Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, a Russian defense ministry spokesperson resuscitated debunked claims about a U.S.-funded bioweapons program in the region, accusing Ukrainian labs of experimenting with bat coronaviruses in an attempt to spark “the covert spread of deadliest pathogens.”

Disinformation is an old Russian government tactic. But this time Russia had help. Within days, Chinese officials and media outlets had picked up the lies and were amplifying and expanding on the biolabs yarn. The Chinese Communist Party tabloid Global Times created two splashy spreads, one sourced in part to Sputnik News, the other featuring a quote from Russian President Vladimir Putin. “What is the U.S. hiding in the biolabs discovered in Ukraine?” it screamed. 

“China jumped on the biolabs conspiracy theory,” said Katja Drinhausen, an analyst with the Mercator Institute of China Studies in Berlin. Chinese officials and media outlets had spent the preceding months pushing the notion that the pandemic might have originated in a lab accident outside China. “It was like, here’s the perfect conspiracy theory coming out of Russia to support our ‘everywhere but China’ main talking point of the last year,” she said.

Since the war broke out in February, experts have been struck by a convergence in Russian and Chinese media narratives. While some of the convergence was likely happenstance, occurring when storylines aided both governments’ goals, documents found in a trove of hacked emails from Russia state broadcaster VGTRK show that China and Russia have pledged to join forces in media content by inking cooperation agreements at the ministerial level.

A bilateral agreement signed July 2021 makes clear that cooperating on news coverage and narratives is a big goal for both governments. At a virtual summit that month, leading Russian and Chinese government and media figures discussed dozens of news products and cooperative ventures, including exchanging news content, trading digital media strategies, and co-producing television shows. The effort was led by Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Communication and Mass Media, and by China’s National Radio and Television Administration.

In the propaganda agreement, the two sides pledged to “further cooperate in the field of information exchange, promoting objective, comprehensive and accurate coverage of the most important world events.” They also laid out plans to cooperate on online and social media, a space that both countries have used to seed disinformation, pledging to strengthen “mutually beneficial cooperation in such issues as integration, the application of new technologies, and industry regulation.” 

A bilateral agreement signed July 2021 makes clear that cooperating on news coverage and narratives is a big goal for both Russian and Chinese governments.

“This is a master document of cooperation on media between the countries,” said David Bandurski, director of China Media Project, an independent organization that researches Chinese-language media. “The document allows us to see the process behind the scenes of how cooperation is planned and discussed by these particular ministries.”

In 2020, the independent Russian-language news outlet Meduza reported the existence of such propaganda agreements, which have resulted in a proliferation of pro-Beijing stories in Russian media. But this is the first time that the text of an agreement has been published. The Ministry of Digital Development did not respond to a request for comment, and the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment.

VGTRK’s email system was hacked earlier this year when, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hackers targeted more than 50 Russian companies and government agencies. The transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets has published more than 13 terabytes of documents from the hacks on its website. The Intercept and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project formed a consortium of news organizations to examine the files; previous stories that emerged from the documents include articles on Putin associate Evgeny Prigozhin, who founded and runs the Wagner Group, a Russian mercenary organization that is fighting in Ukraine.

The agreement lists 64 joint media projects that had either been launched or were in development. Some of these are lighthearted. In early 2021, CCTV and Riki Group launched a saccharine cartoon called “Panda and Krash,” about a panda and a rabbit in a toy store who zip off on adventures with a robot and an elephant in tow. “I encourage you and you help me,” they sing. 

Other projects were more substantial. State news agencies TASS and Xinhua pledged to exchange reporting, and other state outlets agreed to publish supplements promoting the other country. 

Chinese and Russian news reports suggest that the two countries have held annual media cooperation meetings since 2008. The partnership appears largely aimed at domestic audiences. But both China and Russia have massively expanded their overseas media presence in the past decade, and the agreement names outlets with a large international presence, including BRICS TV, RT, and Sputnik (all headquartered in Moscow), and the state-run Chinese outlets China Daily, Global Times, and CGTN. “The ambition is certainly global,” said Drinhausen, who added that despite notable differences in their foreign policies, both countries share a common cause. “In terms of an ideological pushback against the U.S. as the joint enemy, they are brothers in arms.” 

Sources say that such agreements are inked partly for show, and that China has the upper hand in the partnership. “The Chinese control all the big projects,” said a Russian source with knowledge of the meetings, who declined to be named because of possible repercussions from their employer. “So far, they haven’t even figured out some basic issues like broadcasting our channels on Chinese cable.” 

Indeed, some of the products discussed appear to be mainly of interest to China. TASS agreed to run interviews with Chinese leaders Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang and to organize events commemorating the 100th year anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party.  “What possible real interest can Russian audiences have in a photography exhibition to celebrate the CCP’s centennial?” said Bandurski. “What the Chinese government seems to be doing here is throwing a bunch of external propaganda products onto a giant wish list, hoping that Russia will help it tell its story.”

Meduza earlier reported that Russian state media, including the government paper of record Rossiyskaya Gazeta, was publishing more than 100 articles a month sourced from China Media Group, a state-owned media conglomerate whose coverage is mentioned several times in the agreement. 

“In terms of an ideological pushback against the U.S. as the joint enemy, they are brothers in arms.”

Some of those articles, such as a rote defense of the Chinese government’s actions in Xinjiang, appear out of place in the Russian media landscape. Russian state media coverage is generally less censored and more sophisticated than its Chinese counterpart, said Maria Repnikova, director of the Center for Global Information Studies at Georgia State University. “The propaganda genre is more dynamic in Russian state media, especially on TV, with a sophisticated play on emotions and disinformation appealing to many average Russian viewers,” she wrote in an email.

A month after the 2021 agreement was signed, a journalist from China Media Group wrote VGTRK’s general email address to pitch a partnership. “We can conduct corresponding interviews or reports according to your needs,” the journalist wrote in English, in one of the hacked documents. “At the same time, we can also transform your content accordingly and spread it widely in China.”

Hacked emails show that some journalists working for Russian state media helped amplify Chinese narratives. In March 2021, Alexander Balitskiy, Beijing bureau chief for RTR, VGTRK’s international service, sent a script for an upcoming segment on how people in China were boycotting foreign brands that had taken stances on forced labor in Xinjiang. “Global companies played on the same team with Western politicians, accusing China of the genocide of Uyghurs,” the script reads. Then, in parentheses, is a production note: “ZOOM OUT TO BEAUTIFUL VIEWS OF COTTON FIELDS BEING HARVESTED.” The script also outlines plans to include a quote from an earlier interview with Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, who has denied Russian atrocities in Ukraine and defended Chinese state repression in Xinjiang; a quote from him did not make to the final cut of the news item available on VGTRK’s flagship news site Vesti.ru.

In an email, Balitskiy said he could not comment on the news segment because he doesn’t control how segments are edited when they are broadcast in different regions.

The payoff for Russia may have come after the invasion of Ukraine, when Chinese media echoed Russian government talking points on the war. “The coverage oftentimes didn’t even mention that it was Russia carrying out the attacks,” said Repnikova. Chinese outlets, she added, “adapted slogans directly from the Russian discourse.”

The hacked emails end in the spring of 2022. But over the past few months, the Russian government repeatedly brought the biolabs conspiracy theory to the United Nations Security Council, asking it to establish a commission to investigate. Amplifying its efforts was the Chinese press. 

That may have been merely because the biolabs story aided China’s goals. The agreement does not chart detailed plans for sophisticated information operations. Such documents “are signed to publicly bolster the partnership, but the actual particulars are not worked out,” said Repnikova. “The vague wording might be deliberate, as it makes it harder to track the projects and to hold anyone accountable.” 

The post Hacked Russian Files Reveal Propaganda Agreement With China appeared first on The Intercept.

About a decade later, a man named Haoyang Yu did almost exactly the same thing, setting up his own lean chip company, Tricon, in Lexington, Massachusetts, just 30 miles from Blount’s home. A tipster, whom Blount would later acknowledge was linked to his company, went to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, writing that their new competitor “smells a bit fishy.”

The tipster said it was suspicious that no one in their orbit had heard of Yu. “None of us here know this person or this company and there is 100% no way that they could come up with this product line in 6 months,” wrote the tipster. Both Yu and Blount marketed tiny, mass-produced chips called monolithic microwave integrated circuits, or MMICS, which can be used in everything from cellphones to military radar systems. Some MMICs are under export controls, which means that they can only be sent to certain end users and destinations with a license from the Commerce Department. Without evidence, the tipster hinted that Tricon might be violating export control regulations. “They are most likely reselling someone else’s part and what makes me nervous is that at least one is 3A001.b.2.d part,” the tipster wrote, referring to an export control classification number covering certain MMIC chips.

Yu, who also goes by Jack, was in fact no stranger to the industry. He had moved to Amherst in 2002 to study engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After graduation he stayed in New England, eventually settling in Lexington with his wife and two young children. He worked at Hittite after Blount left, staying on after the company was acquired by Analog Devices in 2014. The year Yu started Tricon, he left Analog to work as a software engineer at a company that counts MMIC makers among its clients. At one point, he had even visited Blount’s company, Custom MMIC, to demonstrate software to a group that included Blount.

Nonetheless, the tip to the FBI set off a cascade of events that would upturn Yu’s world. Investigators came to see him as a national security threat, zeroing in on what they imagined were unsavory links to China, where Yu, now a U.S. citizen, was born. They mounted a secret camera on a pole outside his house and enlisted the local trash company to set aside his family’s garbage after collecting it so agents could covertly rifle through it. In May, after spending five nights in jail, three months with a clunky ankle bracelet tracking his movements, and over two and a half years in legal limbo, he stood trial for a slew of felonies, including export control violations, immigration fraud, and wire fraud. Prosecutors also accused Yu’s wife, Yanzhi Chen, of wire fraud after she refused to cooperate.

Then, just as quickly as it had come together, the case against the couple seemed to unravel. The U.S. government largely failed to convince a Boston jury, which in June acquitted Yu on 18 of 19 counts. Shortly after the trial, U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Rachael Rollins dropped all charges against Chen, saying in a statement that the decision was a result of a “continuing assessment of the evidence.”

“There were so many mistakes,” Chen told The Intercept recently. “We have had three very dark years.”

What prosecutors did have was evidence that Yu had transferred prototype chip design files onto his Google Drive while working at Analog Devices, naming two of the files Pikachu and Dragonair after Pokémon characters. Analog later abandoned the prototypes, some of which Yu had worked with while at the company, and in all but one case, the jury was unconvinced that the designs constituted trade secrets.

Yu’s lawyers contend that such a case would have normally been dealt with through a low-stakes civil lawsuit filed by Analog Devices. That didn’t happen, they argue, because of Yu’s ethnicity. “Yes, he had some files on his computer that should have been deleted,” said Yu’s attorney William Fick of Fick & Mark in his closing statement at trial. But for the U.S. government, “[i]f you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

“The root problem behind a specific set of cases remains: the way that our own government still sees foreignness as a threat.”

Federal prosecutors, working closely with the FBI and large corporations, have brought dozens of cases over the last decade involving alleged technology theft by China. In 2018, amid rising tensions with Beijing, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave the crackdown a name: the China Initiative. The initiative was scrapped earlier this year, following concerns from the American Civil Liberties Union and Asian American advocacy groups that it entailed racial profiling, but the biases that contributed to the program’s downfall endure, activists say. “The root problem behind a specific set of cases remains: the way that our own government still sees foreignness as a threat,” said Aryani Ong, co-founder of Asian American Federal Employees for Nondiscrimination. FBI Director Christopher Wray said in January that the bureau has over 2,000 open investigations involving China and technology. And perhaps no technology is more pivotal to geopolitical strategy than semiconductor chips, which are essential components of electronic devices and important to breakthroughs in computing.

“MMICs have cutting-edge military applications ranging from electronic warfare to signals intelligence to military communications,” said Emily de La Bruyère, a co-founder of Horizon Advisory, a consulting firm focused on China. “China and the U.S. are locked in a battle — not just for advanced semiconductor technology, but also for influence over the global semiconductor value chain.” In just the past few months, President Joe Biden signed into law the CHIPS Act, which is aimed at strengthening domestic semiconductor chip manufacturing, and the Commerce Department unveiled unprecedented new restrictions on the sale of semiconductor technology to entities within China. Last week, Reuters reported that the Chinese government was readying an infusion of 1 trillion yuan ($143 billion) into its semiconductor industry.

