Tag: Surveillance of Citizens by Government

He Become China’s Largest Critic in Exile. Then The Threats Followed Him.

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One afternoon in October 2024, Li Ying was lying in bed, scrolling through X, when he got a notification on his phone from the peephole security camera on his apartment door in Turin, Italy. Two men were lingering in the hallway. He got up quietly, went to the door and watched them through the camera feed on his phone. For two years, ever since he turned his X account into one of the most influential Chinese-language sources for uncensored news and dissent, Mr. Li had received threats of physical harm.…

China Aims A.I. at Predicting Who Could Pose a Political Risk

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A Chinese company has been trying to develop artificial intelligence-powered technology that would enable authoritarian governments to not just monitor dissidents but also potentially predict who could become one in the future. The work, which appears to be in the research stage, is ripped out of dystopian science fiction, offering a glimpse of a world in which an authoritarian state is able to move against its citizens before they begin any public dissent. The Chinese company, Geedge Networks, sells a commercial version of the Great Firewall, the surveillance and censorship…

China Exports Surveillance

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When I first read about how China tracks its citizens with surveillance cameras and also ranks them according to a set of political and social criteria set by the Communist Party, it was impossible not to think of “1984” and Big Brother. Since then, China has become the world’s superpower of surveillance, much of it augmented by artificial intelligence. It’s Mao-era policing on steroids. And as my colleagues David Pierson and Berry Wang write, that model of policing is now being exported to authoritarian states and weak democracies across the…

A Quiet Pacific Village Becomes China’s Security Testing Ground

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The first sign that something unusual was unfolding in the Solomon Islands was when the Chinese police showed up at Fighter One, a quiet village ringed with banana trees. The Chinese officers gathered villagers on a grassy patch and proposed a system they said would help keep them safe. They suggested that the residents fill out cards providing the names, addresses and dates of birth for each household member. They recommended collecting fingerprints and palm prints — both highly unusual and legally dubious in a country lacking laws governing personal…

Why China Is So Much Less Scared of A.I. Than the U.S.

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Every evening as our children eat dinner, my phone notifies me that our 3-year-old’s teacher has uploaded photos taken during the day at school. An artificial intelligence facial recognition feature puts a red square around his face, letting me know which photos to look at. It’s kind of creepy, but kind of helpful, too. In China, surveillance technology and A.I. surround our everyday life. It’s built into the way we order food delivered to us from online apps; almost nobody I know here in Shanghai buys groceries at a grocery…

Supreme Court Appears Skeptical of Falun Gong Lawsuit Against Cisco

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A majority of the Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared skeptical of a lawsuit by Falun Gong members who claim that an American tech company helped the Chinese government to target them for torture. The lawsuit asserts that Cisco Systems Inc. helped the Chinese government create an internet censorship program, known as the Golden Shield, that enabled the government to surveil and harm members of the spiritual movement, which is banned in China. At issue before the Supreme Court is whether American courts can judge such disputes. During oral arguments on…

Chinese Officers Questioned U.S. Government Employee About His Army Service

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Chinese intelligence officers began tracking an employee of the U.S. Commerce Department this spring, when he was in southwest China and where he has family members, at one point interrogating him about his prior service in the U.S. military, according to a U.S. government document. The man, who is an American citizen, has been prevented from leaving China since mid-April, according to the document, a State Department cable that was obtained by The New York Times. The cable, from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, was dated May 2 and sent…

Book Review: ‘Means of Control,’ by Byron Tau; ‘The Sentinel State,’ by Minxin Pei

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MEANS OF CONTROL: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State, by Byron Tau THE SENTINEL STATE: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China, by Minxin Pei In 1975, the French philosopher Michel Foucault published “Surveiller et Punir” — “To Surveil and Punish” — a book popularly translated into English as “Discipline and Punish,” about how societies keep their populations in line with minimal violence. At the center of his argument lay the panopticon, a prison designed by the 18th-century political reformer…

China’s Hacker Network: What to Know About the I-Soon Document Leak

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Leaked documents posted online last week show how the Chinese government is working with private hackers to obtain sensitive information from foreign governments and companies. The hackers worked for a security firm called I-Soon, part of a network of spies for hire working closely with Beijing. The leak showed how China’s top surveillance agency, the Ministry of Public Security, has increasingly recruited contractors to attack government targets and private companies as part of a cyberespionage campaign in Asia. The leak is likely to stoke fears among leaders in Washington who…

Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists Are Breaking Up With China

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DCM Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, began investing in China’s start-ups in 1999. The move reaped such blockbuster returns that in 2021, DCM said it planned to “double down” on its strategy of investing in China, the United States and Japan. Yet when DCM set out to raise money last fall for a new fund focused on very young companies and promoted its “cross-Pacific” expertise, the firm described plans to invest in the United States, Japan and South Korea, according to a fund-raising memo that was viewed by…