100 current and former engineers, executives, managers, administrators, and law enforcement officials from China and the United States.

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