Convictions in China Initiative and related cases have led to years of prison time. But many cases have fallen apart because prosecutors made inappropriate leaps, activists say.

“We are deeply concerned that the Yu case is yet another continuation of biased targeting policies and practices,” said Jeremy Wu, founder of APA Justice Task Force, a group formed in the wake of several botched prosecutions of Chinese American scientists. “His case exemplifies another tragic ordeal.”

For Yu and Chen, the ordeal is not yet over. For his sole conviction, Yu now faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. His lawyers are trying to get the charge thrown out ahead of sentencing, arguing that prosecutors inflated a workplace dispute into a national security threat and that the entire investigation was tainted by bias. A judge will soon rule on whether the government is selectively enforcing the law by targeting Yu for his ethnicity, in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Yu, his lawyers, and a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing legal proceedings. When asked about the case by phone, Blount declined to comment and quickly hung up.

“We Make Business”

Chen and Yu met online in the early aughts, when they were students pursuing graduate degrees in different parts of the United States. He was from the north of China, and she was from the south. He struck her as whip-smart and diligent, and after dating long-distance for a year, they married and settled in New England. They had two kids, and Chen stayed home to raise them while Yu worked as an engineer.

In 2013, they moved to Lexington for its excellent public schools, buying a house on a quiet street near the town’s Great Meadow. They grew to love the historic Boston suburb, which two and a half centuries after the outbreak of the Revolutionary War is now a wealthy bedroom community with a large Asian American population. Chen volunteered at her kids’ school and for local groups, and at her urging, Yu ran unsuccessfully for a seat on Lexington’s Town Meeting.

Initially, Chen told The Intercept, Yu’s goals for Tricon were modest. Yu registered the company in Chen’s name — a structure sometimes used to protect assets — and listed a box at a nearby UPS Store as the company’s mailing address. Business was slow. Chen advised him to focus on recouping his investment, not turning a profit. Since Yu was happiest when he was busy, she said she recommended the Town Meeting candidacy partly as a distraction.

“I never expected it to bring so much trouble,” she said of Tricon.

The investigation into Yu began in earnest a month after the complaint linked to Blount, when the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency received a second tip about Tricon. A DCSA agent compiled an internal report, which was later entered into the court record, describing the second tipster as a government contractor with a security clearance. The contractor speculated that Yu “could be using” the contractor’s “products pictures and datasheets to market for HIS own company.” The agent labeled the report as involving foreign intelligence, China, and a “person reasonably believed to be an officer or employee of, or otherwise acting on behalf of, a foreign power” — presumably, Yu.

MMIC is often pronounced “mimic,” and copying competitors’ products is common in the chip industry, as are allegations of theft. Shortly before the tipster went to the FBI, Yu’s previous employer Analog Devices had accused three former employees of taking proprietary material upon leaving the company. That case took the form of a lawsuit against the former employees’ new workplace, Macom, and the matter was handled in civil court, with Analog paying its own legal fees. It quickly ended in a settlement.

But Yu’s case was different. Because the U.S. government alleged that it involved a potential national security threat, four federal intelligence agencies conducted the sprawling 18-month investigation. And while Analog Devices provided information, federal prosecutors ultimately decided which charges to press, and U.S. taxpayers covered the ballooning investigative and legal costs.

Agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Commerce Department, and U.S. Navy worked together to bring down a man they envisioned as a sophisticated technological spy.

Agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Commerce Department, and U.S. Navy worked together to bring down a man they envisioned as a sophisticated technological spy. In addition to putting Yu under surveillance, they followed Chen around town as she drove their kids to and from sports practices and obtained a search warrant to comb through Yu’s email accounts.

From the start, the U.S. government’s investigation didn’t go quite as planned. Early on, an undercover agent with DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations force wrote to Yu, posing as representative of a potential buyer named “XY Atallah” from Jordan. The agent asked about a chip with specifications close to those that fall under export controls. “If good price, we can make business,” he wrote. The agent repeated the stereotypical phrase in a follow-up email the next day: “We make business.”

Yu suggested lower-frequency chips that could be legally exported to Jordan without a license. When the undercover agent posing as Atallah declined, insisting on the higher-frequency chip and saying he could pay upfront, Yu walked away from the deal. Agents also found emails that Yu had exchanged with a potential buyer in Spain. After the buyer asked about controlled chips, Yu noted that he did not have an export license for the products and asked if the buyer had a licensed representative in the United States — a legal way of moving the product overseas, provided that Spain was the final destination. That deal didn’t go through, either.

Nor did the investigation uncover solid evidence of crimes involving China. In March 2019, an HSI agent alleged in an internal report that Yu had stolen designs and technical data from his former employer to produce his own MMIC chips and sell them to entities in China in violation of export control regulations. The agent also contended that Yu had consulted for a Chinese company, claiming that the payment was evidence of “additional export violations to China.” Eventually, though, the government dropped both allegations.

The HSI agent also claimed that Tricon had illegally exported one chip without seeking an export license. But a semiconductor industry expert hired by Yu’s lawyers would later show that the relevant export control classification had only been issued at the request of an investigator after Yu came under scrutiny.

Companies that suspect their technology or designs have been taken generally “want to set an example for their own employees,” said Matthew Brazil, a former export controls official and resident fellow at the Jamestown Foundation focused on Chinese intelligence operations, after reviewing some of the court documents in Yu’s case. “That’s often a corporate response. But it’s not clear where the espionage component was in this case.” (Yu was never charged with espionage, but the U.S. government has in the past charged export control violations in cases alleged to involve spying or technology transfer.)

“It backfired because they turned non-criminal cases into criminal cases. And that never ends well.”

One reason that investigators pressed the national security angle may have to do with timing. In November 2018, less than a year after Yu came under investigation, Sessions announced the China Initiative. Yu’s name does not appear on a list of sample initiative cases released by the Justice Department and last updated in November 2021, but the effort was clearly important for Andrew Lelling, the U.S. attorney in Boston at the time. He was one of a handful of federal prosecutors on the initiative’s steering committee. Lelling, who is now in private practice, declined to comment on this and several other issues.

“If your name is tied to it, then you want to see it succeed,” said Robert Fisher, an attorney with Nixon Peabody in Boston who successfully defended a China Initiative case brought by Lelling’s office. The priority placed on China-related cases led to an uptick in flimsy charges around the country, Fisher said. “It backfired because they turned non-criminal cases into criminal cases. And that never ends well.”

“You Lied to Us”

Early one morning in June 2019, shortly before Yu’s family was scheduled to fly back to China to see relatives, Chen returned home from dropping off their children at school to find cars lining the street. Their house was swarming with agents and local police, around 20 officers in all.

Agents from the Commerce Department and Homeland Security approached and asked her to get inside their vehicle, she said. In the car, according to a transcript of the interview, they drilled her about Tricon.

Chen told the agents that her husband was an uptight engineer, always doing everything by the book. Although the business was in her name, she said that he only let her do basic tasks for the company, not because he had anything to hide but because he wanted them done perfectly. “He’s a control freak,” she said, adding that she had helped him mail chips to sites in Europe and the United States but that he insisted on packing all the materials himself. She said that she didn’t really understand MMIC technology.

“Yeah, neither do I,” one of the agents admitted.

Later in the interview, the other agent accused her of lying. “I don’t want to see you get in trouble for anything, you know, that you lied to us about,” he said.

“I was so confused,” Chen told The Intercept. While she didn’t understand the technology he worked with, she did know that her husband’s business was little more than a side project.

Meanwhile, inside their house, agents were rummaging through the family’s belongings as another pair of investigators from the Commerce Department and Homeland Security questioned Yu. When he asked whether he needed a lawyer, they brushed off the question. Over the course of the interview, Yu mentioned an attorney five more times. But instead of stopping so that he could contact one, the agents kept questioning him.

When Yu declined to answer a query, musing that his remarks could be misinterpreted, one agent launched into a heated speech. “I appreciate that you want to try to protect yourself, but Haoyang, we’re past that. The question now is, are you willing to do the right thing?” The agent offered a sample confession: “Like, ‘Yes, I did it. I’m ashamed. I’m embarrassed. I shouldn’t have done it. I had financial problems and I was trying to do the best thing I could for my family and this is the way that I saw to get out of that. It was a terrible choice.’ Like — whatever.”

But Yu stayed quiet.

Inside the agents’ vehicle, Chen said she watched, stunned, as he was led away in handcuffs. “I didn’t know why they took my husband away,” she said. “It is a really weird feeling.”

After the street cleared out, she walked into her house and surveyed the aftermath. The agents had taken their computers, cellphones, and papers printed with Chinese characters that had no connection to Yu’s business, she said, including notes on potential travel destinations and the addresses of her college classmates. In the kitchen, a chipmunk scurried across the floor. The back door had been left open during the raid, and the animal had found its way inside. She shooed it out and sat down to cry. Then she forced herself to get up and put the house in order before her kids arrived home from school.

Later that day, Lelling’s office issued a press release describing Yu as “a Chinese born naturalized US citizen.” “Theft of trade secrets from American companies is a pervasive economic and national security threat,” Lelling was quoted as saying. The press release continued: “Yu is charged with a massive theft of proprietary trade secret information.”

Singled Out?

As the couple’s cases moved toward trial, Yu’s defense team hired a semiconductor expert, Manfred Schindler, a consultant who had worked with several leading chip companies. Schindler wrote in an affidavit that small outfits like Tricon were common in the MMIC industry, and that companies commonly reverse engineer one another’s chips. “[M]ultiple manufacturers commonly sell individual items with very similar or even identical designs and performance characteristics,” he wrote. (Schindler declined to comment, citing a confidentiality agreement with Yu’s lawyers.)

More explosively, Schindler took issue with the export control category that the U.S. government said governed one of Tricon’s chips. At the time, three of the charges against Yu hinged on that classification. The designation was unusual, Schindler wrote, because chips with similar specifications — including the one that prosecutors alleged Yu had copied — typically do not trigger export controls. He determined that the U.S. government had introduced the designation at the request of an agent investigating Yu and had never publicized the rule. The rule seemed to have been tailor-made for Yu.

Another setback came in January of this year, when the U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts dropped charges in a controversial China Initiative case against Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen (no relation to Yanzhi Chen). He had been charged with wire fraud and accused of omitting affiliations with Chinese institutions on Department of Energy grant applications that he submitted electronically. Prosecutors abandoned the charges after determining that some of the alleged affiliations did not exist and that Chen had no obligation to declare the others. Gang Chen’s defenders alleged that he was the victim of blatant racism and bias; 170 MIT faculty members signed a statement in his defense. The Justice Department scrapped the China Initiative the following month.

Rollins had inherited both the Gang Chen and Yu cases from Lelling. Yu’s lawyers hoped to get charges thrown out in his case as well.

Instead, Rollins’s office went ahead with the prosecution. But by the time Yu stood trial, the allegations against him had changed. Prosecutors dropped the export control violation charges connected to the chip that Schindler had flagged after the Commerce Department reclassified it as not requiring a license. In a superseding indictment, they charged Yu with new export control violations, for sending two chip designs to a foundry, or chip factory, in Taiwan.

Yu’s Tricon was what’s known as “fabless,” meaning the company didn’t fabricate the chips in-house. Instead, Yu designed chips which were then manufactured in foundries. In recent years, Commerce Department officials have grown more aggressive about how they interpret regulations with regard to the export of design files, but historically, companies including Analog Devices have at times not sought licenses for similar exports. “[Fabless] suppliers often use off-shore fabs and package houses, yet most US military contractors don’t seem to care about this,” the industry publication Microwaves 101 notes in an explainer on MMIC suppliers. “Go figure!”

Using files found in Yu’s Google Drive and on devices seized from his home, prosecutors alleged that he had stolen the designs for “dozens” of chips from Analog Devices. And, in a sort of legal hall of mirrors, they tacked on charges that depended on other charges sticking. In his interview ahead of becoming a U.S. citizen in February 2017, Yu had asserted that he’d never committed or tried to commit a crime for which he had not been arrested. Prosecutors alleged that this was fraud because he had committed a crime: trade secrets theft, the crime they were charging him with.

