China's crimes against humanity

INSIDE WECHAT MASSIVE SURVEILLANCE OPERATION
By Isobel Cockerell

It was 2011, and she was living in Hotan, an oasis town in East Turkestan, in northwest China. 

The 30-year-old, Nurjamal Atawula, loved to take pictures of her children and exchange strings of emoji with her husband while he was out. 

In 2013, Atawula downloaded WeChat, the Chinese social messaging app. 

Not long after, rumors circulated among her friends: The government could track your location through your phone. 

At first, she didn’t believe them.
In early 2016, police started making routine checks on Atawula’s home. 

Her husband was regularly called to the police station. 

The police informed him they were suspicious of his WeChat activity. 

Atawula’s children began to cower in fear at the sight of a police officer.
The harassment and fear finally reached the point that the family decided to move to Turkey. Atawula’s husband, worried that Atawula would be arrested, sent her ahead while he stayed in East Turkestan and waited for the children’s passports.
“The day I left, my husband was arrested,” Atawula said. 

When she arrived in Turkey in June 2016, her phone stopped working—and by the time she had it repaired, all her friends and relatives had deleted her from their WeChat accounts. 

They feared that the government would punish them for communicating with her.
She was alone in Istanbul and her digital connection with life in East Turkestan was over. 

Apart from a snatched Skype call with her mother for 11 and a half minutes at the end of December 2016, communication with her relatives has been completely cut. 

“Sometimes I feel like the days I was with my family are just my dreams, as if I have been lonely all my life—ever since I was born,” she said.
Atawula now lives alone in Zeytinburnu, a working-class neighborhood in Istanbul. 

It’s home to Turkey’s largest population of Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim ethnic minority native to East Turkestan, a vast, resource-rich land of deserts and mountains along China’s ancient Silk Road trade route.
Atawula is one of around 34,000 Uyghurs in Turkey. 

She is unable to contact any of her relatives—via phone, WeChat, or any other app. 

“I feel very sad when I see other people video chatting with their families,” she says. 

“I think, why can’t we even hear the voice of our children?”
For Uyghurs in East Turkestan, any kind of contact from a non-Chinese phone number, though not officially illegal, can result in instant arrest. 

Most Uyghurs in Turkey have been deleted by their families on social media. 

And many wouldn’t dare try to make contact, for fear Chinese authorities would punish their relatives. 

It’s just one of the ways Xi Jinping’s government maintains a tightly controlled net of surveillance over the Uyghurs in China, and it has a ripple effect on Uyghurs living all over the world.
Zeytinburnu, the Istanbul suburb where Atawula lives, lies behind the city’s winding expressways, and is dotted with restaurants and cafés serving Uyghur cuisine: wide, slippery noodles, lamb kebabs, and green tea. 

The Uyghur separatist flag—a light blue version of the Turkish flag—is a common sight. 

It’s a banned image in China, representing free East Turkestan.
East Turkestan was brought under the Communist Party of China’s control in 1949. 

During the latter half of the 20th century, Uyghur independence was a threat that loomed over the party’s agenda. 

The government tried to stamp out separatism and “assimilate” the Uyghurs by encouraging mass migration of Han Chinese, China’s dominant ethnic group, to East Turkestan.
During the ’90s, riots erupted between Uyghurs and Chinese police. 

In a white paper published in March, the Chinese government defined the riots as “inhuman, anti-social and barbaric acts” perpetrated by separatist groups. 

Amnesty International, meanwhile, described the 1997 protests in Gulja, East Turkestan, as a peaceful demonstration turned massacre, quoting exiled Uyghur activist Rebiya Kadeer. 

“I have never seen such viciousness in my life,” she said. 

“Chinese soldiers were bludgeoning the demonstrators.”
After the 9/11 attacks, the Chinese government took a page from George W. Bush’s war on terror and began targeting separatist groups in East Turkestan. 

In 2009, bloody ethnic riots broke out between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi, the East Turkestan capital. 

Police put the city on lockdown, enforcing an internet blackout and cutting cell phone service. 

It was the beginning of a new policy to control the Uyghur population—digitally.

