The AP Wins the Pulitzer by Writing About What We All Stand to Lose

The Associated Press last year wrote a landmark series of six stories about the role that U.S. tech firms play in global surveillance, particularly in China. “Made in America, Watched Worldwide,” just won a Pulitzer for international reporting. The award is richly deserved, honoring the efforts of multiple journalists who worked painstakingly on the project for three years.

Celebrating their efforts is an opportunity for all of us in the privacy community to reflect not only on the AP’s key findings but also on the ominous realization that the technology described is homegrown. In other words, it can just as easily be sold to U.S. agencies and directed at the American people. That’s over 90,000 distinct entities when you add up the total number of federal, state and local government operations.

In other words, U.S. technologists not only helped design the Chinese surveillance state, we’re also not that far from having one ourselves. This danger is growing more acute with the ability of AI to transform information into actionable knowledge and to turn individual data points into personal dossiers.

So let’s think about that as we briefly summarize the AP’s topline findings. Everything in this list is all-too-easily capable of being implemented here in the United States:

• Silicon Valley Is the Architect: The sprawling digital cage used to monitor and suppress millions in China was designed and powered by American tech. And U.S. tech didn’t just sell generic hardware that was misused after the fact. AP demonstrated that Big Tech actively pitched their products as tools for social control, providing the blueprint for automated, algorithmic repression.

• Surveillance at Scale: Mass surveillance no longer requires specialized hardware; everyday cloud infrastructure can process staggering amounts of video surveillance footage. Ubiquitous, mundane IT equipment is being repurposed to form an active monitoring grid. And data such as fingerprints and facial recognition scans can be readily synthesized into centralized tracking databases.

• Algorithms of Suspicion: The repression blueprint is already being operationalized on American roads through predictive intelligence networks that monitor the daily movements of millions of drivers, analyzing travel patterns to flag individuals as “suspicious.” Targeted human observation based on probable cause is increasingly being ceded to the opaque calculations of a machine.

• China Is Everywhere: Beijing is leveraging U.S.-engineered AI and high-end hardware to conduct transnational repression on American soil. Systems designed in Silicon Valley and perfected in China are being used to track individuals within the United States, projecting the latter’s authoritarian power into American suburbs. It’s already too late for Tibetans, even in Nepal. One refugee in that mountain kingdom said: “There are cameras everywhere. There is no future.”

• AI Goes To War: The rapid integration of Silicon Valley tech into lethal military operations exposes a chilling reality: Once these systems are “battle-proven,” they can be refined and marketed to militaries and law enforcement authorities anywhere. Domestic policing could quickly become a RoboCop scenario, in China and in California. The line between surveillance and lethal force is blurring.

One of the heroes of AP’s reporting is longtime Chinese activist Zhou Fengsuo. Arrested and imprisoned as a student leader during the Tiananmen protests, the now-U.S. citizen Zhou testified before Congress in 2024, warning that the lack of privacy guardrails and meaningful reform “is a strategic failure by the United States.”  

Current legal guardrails on American surveillance are not keeping pace with advancing technologies and questionable partnerships unmasked in AP’s series. And that gap underscores the urgent need for robust reform of surveillance laws – before these untethered AI networks are fully (and permanently) turned inward.
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Congress should take a deeper look into the technologies U.S. companies are selling to China and other adversarial nations – and how they are being deployed here. The rapidly escalating power of AI should especially make it clear why the House leadership proposal to extend FISA Section 702 for three years is unacceptable.

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