 “Why Are You Challenging Him?”

The drama began even before the trial started, when a prosecutor tried to ensure that an Asian American man was not chosen for the jury. The judge questioned the prosecutor’s motive. The potential juror, the judge noted, “is Asian; why are you challenging him? I see no reason to challenge him.”

When the prosecutor replied that the objection was based on the man’s profession, the judge asked what that was. Silence ensued. “You don’t even know what the profession is,” the judge admonished the prosecutor. (Court documents, which give only the man’s first name and last initial, reveal that he worked as a nurse and paraprofessional for a public school system.) The government ended up withdrawing the objection, and the man remained on the jury.

As the trial got underway, prosecutors returned again and again to the Pokémon characters. “[N]o one names things after Pokémon characters at work when they intend to be found out,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Beck. They accused Yu of adopting a fake name because, in his work with Tricon, he used the English name Jack. They emphasized his use of multiple email addresses, claiming that it was a signature of criminals violating export controls. They suggested it was odd that Yu had registered Tricon in his wife’s name rather than his own and used the address of a UPS store for the business rather than his home. And they called as a witness an employee of Win Semiconductors, the Taiwanese firm that had manufactured Yu’s chips, who testified that the designs Tricon had sent the firm appeared unoriginal.

Then, halfway through the trial, Blount, Yu’s Boston-area competitor, took the stand. In 2020, he had sold Custom MMIC for a reported $96 million. He later started a new company, Kapabl Engineering. When cross-examined by the defense, Blount admitted that he had met Yu before, though he said he did not remember the encounter. He conceded that Kapabl Engineering was, like Tricon, registered in his wife’s name. Just as Tricon had a bare-bones website, Kapabl Engineering had a site that Blount conceded was “rudimentary.” And much as Tricon had sent designs to Taiwan to be manufactured without obtaining an export license, Custom MMIC had sent designs to France without a license until 2019, the year Yu was arrested.

“Custom never got an export license to send the GDS to France?” asked Fick, Yu’s attorney, referring to a chip design file.

“We did not, no,” Blount answered.

“And is that because you were intentionally violating the law?” Fick asked.

“No,” Blount said.

Blount also admitted that he was connected to the tip to the FBI. “We brought this matter to the FBI back in 2017,” he said.

The jury deliberated for five hours. After they largely cleared Yu of the charges, Rollins’s office boasted in a press release about the single charge that had stuck, calling it “the first-ever conviction following a criminal trial of this kind in the District of Massachusetts.” Few observers saw it as a win for the government, though. The trade publication Law360 recently listed the trial among a string of losses by the U.S. attorney’s office.

“The verdict revealed this case for what it truly is: a trumped-up civil dispute between a multibillion-dollar, global technology company and its former employee concerning alleged trade secrets,” wrote Yu’s attorneys in a recent filing. “The government’s relentless pursuit of Mr. Yu was driven, at least in part, by its baseless and offensive assumption that he was a Chinese spy, secretly loyal to China and, thus, a danger to the national security of the United States.”

If Yu had been white, his attorneys contend, the trade secrets spat might have been handled through a lawsuit in civil court, without the threat of prison time.

Yu’s attorneys now argue that the law has been selectively enforced, and that the U.S. government gave too much weight to information provided by Blount and Analog Devices. If Yu had been white, they contend, the trade secrets spat might have been handled through a lawsuit in civil court, without the threat of prison time — as had happened when Analog Devices accused the three former employees of taking proprietary material to Macom. That lawsuit, in fact, involved data for several of the exact same Analog Devices products at issue in Yu’s case, with the difference that the Macom engineers were accused of stealing much more data than Yu, and that, according to Yu’s attorneys, one of them actually confessed to taking trade secrets.

Proving that Yu was singled out will be a challenge. Traditionally, the burden of proof for a selective enforcement motion rests on the defense, and no lawyer has successfully argued it in a China Initiative or related case. But in November, Judge William G. Young reversed an earlier decision on the topic, ordering the U.S. government to turn over to the defense additional evidence connected to Yu’s prosecution.

In one filing, Yu’s lawyers cited comments Lelling made to Science in 2020, in which they say he acknowledged that prosecutors were seeking out ethnic Chinese defendants. “[U]nfortunately, a lot of our targets are going to be Han Chinese,” Lelling said at the time. “If it were the French government targeting U.S. technology, we’d be looking for Frenchmen.’”

In an email to The Intercept, Lelling took issue with that interpretation. “No one was targeting people based on ethnicity — we were looking for conduct,” he wrote.

Chen’s hopes now center on the judge dismissing the case. But she is clear-eyed about Yu’s chances. “The success rate is very low,” she said, adding, “I don’t know why the government has invested so much on us. We are just normal people.”

Meanwhile, in August, Analog Devices finally filed a civil lawsuit against Yu. By the time it winds through the courts, he may be in federal prison.

The post A Competitor Put the FBI on Haoyang Yu’s Trail. The Investigation Didn’t Go as Planned. appeared first on The Intercept.

The New York Times ran an editorial titled “An Engineered Doomsday.” The backlash was so severe that in 2012, Kawaoka, Fouchier, and other prominent flu scientists voluntarily agreed to pause the transmissibility work. The debacle prompted an overhaul of policies, now being reconsidered in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, governing work with so-called gain-of-function research of concern.

The story is well known. And yet, what happened next has never been reported in its entirety.

Early on, Fouchier told Science that he had created “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.” But after controversy broke out, as the science communicator Peter Sandman has written, Fouchier and his supporters shifted to downplaying the danger. In early 2013, flu scientists ended their voluntary pause, arguing that when the research was done at enhanced biosafety level 3, or BSL3+, the benefits outweighed the risks. Kawaoka, who was normally the more taciturn of the two, hosted journalists in his lab, where he explained his safety procedures. “The influenza virus is sensitive to detergent,” he reportedly said while explaining the process of showering out. “They die.” A biosafety staffer at the University of Wisconsin got up before a university audience to dispel what she called myths about lab oversight. The address was broadcast on local television.

Then, months later, Kawaoka’s lab saw two accidents involving lab-generated flu viruses, just one week apart.

The accidents, a spill and a needle prick, carried a low risk of infection. Flu viruses are typically transferred through respiratory droplets, not skin contact or injection. Nonetheless, in letters obtained by The Intercept, staff at a funding agency accused the university of shirking biosafety precautions that Kawaoka had promised to adopt. They also demanded changes to the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s protocol for accidental lab exposures. Of particular concern was a plan to quarantine all researchers exposed to modified H5N1 at home, even if they were at high risk of infection — an approach that the funding agency administrators found so alarming that they threatened to end the lab’s grant unless the university changed course.

At the center of the debacle was the National Institutes of Health, whose National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had funded both Kawaoka’s and Fouchier’s labs. (Fouchier was a sub-awardee on a grant to a U.S. institution.) The agency oversees biosafety protocols on the same research it funds, and its oversight arm has a reputation for being timid, generally resolving issues through polite dialogue. “We want to be cautious about when we use that stick,” said Jessica Tucker, acting deputy director of NIH’s Office of Science Policy, referring to the threat of termination.

Under NIH’s guidelines on research with recombinant DNA, home quarantine is acceptable for low-risk H5N1 exposures, like the two 2013 accidents, but not for high-risk ones in which a scientist has potentially inhaled the virus. The guidelines say that lab workers exposed through their respiratory tract or mucous membranes need to be isolated in a dedicated facility, like a hospital.

With pathogens like modified H5N1, quarantining an exposed lab worker in such a facility is “a prudent precaution and reduces the risk to the worker’s family and community if they do become infected,” wrote Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, in an email.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison did not have such a plan in place, according to the documents. In a letter to NIH, a university vice chancellor wrote that after consulting health care providers and Wisconsin health officials, administrators had determined that “a home quarantine was appropriate for all exotic influenza viruses.” Rebecca Moritz, who was with the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Office of Biological Safety at the time, told The Intercept that the outside health experts were concerned that quarantining researchers in the hospital would put medical staff at risk and unnecessarily take up an isolation bed.

NIH alleged in a letter that university officials also worried about “the stress [hospital quarantine] would place on the laboratory worker.”

“That is not a persuasive argument,” said Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who sits on his university’s institutional biosafety committee. “Most major hospitals have an infectious disease isolation ward with rooms that are expressly designed to reduce transmission. No homes do.” In a hospital, he added, “[Quarantine] is supervised, which is not happening for a person in a home.”

Although the scientific community was debating how to oversee gain-of-function research, and the accidents would have been relevant to that debate, the dispute was handled quietly. One incident came to light 18 months later, the second emerged only last year, and the full story has gone untold until now.

Lack of Clear Standards

Descriptions of the two incidents, along with the agency’s responses, appear in the trove of documents obtained by The Intercept, Edward Hammond, and Lynn Klotz detailing lab accidents reported to NIH’s Office of Science Policy over a span of 18 years. The documents, which number over 5,500 pages, cover the years 2004-2021 and paint a picture of various animal bites, escapes, needlesticks, equipment malfunctions, and even some human infections. Hammond, former director of the now-defunct transparency group Sunshine Project, and Klotz, senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, requested some of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act; The Intercept requested others directly.

When the University of Wisconsin reported the two incidents to NIH’s Office of Science Policy, as required of institutions that use NIH funding to research certain pathogens, it set off a flurry of heated conference calls and sternly worded letters involving high-level administrators on both sides. The spat lasted six weeks.

Kawaoka and the university had assured the world that his research was safe, but NIH alleged that they were not adhering to all regulations, and even in some cases to the university’s own policies. “NIH has significant concerns regarding the biosafety practices associated with both of the recent incidents,” two agency officials wrote in one letter. They threatened to “institute enforcement action(s),” including suspending or terminating Kawaoka’s grant.

The agency’s reaction to the accidents was more extreme than in any other instance examined by The Intercept. After many other accidents, including for some involving potential pandemic pathogens, the same bureaucrats responded with brief thank-you emails. In a few cases, they asked for corrective actions. In no other instance did they threaten to withhold funding.

Withholding or terminating funding “remains the agency’s last measure for compliance and thus the agency tries to prioritize the other tools at our disposal to achieve our policy goals as a first measure,” wrote Ryan Bayha, a spokesperson for NIH’s Office of Science Policy, in an email. “These include working with researchers and other institutional officials to help bring the researcher back into compliance. In our experience, this has been a successful approach.” (Bayha was previously an analyst with the office, and the initial report of the needle prick went to him, along with other staffers.)

In some instances, the University of Wisconsin–Madison biosafety practices singled out for scrutiny by the agency aren’t clearly delineated in agency guidelines. The dispute highlights a lack of clear standards in how to respond to exposures in high-risk labs — a gray area that, critics argue, could put the public in danger. “It shouldn’t be up to people in the moment of a disaster,” said Rocco Casagrande, managing director of Gryphon Scientific, a biosafety advisory firm. “Someone needs to step in and say, ‘This is how it should be.’”

The needle prick was previously reported by USA Today, as part of a larger investigation into U.S. biolabs. Klotz wrote about the two accidents in an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last year. The Intercept is publishing the full correspondence between NIH and the University of Wisconsin–Madison about the breaches, along with additional details and reporting, for the first time. (The Intercept has omitted one document to protect the lab’s security.)

“The Influenza Research Institute has never experienced an event where public health or safety has been put at risk,” wrote Andrea Ladd, director of biological safety at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in an email to The Intercept. “This does not mean incidents do not occur, but when they do, there are protocols and systems in place to ensure that risk is mitigated and our researchers, community, and environment are protected from harm.”

“No one that is currently at UW-Madison was involved in those conversations with the NIH and therefore we cannot confirm details of those conversations,” she added. But she wrote that before NIH intervened, home quarantine was the university’s policy “in most cases” following exposure to highly pathogenic avian flu viruses like H5N1: “Examples of when quarantine would have been at a location other than a personnel residence were not specified in the UW Exposure Control Plan prior to December 2013.” The university currently quarantines high-risk exposures in an isolation room at a local hospital, she said.

Ladd wrote that unlike in the bombshell avian influenza studies, the two strains at issue in the accidents were “not known to be mammalian transmissible.”