The WeChat Lockdown
In recent years, China has carried out its crackdown on Islamic extremism via smartphone. 

In 2011, Chinese IT giant Tencent holdings launched a new app called WeChat—known as “Undidar” in the Uyghur language. 

It quickly became a vital communication tool across China.
The launch of WeChat was “a moment of huge relief and freedom,” said Aziz Isa, a Uyghur scholar who has studied Uyghur use of WeChat alongside Rachel Harris at London’s SOAS University. “Never before in Uyghur life had we had the opportunity to use social media in this way,” Isa said, describing how Uyghurs across class divides were openly discussing everything from politics to religion to music.
By 2013, around a million Uyghurs were using the app. 

Harris and Isa observed a steady rise in Islamic content, “most of it apolitical but some of it openly radical and oppositional.” 

Isa remembers being worried by some of the more nationalist content he saw, though he believes it accounted for less than 1 percent of all the posts. 

Most Uyghurs didn’t understand the authorities were watching.
This kind of unrestricted communication on WeChat went on for around a year. 

But in May 2014, the Chinese government enlisted a taskforce to stamp out “malpractice” on instant messaging apps, in particular “rumors and information leading to violence, terrorism, and pornography.” 

WeChat was required to let the government monitor the activity of its users.
Miyesser Mijit, 28, whose name has been changed to protect her family, is a Uyghur master’s student in Istanbul who left East Turkestan in 2014, just before the crackdown. 

During her undergraduate studies in mainland China, she and her Uyghur peers had already learned to use their laptops and phones with caution. 

They feared they would be expelled from university if they were caught expressing their religion online.
Mijit’s brother, who was drafted into the East Turkestan police force in the late 2000s, warned her to watch her language while using technology. 

“He always told me not to share anything about my religion and to take care with my words,” Mijit said. 

She did not take part in the widespread WeChat conversations about religion. 

If her friends sent her messages about Islam, she would delete them immediately, and performed a factory reset on her phone before coming home to East Turkestan for the university vacation period. Her precautions turned out to be insufficient.

A Surveillance State Is Born
The monitoring of Uyghurs was not limited to their smartphones. 

Mijit remembers first encountering facial recognition technology in the summer of 2013. 

Her brother came home from the police station carrying a device slightly bigger than a cellphone. 

He scanned her face and entered her age range as roughly between 20 and 30. 

The device promptly brought up all her information, including her home address. 

Her brother warned her this technology would soon be rolled out across East Turkestan. 

“All your life will be in the record,” he told her.
In May 2014, alongside the WeChat crackdown, China announced a wider “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism.” 

It was a response to several high-profile attacks attributed to Uyghur militants, including a suicide car bombing in Tiananmen Square in 2013 and, in the spring of 2014, a train station stabbing in Kunming followed by a market bombing in Urumqi. 

Authorities zeroed in on ethnic Uyghurs, alongside Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic minorities in East Turkestan.
After being subjected to daily police checks on her home in Urumqi, Mijit decided to leave East Turkestan for Turkey. 

When she returned to China for a vacation in 2015, she saw devices like the one her brother had shown her being used at police checkpoints every few hundred feet. 

Her face was scanned by police the moment she arrived at the city gates. 

“I got off the bus and everyone was checked one by one,” she said. 

She was also greeted by devices affixed to the entrance of every supermarket, mall, and hospital.
Amina Abduwayit, 38, a businesswoman from Urumqi who now lives in Zeytinburnu, remembers being summoned to the police station and having her face scanned and inputted into the police database.

“It was like a monkey show,” she said. 

“They would ask you to stare like this and that. They would ask you to laugh, and you laugh, and ask you to glare and you glare.”
Abduwayit was also asked to give DNA and blood samples to the police. 

This was part of a larger, comprehensive campaign by the Chinese government to build a biometric picture of East Turkestan’s Uyghur population and help track those deemed nonconformists. 

“The police station was full of Uyghurs,” Abduwayit says. 

“All of them were there to give blood samples.”
Finally, Abduwayit was made to give a voice sample to the police. 

