A report from Dake Kang and Yael Grauer for the Associated Press reveals companies such as IBM have been working with the Chinese Communist Party to help them build the powerful surveillance police state they have right now. This work has been going on for at least 25 years, according to the report.
From the report, “U.S. companies introduced systems that mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use — to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their movements. But this technology also allows Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed.”
Two Major Leaks Illuminate Censorship and Surveillance Sales Into and From China– chinadigitaltimes.net
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Excerpt:
New reporting on two large collections of leaked documents sheds light on the trade of surveillance and censorship technology into and out of China. One, by Dake Kang and Yael Grauer for the Associated Press, builds on an initial collection of thousands of documents leaked from Chinese surveillance company Landasoft to demonstrate how “partnership between American firms and the Chinese police laid the groundwork for China’s digital surveillance state as it exists today — the largest and most sophisticated on earth.” The other, by a consortium including Amnesty International and The Globe and Mail, focuses on Geedge Networks, a Chinese technology firm co-founded by “Father of the Great Firewall” Fang Binxing, and its sales of censorship and surveillance systems to countries including Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar.
The AP’s reporting includes the report itself, a collection of detailed findings, an account of the report’s creation, a photo essay showing some of the systems’ victims, and the following short film and summary of key points:
Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found. They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.
[…] U.S. companies introduced systems that mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use — to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their movements. But this technology also allows Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed. The AP found a Chinese defense contractor, Huadi, worked with IBM in 2009 to design the main policing system for Beijing to censor the internet and crack down on alleged terrorists, the Falun Gong religious sect, and even villagers deemed troublesome. IBM referred to any possible relationship it may have had with Chinese government agencies as “old, stale interactions”: “ … If older systems are being abused today — and IBM has no knowledge that they are — the misuse is entirely outside of IBM’s control, was not contemplated by IBM decades ago, and in no way reflects on IBM today.” Huadi did not respond.