Critics counter that Kawaoka’s research entailed stitching genes from H5N1 onto human flu strains and adding progressively more mutations until the hybrid viruses became transmissible, and that, while risk is hard to predict, strains along that continuum could also be concerning. “If it is a version that is on the pathway toward mammalian transmission, more than strains that circulate in nature, then it is a subject of high concern,” said Ebright. According to the documents, one of the strains had a mutation in the receptor binding site, which is critical to infection.

Fouchier declined to comment, writing in an email, “I have commented many times in the past.” Kawaoka confirmed the accuracy of Ladd’s responses but declined to respond to questions. Shortly after publication, he wrote in an email that “on rare occasions, humans become infected with avian influenza viruses, usually following close or prolonged contact with infected birds. The mutation in question was found in a patient sample and is not known to be mammalian transmissible. We did not test the transmissibility of the virus in question or use this virus for any animal experiments.”

“Dr. Kawaoka is one of most compliant, if not the most compliant PIs [principal investigators] I have ever worked with,” said Moritz, who was with the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Office of Biological Safety at the time. “He takes safety and security incredibly seriously and works very, very well with people like me to figure out how to mitigate risk.” She added: “One of the things that I find most disheartening about this entire debate is that we’re debating the ethics of a set of experiments. That’s what we’re ultimately debating.”

Others agree that the accidents were not unusual or reckless but contend that when it comes to experiments with a small but real chance of ravaging the population, safety and ethics are inextricable. “We should be brave enough to say that some experiments should not be done,” said Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who supported restrictions on controversial gain-of-function research in the wake of the 2011 studies. Because such work accounts for a small proportion of biomedical science, he argued, “This is not an attack on the scientific system. It is about protecting the integrity of the scientific system and society as a whole.”

A Punctured Glove

When flu viruses reassort, or swap gene segments, in nature, the hemagglutinin gene often plays a critical role. For the controversial 2011 experiments, Kawaoka’s team had combined a mutated version of the hemagglutinin gene from an avian H5N1 strain with gene segments from a human H1N1 flu strain. They used a similar approach to generate one of the viruses at issue in the 2013 accident reports, though with a different strain of H5N1 and fewer mutations in the hemagglutinin gene. On a Saturday evening that November, a researcher in Kawaoka’s lab was using a needle to draw up liquid containing the virus when he pricked his hand. The needle punctured his glove, sinking into his finger.

The researcher dialed the on-call lab manager, who gave detailed instructions on what to do next: Squeeze blood out of the wound, run his hand under water for 15 minutes, put on new gloves, clean up, and shower out. After notifying health care providers and other staff, the lab manager gave the researcher Tamiflu, an N95 mask, and a new glove to cover his injured hand; the laboratory manager drove the researcher home, instructing him to quarantine there for a week. A colleague had called ahead and told the researcher’s family members to pack their things so they could be moved to a hotel before he arrived. A university employee alerted city and state health officials. Once home, the researcher started taking his temperature, and the next morning the lab manager collected throat and nose swabs for testing. Soon after, a biosafety officer informed NIH about the accident, boasting: “This has been an exceptional response.”

Administrators at the Office of Science Policy disagreed. A week earlier, a researcher in the same lab carrying a stack of tissue culture plates containing a different modified H5N1 strain dropped a plate, spilling a small amount of virus onto the lab floor. Some of it splashed onto his Tyvek suit, just below the knee. From there, the suit extended down his legs and then stopped at his ankles, leaving patches of bare skin. The researcher cleaned up the accident; doused his arms, legs, and some lab equipment in an ethanol solution; stuffed all of the waste into a biohazard bag; and phoned the on-call scientist to report what had happened. After consulting a doctor and getting him a prescription for Tamiflu, biosafety staff discharged the researcher, telling him to monitor his body temperature. After he left the lab, a second researcher went in to dispose of the waste.

As NIH staff pried into the University of Wisconsin’s policies for research on avian influenza viruses, they learned that the institution planned to quarantine exposed researchers at home in all cases, no matter the risk level. “An individual’s permanent residence is not appropriate due to the fact that many residences are in buildings with high occupancy that share air exchange and other infrastructure,” wrote Jacqueline Corrigan-Curay, an official in the Office of Science Policy, in a December 2013 letter to the university. She pointed out that in a research plan sent to NIH earlier that year, Kawaoka had said he had access to a “designated quarantine apartment” for researchers who were at high risk of infection. (Ladd told The Intercept that Kawaoka’s statement about the apartment was caused by a “misunderstanding” between him and the university on where researchers would quarantine after high-risk exposures.)

Corrigan-Curay ordered the university to find a dedicated quarantine facility, noting, “An isolation room in a hospital would be appropriate.”

NIH also noted that the exposed researcher had been using the needle for an unauthorized purpose; the laboratory’s standard operating procedure did not allow needles to be used for drawing up tissue culture supernatant, the liquid the researcher had targeted. (Ladd said that the policy has since been “revised for improved clarity” and that the lab workers were retrained.)

In the spill, NIH took issue with the researcher’s exposed ankles. Agency officials contended that bare skin violated the agency’s guidelines covering research with recombinant DNA.

On a phone call, university representatives disagreed. According to a note about the call in the correspondence, someone said that the lab had recently been inspected by the Select Agent Program, which is jointly administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and that the report from the inspection did not mention any restrictions of the sort on bare skin.

NIH shot back that the agency had consulted staff at the Select Agent Program. “They are in agreement that bare skin is unacceptable at this level of containment,” wrote Corrigan-Curay. “The University must take immediate action to ensure that, in the future, no workers in this or any other high containment laboratories have exposed skin.”

The dispute over bare ankles illustrates a lack of clear and consistent standards. In Canada and select other countries, research on pathogens is centrally regulated. The United States has a jumble of policies, and biosafety training can vary widely from one lab to the next. After the uproar over the 2011 avian influenza studies, NIH adopted additional biosafety guidelines for research with H5N1 strains that are transmissible in mammals, but even those are not comprehensive.

“They don’t have good guidelines about when things are mitigated enough,” said Casagrande, whose firm has advised NIH on the risks and benefits of gain-of-function research. “They can have one response that is guns blazing, and another that is very muted — and why? What’s the standard?”

“Clearly, [oversight] only happens in extraordinary cases,” said Koblentz, the biosafety scholar. “But really it should be the routine.”

“Cannot Have More Accidents”

The exchange may have been particularly heated because the accident occurred at a fraught moment for high-risk viral research. H5N1 belongs to a group of what are called “potential pandemic pathogens”: bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms that, either through handling or through modification, could set off another pandemic. Policies governing research with such pathogens were established in the wake of Kawaoka’s and Fouchier’s controversial papers, which were published with some revisions by Nature and Science, respectively, in 2012. (Klotz, who provided The Intercept with the University of Wisconsin incident reports, coined the term “potential pandemic pathogen” with Edward Sylvester of Arizona State University.)

In 2014, the U.S. government adopted a moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research that could spark a pandemic. Three years later, the pause was lifted and the Department of Health and Human Services, NIH’s parent agency, shifted to a framework called P3CO, under which research that involves modifying potential pandemic pathogens or is “reasonably anticipated” to create them has to undergo a special review process in order to get funding.

Neither policy has been evenly or transparently implemented. The Intercept has reported that in 2016, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases administrators flagged a proposal by EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S. nonprofit that worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on bat coronavirus research, as potentially being covered by the moratorium. But instead of insisting on modifications that would have made the research safer, they let the organization craft an unusual rule to govern its own work. Since the P3CO policy was adopted in 2017, according to Health and Human Services, only three projects have undergone special review. In a detailed analysis of NIH’s grant database last year, the Washington Post identified a total of eight projects that appear to have warranted review. And just last month, in articles from Stat and Science, it emerged that two more risky experiments had not undergone review. In the first instance, at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory, scientists created a hybrid version of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases alleged that they had not sought approval for the work, prompting scientists not connected with the experiments to point out that the guidance on when to seek approval is unclear.

Moritz, the former University of Wisconsin–Madison biosafety staffer, contended that NIH’s response to the 2013 accidents was overblown and driven by the gain-of-function controversy. “You need to look at the timeframe and the context of what was going on politically,” said Moritz, who is now biosafety director at Colorado State University and the incoming president of ABSA International, a biosafety professional association. “That’s why the reaction was the way it was.”

“These decisions are not made politically,” said Tucker, the Office of Science Policy acting deputy director. “They’re made in terms of the best response and working with institutions to come into compliance.”

After NIH threatened to terminate Kawaoka’s grant, the documents show, the University of Wisconsin overhauled its policies, agreeing to adopt new guidelines on quarantining and on exposed ankles. The university sent the agency copies of new training slides. One conveyed a mixed message to lab workers. “Cannot have more accidents,” read one. “But MUST report any incidents, even the most minor.”

The researcher who had spilled the plate containing modified H5N1 got up in front of his fellow lab workers and reenacted the accident. Staff peppered him with questions. “Did you ever have a moment when you panicked?” asked one. “What was your worst fear? Quarantine?” asked another. The university sent notes on the meeting to NIH.

Finally, the two sides reached an agreement. On Christmas Eve in 2013, NIH wrote in a letter to the University of Wisconsin associate vice chancellor that the university had complied with its demands. Kawaoka’s lab could resume the controversial work.

Weak and Nonspecific

Today, research with potential pandemic pathogens is again in the spotlight. In February, NIH charged a committee called the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity with reconsidering the P3CO policy, along with a policy on dual-use research. The NSABB has a fraught history, and its members are appointed by NIH itself. “There is an inherent conflict of interest in having a group appointed by an agency to review that agency’s work,” said Koblentz.

At NSABB meetings in April and September, tensions ran high. At stake is not just the future of gain-of-function research, some participants stressed, but the safety of the world. And yet, lost in the discussion is the fact that one of the labs that set off the gain-of-function fracas actually has had accidents involving modified H5N1.

When lab accidents happen, “They don’t put it in the local newspaper, and I think it’s reasonable that they don’t,” said Stuart Newman, a cell biologist at New York Medical College who sits on his university’s institutional biosafety committee. “But because it’s all handled quietly, the general public isn’t aware of the frequency of incidents like this — or even that they exist.” Even though most incidents don’t lead to infection, Newman said, “Just the fact that they happen should be more widely known.”

The NSABB released preliminary recommendations last month. Critics say they’re incomplete. At the meeting where the results were unveiled, Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch took issue with the section of the recommendations that deals with transparency, saying, “It’s too weak and too nonspecific.” Tucker said the final recommendations are expected in December or January.

Some biosafety advocates say that a broader overhaul is needed. “As long as all of the oversight is strictly advisory and none of it is enforceable with force of law, nothing ever will move forward — particularly so long as the oversight is housed in an institution that performs and funds research,” said Ebright. “It needs to come from Congress or the White House.”

One model for regulating pathogen research could be the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees all facilities that work with radiological materials and also funds research on safety and security.

Others say that nothing short of a dramatic shift in worldviews is needed. Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, compared it to research on human subjects. Until the 1970s, scientists regularly carried out experiments on prisoners, including for infection studies. Over time, opinions shifted. “At some point, it became accepted that even though experiments on prisoners were scientifically informative, they just aren’t ethical to do,” said Bloom.

For the rest of the world, how the United States regulates research with dangerous pathogens matters. “The United States has a special responsibility when it comes to oversight and getting it right,” said Filippa Lentzos, an expert on biosecurity and biological threats at King’s College London who co-chairs an international task force on high-risk pathogens with Bloom. “It is a leader in a lot of this research, and it’s where most of this research takes place.”

In 2014, the moratorium on gain-of-function work made it impossible for Kawaoka’s lab to continue with transmissibility studies. But five years later, Science reported that the Health and Human Services P3CO panel quietly greenlighted the controversial bird flu experiments to resume, without alerting the public. The agency did not release details on how the panel assessed the proposals or what evidence was evaluated. The grant was contingent on the lab following additional safety measures, but the agency did not announce what these were. The decision came to light only because word leaked to a journalist, a fact that two prominent experts writing in the Washington Post called “unacceptable.”

The 2013 accident reports and correspondence might have helped inform the discussion. But at that point, they weren’t public.