“They gave me a newspaper to read aloud for one minute. It was a story about a traffic accident, and I had to read it three times. They thought I was faking a low voice.”
The voice-recognition program was powered by Chinese artificial intelligence giant iFlytek, which claims a 70 percent share of China’s speech recognition industry. 

In August 2017, Human Rights Watch found information indicating iFlytek supplied voiceprint technology to police bureaus in East Turkestan province. 

The company opened an office in Silicon Valley in 2017 and remains open about working “under the guidance of the Ministry of Public Security” to provide “a new experience for public safety and forensic identification,” according to the Chinese version of its website. 

The company says it offers a particular focus to creating antiterrorism technology.
Human Rights Watch believes the company has been piloting a system in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Public Security to monitor telephone conversations. 

“Many party and state leaders including Xi Jinping have inspected and praised the company’s innovative work,” iFlytek’s website reads.
Halmurat Harri, a Finland-based Uyghur activist, visited the city of Turpan in 2016 and was shocked by the psychological impact of near-constant police checks. 

“You feel like you are under water,” he says. 

“You cannot breathe. Every breath you take, you’re careful.”
He remembers driving out to the desert with a friend, who told him he wanted to watch the sunset. They locked their cellphones in the car and walked away. 

“My friend said, ‘Tell me what’s happening outside. Do foreign countries know about the Uyghur oppression?’ We talked for a couple of hours. He wanted to stay there all night.”
To transform East Turkestan into one of the most tightly controlled surveillance states in the world, a vast, gridlike security network had to be created. 

Over 160,000 cameras were installed in the city of Urumqi by 2016, according to China security and surveillance experts Adrian Zenz and James Leibold.
In the year following Chen Quanguo’s 2016 appointment as regional party secretary, more than 100,000 security-related positions were advertised, while security spending leapt by 92 percent—a staggering $8.6 billion increase.

It’s part of a wider story of huge domestic security investment across China, which hit a record $197 billion in 2017. 

Around 173 million cameras now watch China’s citizens. 

In the imminent future, the government has laid out plans to achieve 100 percent video coverage of “key public areas.”
For Uyghurs, “the employment situation in East Turkestan is difficult and limited,” said Zenz. 

A lot of the good jobs require fluency in Chinese—which many Uyghurs don’t have. 

Joining the police force is one of the only viable opportunities open to Uyghurs, who are then tasked with monitoring their own people.

China’s Uyghur Gulags
The government’s efforts to control the people of East Turkestan were not only digital; it also began to imprison them physically. 

In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said one million Uyghurs were being held in what amounts to a “massive internment camp shrouded in secrecy.”
At first, China denied the existence of the camps entirely. 

But then, in October 2018, the government announced it had launched “a vocational education and training program” and passed a law legitimizing what they termed “training centers.”
In a September 2018 report, Human Rights Watch found human rights violations in East Turkestan to be of a scope and scale not seen since the Cultural Revolution and that the creation of the camps reflected Beijing’s commitment to “transforming East Turkestan in its own image.”
Gulbahar Jalilova, 54, a Uyghur clothes retailer from Kazakhstan, spent one year, three months and 10 days in detention centers and camps in Urumqi. 

She now lives in Istanbul. 

According to her arrest warrant in China, issued by the Urumqi Public Security Bureau, she was detained “for her suspicious involvement in terrorist activities in the region.” 

Police accused her of money laundering via one of her employees in Urumqi, who was also arrested. Jalilova denies the charges, saying that they were a mere pretext.
Jalilova was taken to a kanshousuo, one of the many temporary detention centers in the East Turkestan capital. 

Over the next 15 months, she was transferred to three different jails and camps in Urumqi. 

She is precise and exacting in her memory of life in detention: a 10-by-20 foot cell, with up to 50 people sitting in tightly packed rows, their feet tucked beneath them.
Jalilova, who has struggled with her memory since being released in August 2018, keeps a notebook where she has written down all the names of the women who were in the cell with her. 

She also notes the reasons for their arrest, which include downloading WhatsApp—a blocked app in China—storing the numbers of prominent Uyghur scholars, and being caught with religious content on their phones.
She remembers how the cell was fitted with cameras on all four sides, with a television mounted above the door. 

“The leaders in Beijing can see you,” the guards told her. 

Once a month, Jalilova said, the guards would play Xi Jinping’s speeches to inmates and make them write letters of remorse. 

“If you wrote something bad, they would punish you,” Jalilova said. 

“You could only say ‘Thank you to the Party’ and ‘I have cleansed myself of this or that’ and ‘I will be a different person once I am released.’”

She was set free in August 2018 and came to Turkey, no longer feeling safe in Kazakhstan, where the government has been accused of deporting Uyghurs back to East Turkestan.

Escape to Turkey
Though no official statistics for the camps exist, the volunteer-run East Turkestan Victims Database has gathered more than 3,000 Uyghur, Kazakh, and other Muslim minorities’ testimonials for their missing relatives. 

It shows that around 73 percent of those recorded as being in detention are men.
It follows that the majority of people who have escaped East Turkestan for Turkey in recent years are women. 

Local activists estimate 65 percent of the Uyghur population in Turkey is female, many separated from their husbands.
Some Uyghur women made their clandestine escape from East Turkestan by fleeing overland, through China and Thailand to Malaysia, before flying to Turkey. 

In Zeytinburnu, they live in a network of shared apartments, making whatever money they can by doing undocumented work in the local textile industry, as tailors or seamstresses.
The women who arrived without their husbands are known among other Uyghurs as “the widows.” Their husbands are trapped in East Turkestan, and they do not know if they are alive, imprisoned, or dead.
Kalbinur Tursun, 35, left East Turkestan in April 2016 with her youngest son Mohamed, the only one of her children who had a passport at the time. 

She left her other children and husband in East Turkestan. 

She was pregnant with her seventh child, a daughter called Marziya whom she feared she would be forced to abort, having already had many more children than China’s two-child policy allows.
When Tursun first arrived in Turkey, she video-called her husband every day over WeChat. 

Tursun believes Chinese police arrested him on June 13, 2016—as that was the last time she spoke to him. 

She was then told by a friend that her husband had been sentenced to 10 years in jail as a result of her decision to leave. 

“I am so afraid my children hate me,” she said.

Turkey is seen as a safer place to go than other Muslim-majority countries, including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, whose leaders have both recently dismissed the Uyghurs’ plight. 

Uyghurs have come to Turkey in waves from China since the 1950s. 

They are not given work permits, and many hope they will eventually find refuge in Europe or the United States.
Though Turkey has traditionally acted as protector for Uyghurs, whom they view as Turkic kin, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been reluctant to speak up for the Uyghurs in recent years as trade relations with China have improved. (By the same token, the Trump administration has declined to press China on human rights issues in East Turkestan as it negotiates a trade deal with Beijing.)
On February 9, 2019, Hami Aksoy, a spokesman for Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, broke the diplomatic hush. 

“It is no longer a secret that more than one million Uyghur Turks incurring arbitrary arrests are subjected to torture and political brainwashing in internment camps and prisons,” Aksoy’s statement read.

Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman from Urumqi, was afraid to speak freely when she arrived in Turkey in 2015. 

For the first two years after she arrived, she did not dare to greet another Uyghur. 

“Even though I was far away from China, I still lived in fear of surveillance,” she said. 

Though she now feels less afraid, she has not opened her WeChat app in a year and a half.
Others tried to use WeChat to contact their families, but the drip-feed of information became steadily slower. 

In 2016, findings by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a research center that monitors methods of information control, showed how the app was censoring its users by tracking their keyword usage. 

Among the search terms that could trigger official suspicion are any words relating to Uyghur issues such as “2009 Urumqi riots,” “2012 Kashgar riots,” and anything to do with Islam.
In Zeytinburnu, seamstress Tursungul Yusuf, 42, remembers how phone calls and messages from relatives in East Turkestan became increasingly terse as 2017 went on. 