Update: November 2, 2022

This article has been updated with a comment from Yoshihiro Kawaoka that was received after publication.

The post Lab That Created Risky Avian Flu Had “Unacceptable” Biosafety Protocols appeared first on The Intercept.

The flu is typically transmitted through respiratory droplets, and an animal bite is unlikely to infect a scientist. But with a virus as devastating as 1918 flu, scientists are not supposed to take any chances. The researcher squeezed blood out of the wound, washed it with an ethanol solution, showered, and left the lab. A doctor gave him a flu shot and prescribed him Tamiflu. Then, after checking that he lived alone, a Mount Sinai administrator sent him home to quarantine for a week, unsupervised, in the most densely populated city in the United States. As documents obtained by The Intercept show, staff told him to take his temperature two times a day and to wear an N95 respirator if he got sick and needed to leave for medical care.

NIH guidelines say that only people exposed through their respiratory tract or mucous membranes need to be isolated in a dedicated facility, rather than at home. But some experts contend that the protocols governing research with the most dangerous pathogens should be stronger.  “That is a pretty significant biosafety breach,” said Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, agreed: “Say the risk was 0.1 percent. But if he just happened to be unlucky, then the consequences would be absolutely gigantic.” A researcher stuck in a small apartment in New York City might be tempted to venture outside to get food or fresh air, he added.

Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, said that Mount Sinai’s response seemed appropriate. But, he said, the episode shows that “accidents sometimes happen even where there isn’t negligence.” In his view, the solution was simpler: 1918 influenza is so dangerous that experiments with it shouldn’t be done at all.

Adolfo García-Sastre, the lab’s principal investigator, knew firsthand how work with the 1918 flu virus could spark controversy. In 2005, he was part of a team that reconstructed the virus in order to study how it had become so devastating. The effort was the culmination of an outlandish journey, which started when a Swedish microbiologist trekked to Alaska to take a sample of the virus from the corpse of a 1918 flu victim; she had been buried in a mass grave after the virus wiped out most of her village, and her body was preserved in the permafrost. Using that and other samples, scientists spent years sequencing parts of the virus, eventually sequencing the whole genome. García-Sastre and collaborators then used a technique called reverse genetics to make a copy of the virus’s DNA, laying the groundwork for recreating the virus. (The actual reconstruction of the virus was done at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab in Atlanta.) When the team studied the virus in mice, they found that it was incredibly lethal. Some mice died within three days of infection.

Furor ensued. Biosafety proponents argued that the risk of accidental release was not worth taking. No one really knew how potent the virus would be in modern times. Did we want to find out?

The ferret bite happened six years later but has not been publicized until now. For some, it is a stark example of the risks that accompany research on dangerous pathogens.

The mishap and hundreds of others are recorded in more than 5,500 pages of National Institutes of Health documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, detailing accidents between 2004 and 2021. The Intercept requested some of the reports directly, while Edward Hammond, former director of the transparency group the Sunshine Project, and Lynn Klotz, senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, separately requested and provided others.

The documents show that accidents happen with risky research even at highly secure labs. NIH recently convened an advisory panel to consider how it regulates such experiments.

In 2017, following a protracted controversy over experiments in which scientists tweaked the H5N1 avian influenza virus to make it more transmissible in ferrets, the Department of Health and Human Services adopted new oversight of research on pathogens with the capacity to spark a pandemic. Those guidelines require experiments that are “reasonably anticipated” to confer dangerous new traits to so-called “potential pandemic pathogens” — or create new ones — to undergo a special review process in order to get NIH funding. But as The Intercept has reported, the policy has been unevenly applied.

Some experts are calling for other biosafety policies, such as those outlining what to do after a lab accident, to be tightened as well.  “A lot of our talk now is about potential pandemic pathogens and risks around that,” said Koblentz of the ferret bite. “But the 1918 flu was a known pandemic pathogen. That should have the highest possible level of biosafety and measures taken in the event of an accident or a suspected or known exposure.”

“The downside with that type of pandemic pathogen is so high that it just doesn’t seem to me that there’s any level at which it’s worth it.”

Mount Sinai and García-Sastre did not respond to requests to comment. Mount Sinai reported the ferret bite to NIH, as well as to the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as required under a program governing the use of certain toxins called select agents.

“[I]solation in a predetermined facility was not necessary because an animal bite did not meet the definition of known laboratory exposure with a high risk of infection,” wrote Ryan Bayha, a spokesperson for NIH’s Office of Science Policy, in an email. (Bayha was previously an analyst with the office, and the report on the ferret bite was addressed to him.)

Bloom said that experiments with 1918 influenza are scientifically interesting. At one point, he supported doing them. But he came to change his views after considering the risks more holistically. “I now feel that experiments with actual 1918 influenza just shouldn’t be done,” he said. To him, the ferret bite shows that accidents with dangerous viruses happen at even the best, most secure labs. “It’s like a nuclear weapons accident. The downside with that type of pandemic pathogen is so high that it just doesn’t seem to me that there’s any level at which it’s worth it.”

“A Complete Farce”

Many of the biotechnology safety standards in place today trace to 1975, when a group of scientists gathered at the Asilomar Conference Center on the California coast. Advances in biology had recently made it possible to modify DNA by inserting genes from one organism into the genetic code of another, and scientists convened the International Congress on Recombinant DNA Molecules to consider the implications of such research. Though driven by concerns about ethics, the conference would come to be seen by historians and bioethicists as an elite gathering aimed in part at warding off intervention by U.S. Congress.

Three years earlier, Stanford University biochemists Paul Berg and Janet Mertz had sparked outcry when they combined genes from the gut bacteria E. coli with DNA from a type of simian virus that can cause tumors in rodents. They had planned to insert the new DNA back into E. coli, but some of their peers worried that the modified bacteria could cause cancer in lab workers. Others feared that genetically engineered organisms could be used as bioweapons. The Asilomar meeting was organized in part by scientists whose primary interest was in allowing the research to go forward. Berg, under fire, co-chaired the conference.

“They focused on this idea that research is done outside of society — that if scientists can get their act in order and govern themselves, then they don’t have to worry about the broader world,” said Sam Weiss Evans, a senior research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Science, Technology, and Society. “But for many citizens at the time, the issue was very different: Are these scientists going to run rampant and just do whatever they want, or is there going to be some kind of ability for us to have a check on them?”

The critics’ worst fears about carcinogenic gut bacteria did not pan out, but the notion that scientists could set their own guardrails would have long-lasting consequences. The recommendations drawn up by the delegates to the Asilomar conference became the basis for the NIH guidelines on recombinant DNA that, with some revisions, are still in place today.

In 2001, after letters laced with anthrax killed five Americans, the United States adopted new biosecurity regulations, including rules governing the use of select agents. A decade later, the H5N1 controversy spurred another layer of oversight. But in other areas, regulation is lacking, despite breakthroughs in fields like synthetic DNA.

At NIH, meanwhile, critics point to an inherent conflict of interest: The agency is charged with overseeing the same research it funds.

Institutional biosafety committees — or IBCs, review boards at universities and other institutions that evaluate potentially risky research plans for NIH compliance — are another legacy of Asilomar. Scientists devising a new experiment consider the risks and come up with ways to mitigate them: safety equipment, checks, and controls. They then propose that plan to the IBC. But there are no standards in place for an IBC to determine whether the benefits of an experiment actually justify the remaining risks — a glaring problem when it comes to pathogens like the 1918 flu virus.

“Yes, they’re all experts, and yes, they’re all trained in this type of thing, but do we really just want it to be down to a judgment call?” said Rocco Casagrande, managing director of the biosafety advisory firm Gryphon Scientific. “How do you determine if the experiment should be done, if there really aren’t any standards?”

“How do you determine if the experiment should be done, if there really aren’t any standards?”

Critics say that the IBC system, like NIH oversight, also has a conflict-of-interest problem: Research is evaluated by an institution that relies on grant funding. Some institutions even hire out IBC work to private companies.

As director of the Sunshine Project, which is now defunct, Hammond spent years pressing institutions for minutes from institutional biosafety committee meetings, which NIH requires be made available upon request. Some of the institutions he contacted could not provide them, he said. “The IBCs didn’t exist at a lot of institutions. They hadn’t met in years. They weren’t doing the oversight business. The system was just a complete farce.”

Shortly before the reconstruction of the 1918 flu virus, Hammond’s Sunshine Project published a report that singled out Mount Sinai for criticism, alleging that the institution had no IBC minutes. Earlier this year, for an investigation published by Undark, journalist Michael Schulson asked eight institutions in the New York area for IBC minutes. Mount Sinai did not provide them, Schulson told The Intercept. Mount Sinai also did not respond to a request to provide minutes to The Intercept.

The documents reviewed by The Intercept show broad variation in how seriously scientists and biosafety officers treated errors and accidents. In one report, a principal investigator apologized profusely after his IBC approval expired in the chaos of the early pandemic and his lab continued with research without renewing it. “This is completely my (PI) fault,” he wrote. “I failed my role as an effective PI this time.”

In other cases, staff appear eager to avoid responsibility. After a 2020 incident in which a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison pricked themselves with a needle while working in a biosafety level 3 lab with a mouse infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a biosafety officer blamed the accident on the mouse, writing, “The root cause is the natural instinct of an animal to be uncooperative with a procedure it dislikes.” (The officer wrote that “incomplete restraint” techniques contributed to the accident.)

In responding to violations, NIH can ask for changes or corrective action — and in some cases, the agency did. It can also pull funding if the guidelines aren’t met. But in 18 years of documents, The Intercept found no evidence of such extreme measures being taken. In one instance, NIH threatened to terminate funding after two incidents in a University of Wisconsin–Madison lab working with modified H5N1 avian influenza; the standoff ended with the institution adopting stricter protocols.

Regulators intent on preventing future pandemics are now exploring changes to biosafety policies. The issue has been taken up by Congress, the White House, the World Health Organization, and NIH itself. But the discussion is highly politicized, with some scientists resisting regulation and some experts pessimistic that the process will lead to real change.

One problem is a dearth of information. “We don’t have a clear picture of all accidents,” said Filippa Lentzos, an expert on biosecurity and biological threats at King’s College London. “It’s difficult to get good information on how risky stuff is, and how likely it is that you’re going to have an accident. We simply don’t have that data.” News of severe breaches sometimes leaks out in press reports. But many lab workers are graduate students. For them, speaking up about safety problems could mean career suicide.

The new documents fill in some of those gaps. While the researcher at Mount Sinai did not fall ill, in a small number of cases, accidents did lead to infection. In one instance, a researcher at Washington University of St. Louis contracted Chikungunya virus, which has sparked epidemics in Africa, after pricking herself with a needle in a biosafety level 3 lab. She only reported the accident after getting sick.

With pathogens like the 1918 flu virus, the stakes are even higher. The current system “gives a good level of review most of the time,” Bloom said. “But it’s not the kind of system that you could count on if you potentially have research that could kill 10 million people if it goes wrong.”

“There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with doing these experiments that are so high-risk,” says Lentzos. “It’s about talking through some of that. That is the biggest loophole that needs to be addressed.”

The post Accident With 1918 Pandemic Virus Raises Questions About Pathogen Research appeared first on The Intercept.

Chikungunya, which means “bent over in pain” in the Makonde language, can lead to chronic arthritis, and its spread through the Americas had made studying it more urgent. The researcher’s team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, was studying the virus in the hope of discovering possible treatments or developing a vaccine. The graduate student was working in a biosafety level 3 lab, a level that often includes a completely sealed perimeter, directional airflow, and full personal protective equipment. But accidents still happened. The team’s experiments were set back when, after withdrawing the needle from the mouse’s belly, the graduate student grazed a finger on her left hand.

The needle pierced through both sets of gloves, but the student saw no blood, so she washed her hands, removed her safety equipment, and left the lab without telling anyone what had happened. Four days later, she ran a fever, and her body ached and convulsed in chills. The next morning, her skin was flecked with discolored spots. They multiplied over the course of the day, so she went to the emergency room, where the doctors kept her overnight for observation. A nurse drew her blood and sent it off to a state lab. She tested positive for Chikungunya. Only after getting sick did the student tell her supervisor about the slipped needle.