“When we spoke, they’d keep it brief. They’d say, ‘We’re OK, safe.’ They’d speak in code—if someone was jailed in the camps, they would say they’d been ‘admitted to hospital.’ I’d say ‘understood.’ We could not talk freely. My older daughter wrote ‘I am helpless’ on her WeChat status. She then sent me one message, ‘Assalam,’ before deleting me.”
A kind of WeChat code had developed through emoji: A half-fallen rose meant someone had been arrested. 

A dark moon, they had gone to the camps. 

A sun emoji—“I am alive.” 

A flower—“I have been released.”
Messages were becoming more enigmatic by the day. 

Sometimes, a frantic series of messages parroting CPC propaganda would be followed by a blackout in communication. 

Washington, DC-based Uyghur activist Aydin Anwar recalls that where Uyghurs used to write “inshallah” on social media, they now write “CPC.”
On the few occasions she was able to speak with relatives, she said “it sounded like their soul had been taken out of them.” 

A string of pomegranate images were a common theme: the Party’s symbol of ethnic cohesion, the idea that all minorities and Han Chinese people should live harmoniously alongside one another, “like the seeds of a pomegranate.” 

By late 2017, most Uyghurs in Turkey had lost contact with their families completely.

Resilience, Resistance, Resolve
In a book-lined apartment in Zeytinburnu, Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur activist and poet, coaches Amina Abduwayit, the businesswoman who fled East Turkestan after police took her DNA. 

They’re filming a video they plan to upload to Facebook. 

Ayup films her on his smartphone, while she sits at a table and recounts how her home city of Urumqi was a “digital prison.”
Abduwayit describes how they were afraid to turn the lights on early in the morning, for fear the police would think they were praying. 

She then lists all the members of her family whom she believes have been transferred to detention centers.
Abuwayit is just one of hundreds of Uyghurs in Turkey—and thousands across the world—who have decided to upload their story to the internet.
Since this time last year, a kind of digital revolution has taken place. 

The Finland-based Uyghur activist Halmurat Harri believes he was the first person to film a testimonial. 

“I want freedom for my parents, freedom for Uyghur,” he said in a cell phone video recorded in his bathroom in Helsinki last April, before shaving off his hair in protest. 

“Then I called people and asked them to make their own testimony videos,” Harri said.
Videos filmed on smartphones from Uyghur kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms began appearing on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. 

Ayup described how at the beginning, people would “cover their faces and were afraid of their voices being recognized,” but as 2018 progressed, people became braver.
Gene Bunin, a scholar based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, manages the volunteer-run East Turkestan Victims Database, and has cataloged and gathered thousands of testimonials from Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Muslim minorities targeted in East Turkestan.
Bunin noticed that unlike private attempts to make contact, public exposure of missing relatives seemed to push the Chinese authorities to respond. 

This is particularly true for cases where victims had links to Kazakhstan, where the government has been exerting pressure on China to release ethnic Kazakhs. 

“There’s evidence the Chinese government is willing to make concessions for those whose relatives give video testimonies,” Bunin said.
He was told of people being released as little as 24 hours after their relatives posted testimonies online. 

“It’s a strong sign the East Turkestan authorities are reacting to these videos,” he said.
China has recently stepped up its defense of practices in East Turkestan, seemingly in response to broader Western attention. 

In March, Reuters reported that China would invite European diplomats to visit the region. 

That followed a statement by East Turkestan governor Shohrat Zakir that the camps were in fact “boarding schools.”
Harri recently started a hashtag, #MeTooUyghur, encouraging Uyghurs around the world to demand evidence that their families were alive.
Large WhatsApp news groups, with members from the international Uyghur diaspora, have also been a vital source of solidarity for a community deprived of information.
On December 24, 2018, Kalbinur Tursun—the woman who left five of her children in East Turkestan—was sitting in the ladies’ clothing shop she manages in Zeytinburnu, scrolling through a Uyghur WhatsApp group. 

She checks it first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and dozens of times throughout the day, as several hundred Uyghur members post near-constant videos and updates on the crisis in East Turkestan.
She tapped on a video of a room full of Uyghur children, playing a game. 

An off-camera voice shouts “Bizi! Bizi! Bizi!”—Chinese for “Nose! Nose! Nose!” and an excited group of children tap their noses. 

Tursun was astonished.
On the left, she recognized her 6-year-old daughter, Aisha. 

“Her emotion, her laugh … it’s her. It’s like a miracle,” she said. 

“I see my child so much in my dreams, I never imagined I would see her in real life.” 

It had been two years since she had last heard her daughter’s voice.
The video appears to come from one of the so-called “Little Angel Schools” in Hotan province, around 300 miles from Tursun’s native Kashgar, where it’s been reported nearly 3,000 Uyghur children are held. 

Tursun wonders whether her four other children may have been taken even further afield. 

Speaking to Radio Free Asia, a Communist Party official for the province said the orphanages were patrolled by police to “provide security.”
Unlike almost everyone in the global Uyghur diaspora, Nurjamal Atawula managed to find a way to contact her family after the WeChat blackout. 

She used one of the oldest means possible: writing a letter. 

In late 2016, she heard of a woman in Zeytinburnu who regularly traveled back and forth between Turkey and her parents’ village in East Turkestan. 

She asked the woman to take a letter to her family. 

The woman agreed. 

Atawula wrote to her brother and was careful not to include anything border inspection or police might be able to use against him.
“When I was writing the letter, I felt I was living in the dark ages,” Atawula said. 

She gave it to the woman, along with small presents for her children and money she had saved for her family.
A month later, she got a reply. 

The Uyghur woman, who she calls sister, smuggled a letter from her brother out of China, hidden in a packet of tissues.
Atawula sent a reply with her go-between—but after the third trip, the woman disappeared. 

Atawula doesn’t know what happened to her. 

She still writes to her family, but her letters are now kept in a diary, in the hope that one day her children will be able to read them.
It has now been more than two years since Atawula received her brother’s letter. 

She keeps it carefully folded, still in the tissue it came in. 

In that time, she has only read the words three times, as if by looking at them too much they will lose their power.
My beautiful sister,
How are you? After you left Urumqi we couldn’t contact you, but when we got your letter we were so pleased. I have so many words for you… maybe after we reunite we will be able to say them to one another. You said you miss your children. May Allah give you patience. Mother, me, and the relatives all miss you very much. We have so many hopes for you. Please be strong and don’t worry about the children.