“That’s not a good situation,” said Scott Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and an expert on Chikungunya virus. “If that person knew they had a needlestick and they were working with Chikungunya, they should have reported it immediately. And then whatever health care people saw them should have recognized that there was a very small — but not zero — risk of them transmitting the virus.”

After the student told her supervisor about the accident in September 2016, Washington University reported it to the National Institutes of Health, but until now, the event has remained out of public view. So have hundreds of other incidents in U.S. labs, including four other needle injuries at Washington University.

An Intercept investigation based on over 5,500 pages of NIH documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act has uncovered a litany of mishaps: malfunctioning equipment, spilled beakers, transgenic rodents running down the hall, a sedated macaque coming back to life and biting a researcher hard enough to lacerate their hand. Many of the incidents involved less dangerous pathogens that can be handled with basic safety equipment, and most did not lead to infection. But several accidents happened while scientists were handling deadly or debilitating viruses in highly secure labs, and a few, like the Chikungunya virus slip-up, did lead to illness.

“People have it in their minds that lab accidents are very, very rare, and if they happen, they happen only in the least well-run overseas labs,” said Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and an advocate for better biosafety standards. “That simply isn’t true.”

The United States has a patchwork of regulations and guidelines covering lab biosafety. Safety training can vary widely from one institution to the next. Experiments involving certain pathogens and some research funded by the U.S. government is subject to oversight, but critics say that other areas are like the Wild West. Unless they work with the most dangerous pathogens, biolabs don’t have to register with the U.S. government. As a result, there is little visibility into the biosafety of experiments carried out by private companies or foundations.

“Your favorite tech billionaire could, with their own money, do basically whatever the hell they want with any pathogen,” said Rocco Casagrande, managing director of Gryphon Scientific, a biosafety advisory firm that has advised NIH on biosafety standards. “They could take the measles virus and intentionally try to make it vaccine-resistant and more pathogenic in their garage. If they’re doing it for legitimate research purposes in their own minds, they can do so wildly, unsafely, and no one can stop them.”

As policymakers scramble to prevent future pandemics, those gaps have been thrust into the spotlight. A Senate subcommittee held a hearing in August on the oversight of dangerous pathogens, and NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, has convened an advisory panel to consider how the agency vets proposals for risky science. In September, the World Health Organization published guidance aimed at “preventing the accidental and deliberate misuse of biology and other life sciences” around the world. That same month, the White House issued an executive order tasking the secretaries of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security with devising a plan to improve biosafety research, noting a need to prevent biotechnology from leading to “accidental or deliberate harm to people, animals, or the environment.” (The Department of Health and Human Services oversees NIH.) In October, the White House unveiled a broader biodefense plan that includes a pledge to strengthen lab biosafety and biosecurity.

Since the question of how to prevent future pandemics is related to the still unsettled question of how the current pandemic started, the policy discussions have been shot through with politics. In Congress, the issue of biosafety regulation has been pushed almost exclusively by Republicans, the very same party that helped usher in the expansion of the U.S. biolab network after September 11. (Many Democrats also supported the effort at the time.) The NIH advisory panel’s members are installed by agency leadership, making them unlikely to buck the status quo. Broader discussions about biosafety, meanwhile, have devolved into bitter Twitter fights.

Biosafety proponents maintain that regardless of what caused the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in China in 2019, the fact that a lab accident could spark a pandemic is reason alone for better oversight. Many virologists, meanwhile, contend that more regulation is unnecessary and that the benefits of their research outweigh the risks. “There’s a whole community of scientists who downplay the fact that things can be acquired in the lab,” said Stuart Newman, a cell biologist at New York Medical College who sits on his university’s institutional biosafety committee.

The documents show that the threat is real.

The Intercept obtained 18 years of lab incident reports submitted to NIH, which oversees research as well as funds it. Some of these were obtained directly, through a Freedom of Information Act request. Others were obtained by Edward Hammond, former director of the Sunshine Project, and Lynn Klotz, senior science fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, who separately requested the reports using FOIA and then provided them to The Intercept. The reports span the period of 2004 to 2021. Institutions funded by NIH are required to report any mishaps involving recombinant DNA to the agency’s Office of Science Policy.

Among the accidents revealed in the documents:

• In 2010, a machine in a University of California, Irvine lab malfunctioned while decontaminating waste from experiments with the SARS virus. The machine, called an autoclave, leaked steam and water, potentially exposing eight people to the virus, which could spark a pandemic. The risk of an outbreak was mitigated by a quirk of timing: The machine had already reached a high temperature — likely enough to kill the virus — before malfunctioning. The University of California, Irvine spokesperson Tom Vasich wrote in an email, “The incident was quickly addressed. … Released materials were contained in our BSL3 laboratory. Exposed lab workers were wearing proper personal protective gear. No transmission of the virus was detected.”
• In 2013, a researcher at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, pricked their finger while drawing blood from a chicken infected with H5N1 avian influenza. The scientist had handed a used syringe to an assistant while trying to get a better grasp of the chicken’s jugular vein. The assistant returned it needle side out, piercing through the scientist’s gloves. The researcher was prescribed Tamiflu for one week and told to immediately report a fever. Kansas State University did not respond to a request to comment.
• Between April 2013 and March 2014, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reported five mouse escapes, including one of an animal that had been infected with SARS four days earlier. In a letter to NIH, a biosafety specialist argued that the frequency of escapes was due to the “complex research taking place at our institute” rather than a failure of training, noting that several teams at the university use a breed of transgenic mouse known for its unpredictable behavior. After the SARS-infected mouse darted under lab equipment, researchers cornered it with a broom and returned it to its cage. The University of North Carolina did not respond to a request to comment.
• In 2018, a researcher at the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, contracted a MRSA infection, a condition that can become severe if left untreated, after working with the antibiotic-resistant bacteria MRSA in the lab. The researcher could not recall any mishaps that would have led to infection, a situation that experts say is common with laboratory-acquired infections. The FDA center did not respond to a request to comment.
• In early 2020, amid the shortage in respirators and masks brought on by the pandemic, a lab at Tufts University conducted low-risk experiments with the H3N2 flu virus without proper equipment. A student spilled a test tube containing a small about of virus, potentially exposing five people. None were initially wearing masks. (Two later put them on to clean up the spill.) H3N2 is a seasonal flu virus and not considered a dangerous pathogen, but in an email to Tufts, an administrator at NIH highlighted a series of omission and errors. These included the lab’s failure to provide personal protective equipment, a lack of proper safety signage, and the failure of researchers to seek appropriate medical care after being exposed to the virus. The NIH administrator also recommended that the principal investigator be retrained. Tufts declined to comment.

In an analysis of incident reports filed with the Office of Science Policy between 2004 to 2017, Klotz found seven lab infections that initially went undetected or unreported, in addition to the Chikungunya case. Critics say that even a few laboratory-related infections is too many, because often they are avoidable. Lab accidents are typically the result of “cascading errors,” said Casagrande. “Some physical mistake happens that then takes advantage of vulnerabilities introduced by someone’s carelessness or mental mistake or happenstance. Someone spilled something when the backup fan happens to be knocked out by a power outage, or someone spilled something on the day that their lab coat was at the cleaner.”

Cascading Errors

The Washington University case shows how errors can multiply. If the graduate student had promptly reported the needle prick instead of waiting until after she got sick, she could have stayed inside, preventing mosquitoes from feasting on her blood and potentially sparking an outbreak of Chikungunya. According to Weaver, people infected with Chikungunya have the most virus in their blood one to four days after transmission, the very period during which the student went about her life without knowing that she was infected. And while Americans’ habits of spending long hours indoors drastically reduced the chance of local transmission — “Because of our culture, we just don’t get very many mosquito bites,” Weaver said — it’s likely that a vector for transmission was present. In 2016, a survey of Missouri’s mosquito population found that a species that the World Health Organization says is implicated in the spread of Chikungunya, Aedes albopictus, was “very abundant” in southern Missouri.

In the 2016 report to NIH’s Office of Science Policy, Washington University biological safety officer Susan Cook did not name the principal investigator who oversaw the graduate student. The report also omits the name of the infected graduate student, as is standard practice for such documents. (Biosafety experts stress that while accidents can reflect problems with a lab’s culture or training, they should not be seen as an indictment of one researcher’s behavior.)

The Intercept sent a detailed list of questions to Cook along with Deborah Lenschow and Michael S. Diamond, who separately oversee labs that work on Chikungunya virus at Washington University. All three referred questions to a spokesperson, who sent a statement that she said was authored by Cook.

“As a major research institution, the safety of graduate students and scientists working in BSL3 labs is of paramount importance to us,” the statement reads. “We continually evaluate our laboratory safety policies, procedures and training materials and look for ways to incorporate new technologies and tools so that our labs remain safe and our students and researchers can continue their critical infectious diseases research.” The graduate student recovered within a few days and did not suffer prolonged symptoms, the statement says.

In her 2016 report to NIH, Cook wrote that after the infection, the lab’s principal investigator called a meeting about safety standards, and the university added training materials about needle injuries. She added that at its October 2016 meeting, the university’s institutional biological and chemical safety committee would discuss how to minimize injuries from needle pricks. Minutes from that meeting do not show that the infection was discussed there. Cook wrote The Intercept that “most discussions of specific injury/illness reports are too granular to be captured in the IBC minutes.”

An administrator with NIH’s Office of Science Policy responded by admonishing the institution. “We are concerned that an exposure incident occurred in a BL3 laboratory and went unreported for four days,” he wrote in a letter. He asked Washington University staff to conduct a thorough investigation, explore using different needles, better train researchers, and emphasize that exposures in high-containment labs needed to be reported immediately, not days after they happen. But after that, the correspondence chain ended.

Ryan Bayha, a spokesperson for NIH’s Office of Science Policy, would not comment directly on whether the agency continued the discussion, writing, “Washington University and OSP worked together to successfully resolve the issue involved in the Washington University report.”

“There doesn’t seem to be a lot of enforcement or follow-up actions, and there doesn’t seem to be any real accumulation of learning,” said Greg Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, after reading the Washington University report and NIH’s response. “It helps demonstrate why we need to have a dedicated organization for biosafety and biosecurity in the United States.”

“No Standard”

The United States has the most robust biomedical funding in the world, and controversial breakthroughs in science often come from American labs. Yet the United States lacks a central framework for lab oversight. Canada’s Centre for Biosecurity oversees all pathogen research, setting standards and training regimens for labs and enforcing them as well. The United Kingdom has centralized reporting for infections acquired in the lab. When it comes to U.S. regulations, “There are some significant holes,” said Filippa Lentzos, an expert on biosecurity and biological threats at King’s College London. Biosafety protocols are “not embedded in statutory law. It’s tied to funding.”

Policies governing the use of so-called select agents and dual-use research are limited to specific toxins and types of experiments, leaving out much work on synthetic DNA. Another crucial set of federal guidelines covers research funded by NIH, the world’s largest biomedical funder. But a host of other entities work with or fund research with pathogens, with varying degrees of oversight: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the United States Agency for International Development, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and private companies. “There’s nothing out there that says, if you want to fund research, here’s what you should think about,” said Casagrande. “That doesn’t exist, period.”

There’s reason to worry. The 1977 outbreak of H1N1 influenza in the Soviet Union and China is believed to have been accidentally introduced by scientists, either through a lab accident or through a live-vaccine trial gone awry. In 2003 and 2004, the first SARS virus is suspected to have escaped four times from labs in China, Taiwan, and Singapore. In 2007, wastewater containing live virus leaked out of pipes near a highly secure biolab in Surrey, the United Kingdom, sickening animals in the area with foot-and-mouth disease. Accidents regularly happen at even the world’s top labs. In 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases to temporarily halt work at a lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, after identifying biosafety issues there. In addition to the MRSA infection at the FDA lab, the documents obtained by The Intercept include records of accidents at labs operated by the CDC and NIH. (In those two cases, researchers were exposed but not infected.)

Biosafety proponents worry most about accidents with what are called “potential pandemic pathogens”: bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms that, either through handling or through modification, could set off another pandemic. Some are also concerned about accidents with pathogens like Chikungunya virus, seeing them as sentinel events that reveal broader problems. Because those incidents are more common, they can give insight into the daily workings of biolabs. And some pathogens that don’t pose a significant threat in the United States might ravage populations in other parts of the world, if a researcher were to travel after getting infected.