Blood Money

U.S. Firms Are Helping Build China’s Orwellian State
BY LINDSAY GORMAN, MATT SCHRADER
When a Dutch cybersecurity researcher disclosed last month that Chinese security contractor SenseNets left a massive facial recognition database tracking the movements of over 2.5 million people in China’s East Turkestan colony unsecured on the internet, it briefly shone a spotlight on the alarming scope of the Chinese surveillance state.
But SenseNets is a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: Tech firms in the United States are lending expertise, reputational credence, and technology to Chinese surveillance companies.
The SenseNets database logged exact GPS coordinates on a 24-hour basis and, using facial recognition, associated that data with sensitive personal information, including national ID numbers, home addresses, personal photographs, and places of employment. 
Nearly one-third of the individuals tracked were from the Uighur minority ethnic group.
In a bizarre juxtaposition of surveillance supremacy and security incompetence, SenseNets’ database was left open on the internet for six months before it was reported and, according to the researcher who discovered it, could have been “corrupted by a 12-year-old.”
The discovery suggests SenseNets is one of a number of Chinese companies participating in the construction of a technology-enabled totalitarian police state in East Turkestan, which has seen as many as 2 million Uighurs placed into “re-education camps” since early 2017. 
Eyewitness reports from inside the camps describe harsh living conditions, torture, and constant political indoctrination meant to strip Uighurs of any attachment to their Islamic faith. 
Facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and speech monitoring enable supercharge the Chinese Communist Party’s drive to “standardize” its Uighur population. 
Uighurs can be sent to "re-education" camps for a vast array of trivial offenses, many of which are benign expressions of faith.
The party monitors compliance through unrelenting electronic surveillance of online and physical activities. 
This modern-day panopticon requires enormous amounts of labor, but is serving as a testing ground for new technologies of surveillance that might render this process cheaper and more efficient for the state.
Toward this goal, the party is leveraging China’s vibrant tech ecosystem, inviting Chinese companies to participate through conventional government-procurement tools.
Companies built the "re-education" camps.
Companies supply the software that watches Uighurs online and the cameras that surveil their physical movements.
While based in China, many are deeply embedded in the international tech community, in ways that raise serious questions about the misuse of critical new technologies. 
Foreign firms, eager to access Chinese funding and data, have rushed into partnerships without heed to the ways the technologies they empower are being used in East Turkestan and elsewhere.
In February 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced a wide-ranging research partnership with Chinese artificial-intelligence giant and global facial-recognition leader SenseTime.
SenseTime then held a 49 percent stake in SenseNets, with robust cross-pollination of technical personnel. 
SenseNets’ parent company Netposa (also Chinese) has offices in Silicon Valley and Boston, received a strategic investment from Intel Capital in 2010, and has invested in U.S. robotics start-ups: Bito—led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University—and Exyn, a drone software company competing in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) artificial-intelligence challenge.
This extensive enmeshing raises both moral and dual-use national-security questions.
Dual-use technology is tech that can be put to both civilian and military uses and as such is subject to tighter controls.
Nuclear power and GPS are classic examples, but new technologies such as facial recognition, augmented reality and virtual reality, 5G, and quantum computing are beginning to raise concerns about their dual applicability.
Beyond SenseNets, Chinese voice-recognition leader iFlytek is also supplying software to monitor electronic communications in East Turkestan.
A 2013 iFlytek patent identified by Human Rights Watch specifically touted its utility in “monitoring public opinion.” 
Nonetheless, like SenseTime, iFlytek recently established a multiyear research partnership with MIT. 
These partnerships lend reputational weight to activities that undermine freedom abroad.
Equally concerning is that the details of technical and research collaborations with Chinese companies can be opaque to international partners, concealing ethically objectionable activities.
When Yale University geneticist Kenneth Kidd shared DNA samples with a scientific colleague from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Institute on Forensic Science, he had no idea they would be used to refine genetic surveillance techniques in East Turkestan.
Massachusetts-based company Thermo Fisher is also implicated: Until it was reported last month, the company sold DNA sequencers directly to authorities in East Turkestan for genetic mapping.
Western companies and institutions must be far more vigilant in scrutinizing how Chinese partners are using their products, especially emerging technologies.
Facial recognition is a good place to start.
The industry needs to establish global standards for appropriate applications—use that respects human rights and the rule of law. 
In the United States, Microsoft has been an industry leader in calling for regulation and has tapped employees, customers, public officials, academics, and civil society groups to develop a set of “principles for facial recognition,” which it plans to launch formally this month.
When it comes to building out regulation, the devil may be in the details.
But the principles—fairness, transparency, accountability, nondiscrimination, notice and consent, and lawful surveillance—are sound.
Surprisingly, SenseNets lists Microsoft itself as a partner on its website, along with American chip manufacturer AMD and high-performance computing provider Amax.
In the case of SenseNets, these partnerships could be false claims by a company looking to boost credibility, unwitting collaboration on the part of U.S. tech firms, or true business relationships.
“We have been able to find no evidence that Microsoft is involved in a partnership with SenseNets,” a spokesperson for Microsoft told the authors, “We will follow up with SenseNets to cease making inaccurate representations about our relationship.”
But if these partnerships are real, they would violate all six of Microsoft’s principles.
California-based Amax, which specializes in high-performance computing for deep-learning applications, touts a partnership with Chinese state-owned Hikvision, the world’s largest supplier of video surveillance products. 
AMD is also involved in a Chinese joint venture supplying proprietary x86 processor technology.
Despite a general awareness of the ways American companies and individuals are abetting surveillance in East Turkestan, U.S. Congress and government officials have yet to call for a review of the extent of U.S. investment and research partnership entanglements. 
The Commerce Department’s proposed rule-making on controls for certain emerging technologies is a start, but its scope remains unclear.
The international tech community can help guide the ethical application of its developments.
After employee protests, Google reportedly suspended plans to launch Dragonfly, a censored version of its search engine custom-built for China, although there are suspicions the project may not be entirely dead. 
Authoritarianism has proven it can use emerging technologies to undermine democratic norms and freedoms.
As such, U.S.-based research-and-development organizations should perform basic due diligence on partnerships to assess their connection to surveillance regimes.
International scientific exchange has yielded awe-inspiring achievements, from the discovery of the Higgs boson to the eradication of smallpox.
And cooperation is growing faster than ever.
But by taking basic steps to understand their partners, investors can mitigate some of the unintended risks of that cooperation.
If they fail to do so, they will end up owning some of the responsibility for human rights abuses in East Turkestan and elsewhere.

U.S. Tech Executioners

How U.S. tech powers China's surveillance state

By Erica Pandey

American companies eager to enter China’s massive market brace themselves for potential intellectual property theft or forced technology transfers. 

But there’s another threat at play: their technology is being used for surveillance.
The big picture: China has sophisticated systems of state surveillance, and these systems have long been powered by technologies developed by American companies. 

Beijing has used U.S. tech to surveil its citizens, violate human rights and modernize its military.

The entanglement
Companies doing business in China often get caught in a web: Beijing uses its economic leverage to draw them in and then uses their technology for police-state tactics. 

As a result, "American companies are enabling and complicit in major human rights abuses," says Elsa Kania, a technology and national security expert at the Center for a New American Security.
Another concern is American universities and research institutions partnering with Chinese companies that work with state security, she says.
Thermo Fisher Scientific, a Massachusetts company, has supplied the Chinese government with DNA sequencers that it is now using to collect the DNA of ethnic minorities in East Turkestan, Human Rights Watch reports. 

At a Thursday hearing, Sen. Marco Rubio called Thermo Fisher's operations in East Turkestan "sick."
iFlyTek is a Chinese company that recently launched a 5-year partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Beijing has used iFlytek’s voice recognition technology "to develop a pilot surveillance system that can automatically identify targeted voices in phone conversations," according to Human Rights Watch.
Cisco, in 2011, participated in a Chinese public safety project that set up 500,000 cameras in Chongqing, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Yahoo, in 2005, gave the personal information of a Chinese journalist to China's government. 

That information was used to put the man in jail.
Tech giants, like Facebook, Apple and LinkedIn, have faced scrutiny in the past for censoring or offering to censor content in China.
"Not all of these companies realize the extent to which their activities could be exploited," Kania says.
Companies often take on projects for the Chinese government in the name of curbing "crime", according to Scott Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, but "the boundary between promoting public safety and protecting the state is increasingly blurred with these types of technologies."

The other side: Axios reached out to all of the companies listed above. 

The responses we received by deadline:
Thermo Fisher Scientific: "We work with governments to contribute to good global policy."
Cisco said it "has never custom-tailored our products for any market, and the products that we sell in China are the same products we sell everywhere else."
Oath, which now owns Yahoo: “We’re deeply committed to protecting and advocating for the rights to free expression and privacy of our users around the world."
LinkedIn: "In order to create value for our members in China and around the world, we need to implement the Chinese government’s restrictions on content, when and to the extent required."

The stakes
"A lot of people wanted very much to believe that once China had exposure to the outside world, political liberalization would come with economic liberalization," Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, tells Axios. 

"They're getting a lot richer and a lot more powerful and no more politically liberal."

What's next:
Some companies have pulled out of China of their own accord in the past. 

Google refused to censor its search engine in China in 2010, leading to its ouster from the country. Other companies may follow suit if they realize their technology is being misused, says Kania.
If companies cannot be held accountable by internal ethics guidelines, shareholders or users, the government may need to step in through export controls or limits on funding to researchers that collaborate with China, she says.
Worth noting: There's already a U.S. law that prohibits the export of crime-control products to China, but the sale of cameras and other dual use technologies that could be used for surveillance are not banned, reports the Wall Street Journal.