NIH-funded institutions that conduct research on recombinant DNA have to get experiments approved by an institutional biosafety committee, or IBC. If that work is extensive or done in a BSL-3 or BSL-4 lab, they are also required to appoint a biosafety officer to oversee lab work. But there is broad variation in how both rules are applied.

“There’s no standard for how many biosafety officers you need and indeed, for many types of institutions, whether you need a full-time monitor at all,” said Casagrande. “Sometimes there’s a part-time person, like you’re the biosafety officer and the animal use officer and the prime minister of bagels.”

At Washington University, the accident went unreported for four days. In other cases, accidents went unreported for months or even years, either because the affected researchers stayed quiet or because staff overlooked the incidents. In 2015, a University of Minnesota vice president for research wrote NIH’s Office of Science Policy to say that an employee had failed to report to the agency four incidents, one of which dated back to 2013. (None of the incidents apparently resulted in infection, though in a response letter, NIH noted that in two cases employees failed to get prompt medical attention.) The university discovered the accidents only after a journalist reached out to the institutional biosafety committee to ask for information. “After having questioned why these reports were not made, I have received a note of apology from the person whose responsibility it was to insure [sic] that this reporting was done,” a human resources administrator wrote NIH in an email sent the same day as the vice president’s letter. “She is no longer in the role.” A University of Minnesota spokesperson wrote that they could not comment on the affair because of “laws designed to protect employee privacy” but that since 2015, the university has improved biosafety procedures, training, and reporting and added resources for the institutional biosafety committee.

In another case, an institutional biosafety committee chair reported to NIH a biosafety infraction that had occurred six years earlier.

In the documents obtained by The Intercept, biosafety officers sometimes appear overly credulous. In 2019, an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who worked with salmonella contracted salmonellosis. She told a staffer that she thought her illness was caused by eating undercooked turkey, not by exposure to the bacteria in the lab. A biosafety officer appeared to accept this as a possible explanation, noting it in an initial email to NIH. (In a later formal report, the officer made clear that the student likely had a laboratory-acquired infection.) The student’s supervisor only learned that the student was sick after she visited the campus health center.

Even basic concepts, like how to train researchers in biosafety, vary widely from one lab to the next. At some labs, researchers are expected to do dry runs of experiments when learning safety techniques. At other places, said Casagrande, training consists mainly of slideshows.

Slides did a lot of work at Washington University too. In her report to NIH on the Chikungunya infection, Cook, the biosafety officer, noted that staff would add slides about working with needles and other sharp objects to an annual lab training presentation.

A Missed Opportunity

Needlesticks, as scientists call needle injuries, were for decades seen as rare. When they did happen, they were believed to rarely lead to infection. Only recently have biosafety experts begun to challenge those assumptions. “Everyone who works with needles needs an emergency plan for when they stick themselves,” said Casagrande. “Anecdotally, people think of it as a once-in-a-career injury, but the data suggests it should be expected on any R01 grant,” he added, referring to a type of five-year research grant provided by NIH.

In the wake of the Chikungunya infection, Washington University doubled down on education about the safe use of needles in the lab. But in a span of 14 months, it happened twice more: In April 2017 and November 2017, researchers at Washington University pricked themselves while working with mice infected with Chikungunya.

In the statement sent by the spokesperson, Cook cited the incidents as a success because the lab workers immediately reported them and did not contract the virus.

Staff at the Office of Science Policy disagreed. After the April incident, an administrator noted that the needlestick had happened in the same lab that had the Chikungunya infection. But the response was otherwise muted. They again recommended more training, this time adding the world “strongly.”

“At the same facility within the span of a year, you had two incidents, and they’re like, ‘Well, do better,’” said Koblentz, referring to NIH.

In a perfect world, he said, the graduate student’s illness would have been used to teach other labs. “Ideally, these kind of incident reporting systems are a preventive measure. If you could learn from the accidents and then tell people, ‘OK, here’s how to avoid them,’ that’s great.”

Because accidents only come to light through attention from the press or civil society groups, there is little data on how frequently specific breaches occur. “There’s no central repository of accidents,” said Lentzos. “The reporting is very opaque.”

Bayha wrote in an email to The Intercept that NIH often develops “guidance documents” following notable lab incidents but conceded that did not happen in the Washington University case. “There was no feedback to the broader community,” said Koblentz. “It’s a missed opportunity.”

The post Student Infected With Debilitating Virus in Undisclosed Biolab Accident appeared first on The Intercept.

“The deployment of DNA databases across the whole of China lacks elementary fundamental rights safeguards,” said Yves Moreau, a bioinformatician at Belgium’s University of Leuven who uncovered the procurement documents through the Chinese search engine Baidu. “Western suppliers should not aid and abet those abuses.”

In October 2021, a second tender announcement shows, police in Lhasa spent $173,000 upgrading a “3500 sequencer,” a product name and price range matching Thermo Fisher’s 3500 Genetic Analyzer line. Other documents hosted on a third-party government tender site suggest that Tibetan police also bought Thermo Fisher equipment in August of last year.

The news comes amid two reports from human rights groups describing a vast Chinese government drive to collect DNA from ethnic Tibetans. In a report published Tuesday by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, author Emile Dirks estimates that since 2016 authorities have taken DNA from 919,000 to 1.2 million Tibetans — a fourth to a third of the region’s population. A second report, released by Human Rights Watch last week, finds that authorities have collected blood samples from children in Tibet and surrounding regions.

In at least one county in Tibet, according to the Citizen Lab report, authorities combined DNA testing with what they termed Covid-19 prevention efforts. Dirks, a postdoctoral fellow at Citizen Lab, said that may just be a matter of timing and that more information is needed before drawing firm conclusions. In general, DNA is collected in China through blood samples, while Covid testing is done through swabbing.

“When the police want to engage in mass DNA collection, they’re actually very open about it,” said Dirks. Often, he added, police in China will combine projects to save time. “They may be informing the public about pandemic prevention measures, and then alongside that they’ll say, ‘OK, while you’re here, we’re going to collect some DNA.’”

Amid stringent pandemic control measures in 2020, Dirks found, government and local media posts mentioning mass DNA collection in the region tripled.

Thermo Fisher has been criticized in the past for selling DNA equipment to police in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China where authorities have interned an estimated 1 million Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in inhumane camps and forced others into labor. Citing what it called “fact-specific assessments,” the company said in 2019 that it would no longer sell or service DNA equipment in Xinjiang. Later that year, the Trump administration blacklisted several of the region’s police agencies.

But there are no such restrictions in place for Tibet, where DNA collection enables research on high-altitude tolerance valued by the Chinese military, or for the rest of China, where authorities are building a massive DNA database with blood samples taken from men and boys.

“We design our products with great care, follow rigorous trade export policies, and work with governments to contribute to good global policy overall,” Thermo Fisher spokesperson Ron O’Brien wrote in an email to The Intercept. “As the world leader in serving science, we recognize the importance of considering how our products and services are used — or may be used — by our customers.”

The new sale documents show “that the abuses that led to the export controls against Xinjiang public security are not at all confined to Xinjiang,” Moreau told The Intercept. O’Brien said that Thermo Fisher would review the transactions The Intercept had flagged.

For its recent report, Human Rights Watch found records of police going into Tibetan schools to collect DNA. In one case, a local police department from neighboring Qinghai province, where much of the population is ethnically Tibetan, posted on its WeChat account a photo of boys getting their fingers pricked while officers stood by. In addition to children, the report says, police are sweeping up DNA from people in Tibet’s rural areas.

“What’s happening in Tibet is part of the authorities deepening intrusive surveillance and policing, extending all the way to local village levels in rural areas,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch.

The sale of Thermo Fisher testing kits in Tibet was made by a Chinese broker, a third-party company that bundles surveillance technology and security equipment for police and other buyers. Such transactions can obscure responsibility for the flow of fraught technologies. In 2021, two years after Thermo Fisher said it would stop selling in Xinjiang, the New York Times reported that the company’s DNA equipment continued to be sold by brokers in the region. Thermo Fisher claimed at the time that it had no record of the transactions in its system.

Last year, The Intercept reported that cellphone crackers made by the Israeli surveillance tech outfit Cellebrite continued to be sold by brokers in China, despite the company saying it had pulled out of the country. The Intercept also revealed that software and databases from the Austin-based software giant Oracle were bundled and sold to Chinese authorities as surveillance tools by brokers with close ties to Beijing.

Thermo Fisher is not the only entity outside China implicated in the Tibetan DNA drive. At Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, published by the New Jersey-based Wiley, eight editorial board members resigned last year after the journal published papers detailing genetic differences among Chinese ethnic groups, including Tibetans. One of the flagged papers listed an author from the Tibetan Public Security Bureau, the region’s major police agency.

At the time, the board members called for an investigation and said they were dismayed at the journal’s failure to react promptly. The journal still has not retracted the papers.

Partial DNA sequences from Tibetan men, without names attached, are also stored in a German database called the Y-Chromosome Haplotype Reference Database, which focuses on so-called Y-STR data, the unique sequences that occur on the Y chromosome. Last December, the highly regarded scientific journal Human Genetics retracted a paper based on Tibetan, Uyghur, and other partial genetic profiles in the German database.

“You can imagine YHRD as a Google search without providing actual search results,” Sascha Willuweit, an administrator of the database, wrote in an email to The Intercept in February. YHRD recently removed ancestry information from the public database and tightened its standards for ensuring that subjects give informed consent, he added.

The new evidence of mass testing in Tibet will likely lead to renewed pressure on Thermo Fisher, YHRD, and international journals that publish fraught genetic studies from China.

In recent years, DNA collection has expanded globally. In Orange County, California, prosecutors were caught prying DNA samples from people accused of low-level misdemeanors, like walking a dog without a leash. Kuwait required that all citizens give DNA samples before a court struck down the law in 2017. But China has the largest collection program in the world.

Moreau said that DNA collection in Tibet can veer into “biocolonialism,” a global problem. Because some DNA is shared across families and populations, he said, “If I start collecting DNA from members of a population, then I’m getting information about the entire population.” As a result, he added, “The notion of community needs to be made center to the notion of group harm.”

Genetic studies of Indigenous people around the world — including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, San people in Southern Africa, and several Native American groups in the United States — used either inadequate consent measures or none at all. In Europe, forensic geneticists have for decades collected DNA from the Roma, a persecuted minority. In Pakistan, the CIA organized a fake hepatitis B vaccination drive in an attempt to recover DNA from locals, hoping it would help lead them to Osama Bin Laden.

Last year, the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black cancer patient whose cells were taken in 1951 without her knowledge, sued Thermo Fisher in federal court for selling product lines derived from her cells.

In Tibet, some see DNA collection as part of a larger campaign of erasure. “China’s mass DNA collection of Tibetans is outrageous, but it is not entirely surprising,” said Bhuchung K. Tsering, interim president of the International Campaign for Tibet. “The end goal is not simply to bring Tibetans to heel but to undermine their unique identity altogether so that their right to determine their own destiny will no longer matter.”

The post Tibetan Police Bought Thermo Fisher DNA Equipment, Chinese Government Documents Show appeared first on The Intercept.

Secrecy about the pandemic has hindered work on its impact, on vaccines, and on its origins. In China, the government cracked down on citizen journalists reporting from Wuhan and heavily controlled a visit by World Health Organization investigators. In the United States, the pharmaceutical industry hoarded rights to lifesaving vaccines. Hospitals, meanwhile, barred photographers from recording the devastation wrought by the coronavirus.

A new project aims to shine a light on what happened during the pandemic, at least in the United States, by aggregating and making more accessible public records relating to the coronavirus and the transformation it wrought on society. Led by historians and transparency advocates, the Covid-19 Archive, as the project is called, will be a broad, interactive repository of records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and other open records laws. The project launched last week with Fauci’s early 2020 emails, including the one in which he addressed the rumors of his muzzling, and will be expanded by adding local, state, and federal public health records over the coming months.

Eventually, the project may help answer essential questions like how many Americans actually died from Covid-19 and how many contracted it in counties that are suspected of underreporting cases. It may also illuminate local government responses as the coronavirus swept through America. In 2021, an affiliated project showed that Missouri Gov. Mike Parson had kept secret data from the state’s health department showing the efficacy of mask mandates.

The Fauci emails have been under scrutiny since June 2021, when they were obtained by BuzzFeed News and the Washington Post and uploaded by investigative reporter Jason Leopold to DocumentCloud. Until now, much discussion has focused on what the FOIA release doesn’t reveal. A series of emails summarizing a February 2020 conference call about the origins of the coronavirus is almost entirely redacted. Earlier this year, congressional staffers were allowed to view copies of those emails behind closed doors. House Republicans later published their juicy notes on the redacted text; the full emails have still not been released.

While the project won’t fix the problem of excessive redaction, it will make documents like the trove of emails easier to interpret and search, a mounting problem for journalists and historians as the volume of hacked, leaked, and digitized government documents grows. Researchers often find themselves “wading through filing cabinets that are metaphorically just dumped on the ground,” said Michael Morisy, chief executive of the transparency group MuckRock, one of the partners on the Covid-19 Archive. The platform provides a workaround by allowing users to search for specific people, groups, and dates, as well as to layer two or more search terms.

Leopold, a prolific FOIA reporter who was not involved with the project, called the Covid-19 Archive “an incredibly important resource for journalists, historians, and the public.” He added, “This is why I share documents I obtain through FOIA with the public.”

The project is spearheaded by Columbia University’s History Lab and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, along with MuckRock, and partially funded by a $150,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Over the coming months, the researchers will work with journalists and other requesters to upload and process additional releases. Emails are particularly rich because it’s easy to extract dates and names from them. The group is seeking emails from constituents — people like the man who wrote Fauci — as well as from senior officials. “Historians, we want it all,” said History Lab principal investigator Matthew Connelly, one of the researchers behind the project.

Connelly has spent much of his career studying catastrophic risks to humanity, and in 2011 he helped organize a prescient event at Columbia called “The History of the Next Pandemic.” When an actual pandemic hit nearly a decade later, he began researching its impact. He is separately involved with a History Lab project to aggregate some 4.6 million declassified historical documents.

The new archive will be a record of not just what happened during the pandemic but also how reporters covered it, said Connelly: “Given how often the media itself became a part of the story, people will want to know, what was it that journalists were getting from the government, and how is it that they framed their stories?”

“We’ve seen agencies, even with very mundane things, point to Covid-19 disrupting their operations.”

Another researcher on the project, MuckRock Data and Investigations Editor Derek Kravitz, has led an effort to request records from state and local agencies for sensitive records like Covid-19 death tolls and conditions in meatpacking facilities. The new archive will expand upon and complement that project, Documenting Covid-19.

This is a crucial moment for transparency, as some agencies have pointed to the pandemic to justify long processing delays. “It’s just been a blanket dampening transparency,” Morisy said of the pandemic. “We’ve seen agencies, even with very mundane things, point to Covid-19 disrupting their operations.” The Intercept had to sue the National Institutes of Health for documents describing research it funded in Wuhan; while the agency ultimately released thousands of pages of documents, on many pages it redacted seemingly important information. The lawsuit is still in litigation.

Gunita Singh, a staff attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the project gives her hope. “Too often we are faced with evidence that FOIA is broken,” said Singh, who is not involved with the new archive. “This project demonstrates that FOIA has worked to inform the public at a critically important moment in our history.”

The post Laying Bare the Secrets of the Pandemic appeared first on The Intercept.

The online facial recognition search engine PimEyes allows anyone to search for images of children scraped from across the internet, raising a host of alarming possible uses, an Intercept investigation has found.

Often called the Google of facial recognition, PimEyes search results include images that the site labels as “potentially explicit,” which could lead to further exploitation of children at a time when the dark web has sparked an explosion of images of abuse.

“There are privacy issues raised by the use of facial recognition technology writ large,” said Jeramie Scott, director of the Surveillance Oversight Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “But it’s particularly dangerous when we’re talking about children, when someone may use that to identify a child and to track them down.”

Over the past few years, several child victim advocacy groups have pushed for police use of surveillance technologies to fight trafficking, arguing that facial recognition can help authorities locate victims. One child abuse prevention nonprofit, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s Thorn, has even developed its own facial recognition tool. But searches on PimEyes for 30 AI-generated children’s faces yielded dozens of pages of results, showing how easily those same tools can be turned against the people they’re designed to help.

While The Intercept searched for fake faces due to privacy concerns, the results contained many images of actual children pulled from a wide range of sources, including charity groups and educational sites. PimEyes previously came under fire for including photos scraped from major social media platforms. It no longer includes those images in search results. Instead, searches churn up a welter of images that feel plucked from the depths of the internet. Some come from personal websites that parents created anonymously or semi-anonymously to feature photos of their children, likely not anticipating that they could one day be pulled up by strangers taking snapshots of kids on the street.

One search for an AI-generated child turned up images of a real boy in Delaware, where a photographer had taken portraits of his family on a sunny spring day. When she posted the portraits in her online portfolio, the photographer omitted the boy’s name and other identifying details. But a determined person might theoretically be able to find such information. (The photographer did not respond to requests to comment for this article.)

Another search turned up a girl displaying a craft project at an after-school program in Kyiv, Ukraine, in a photo taken just before the war. A second page on the same website showed the girl at home this spring; by then, Kyiv was under siege, the program had gone remote, and teachers were assigning kids craft projects to complete from their kitchen tables.

A third search turned up a photo of a 14-year-old British boy that had been featured in a video about the U.K. educational system. The commentator gave the boy’s first name and details about the school he attended.

Still another search turned up a photo of a toddler from an American home-schooling blog, where the girl’s mother had revealed her first name and, when the family was traveling, rough whereabouts.

PimEyes is the brainchild of two Polish developers who created the site in 2017 on a whim. It reportedly passed through the hands of an anonymous owner who moved the headquarters to the Seychelles and then in December 2021 was purchased by Georgian international relations scholar Giorgi Gobronidze, who had met the site’s creators while lecturing in Poland.

In a wide-ranging video interview that stretched to nearly two hours, Gobronidze offered a vague and sometimes contradictory account of the site’s privacy protections.

He said that PimEyes was working to develop better safeguards for children, though he offered varying responses when asked what those might entail. “It’s a task that was given already to our technical group, and they have to bring me a solution,” he said. “I gave them several options.”

At the same time, he dismissed the argument that parents who post anonymous photos of their children have any expectation of privacy. “Parents should be more responsible,” he said. “I have never posted a photo of my child on social media or on a public website.”

“Designed for Stalkers”

On its website, PimEyes maintains that people should only use the tool to search for their own faces, claiming that the service is “not intended for the surveillance of others and is not designed for that purpose.” But the company offers subscriptions that allow people to perform dozens of unique searches a day; the least expensive package, at $29.99 a month, offers 25 daily searches. People who shell out for the premium service can set alerts for up to 500 different images or combinations of images, so that they are notified when a particular face shows up on a new site.

Gobronidze claimed that many of PimEyes’s subscribers are women and girls searching for revenge porn images of themselves, and that the site allows multiple searches so that such users can get more robust results. “With one photo, you can get one set of results, and with another photo you can get a totally different set of results, because the index combination is different on every photo,” he said. Sometimes, he added, people find new illicit images of themselves and need to set additional alerts to search for those images. He acknowledged that 500 unique alerts is a lot, though he said that, as of Thursday, 97.7 percent of PimEyes subscribers had a lighter account.

Following criticism, the company pivoted to claiming that the search engine was a privacy tool.

PimEyes’s previous owners marketed it as a way to pry into celebrities’ lives, the German digital rights site Netzpolitik reported in 2020. Following criticism, the company pivoted to claiming that the search engine was a privacy tool. Gobronidze said that fraught features were being overhauled under his ownership. “Previously, I can say that PimEyes was tailor-designed for stalkers, [in that] it used to crawl social media,” he said. “Once you dropped a photo, you could find the social media profiles for everyone. Now it is limited only to public searches.”

But many people clearly do not see PimEyes as an aid to privacy. The site has already been used to identify adults in a wide variety of cases, from so-called sedition hunters working to find perpetrators after the January 6 insurrection, to users of the notorious site 4chan seeking to harass women.

Nor do PimEyes’s marketing materials suggest much concern for privacy or ethics. In a version of the “people kill people” argument favored by the U.S. gun lobby, a blog post on the site blithely alludes to its many uses: “PimEyes just provides a tool, and the user is obliged to use the tool with responsibility. Everyone can buy a hammer, and everyone can either craft with this tool, or kill.”

“These things should only be instrumentalized with the clear and knowledgeable consent of users,” said Daly Barnett, a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “This is just another example of the large overarching problem within technology, surveillance-built or not. There isn’t privacy built from the get-go with it, and users have to opt out of having their privacy compromised.”

“We Do Not Want to Be a Monster Machine”

Alarmingly, search results for AI-generated kids also include images that PimEyes labels as “potentially explicit.” The backgrounds in the labeled images are blurred, and since clicking through to the source URLs could contribute to the exploitation of children, The Intercept could not confirm whether they are, in fact, explicit. Gobronidze said that the labels are assigned in part based on images’ source URLs, and that often the photos are harmless. When PimEyes representatives do run across child sexual abuse images, he said, representatives report it to law enforcement.

But one example he gave shows how easily the site can be used to unearth abusive or illegal content. A 16-year-old girl had used her parents’ credit card to open an account, Gobronidze said. She soon found revenge porn videos that had been uploaded by an ex-boyfriend — images that likely fit the legal definition of child pornography. (He said PimEyes issued takedown notices for the websites and advised the girl to talk with authorities, her parents, and psychologists.)

Gobronidze was vague on how he might limit abuse of children on the site. Subscribing requires a credit card, PayPal, or Amazon Pay account, and users upload their IDs only when asking PimEyes to perform takedown notices on their behalf. By design, he said, the search engine only seeks matches in photos and does not guess at age, gender, race, or ethnicity. “We do not want to be a monster machine,” he said, dubbing a more heavy-handed approach “Big Brother.” But at another point in the interview, he said he was planning to exclude images of children from search results. Still later, he said that his technical team was figuring out how to balance these two conflicting goals.

PimEyes flags people who “systematically” use the engine to search for children’s faces, he said. Users who plug in one or two faces of children are typically assumed to be family members. If a PimEyes representative gets suspicious, he said, they might ask a subscriber for a document like a birth certificate that would prove that a user is a parent.

When asked how a birth certificate would rule out abuse or stalking by noncustodial parents, Gobronidze said that PimEyes might instead request a signed form, similar to what parents and legal guardians provide in some countries when crossing borders with a child, to show they have any other parent’s consent. In a later email, he said that PimEyes had twice asked for “documents + verbal explanation” for people who uploaded images of children, and that the site had subsequently banned one of the accounts.

“The fact that PimEyes doesn’t have safeguards in place for children and apparently is not sure how to provide safeguards for children only underlines the risks of this kind of facial recognition service,” said Scott, of EPIC. “Participating in public, whether online or offline, should not mean subjecting yourself to privacy-invasive services like PimEyes.”

The inclusion of children’s faces in PimEyes search results underscores just how fraught the facial recognition landscape has become.

The inclusion of children’s faces in PimEyes search results underscores just how fraught the facial recognition landscape has become. For years, victim advocacy groups have pushed for expanded use of the technology by law enforcement. The Kutcher-Moore nonprofit, Thorn, has developed a facial recognition tool called Spotlight that it provides to investigators working on sex trafficking cases, as well as to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In a recent report, the center said that in 2021, Spotlight helped it identify over 400 missing children in online sex trafficking advertisements.

Commercial providers of facial recognition have also gotten into trafficking prevention. The controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI sells its tools to police for identifying child victims.

But those same tools can also be used to target the vulnerable. Clearview AI promoted the use of its database for child trafficking after being sued by the American Civil Liberties Union for endangering survivors of domestic violence and undocumented immigrants, among others. Prostasia Foundation, a child protection group that supports sex workers rights and internet freedom, contends that an earlier Thorn tool sometimes flagged images of adults, leading to the arrest of sex workers.

This tension is even more extreme with PimEyes, which has virtually no guardrails and smashes long-standing expectations of privacy for both adults and children.

Gobronidze said that PimEyes had talked to Thorn about using its tool Safer to detect child sexual abuse material using image hashing technology — a potentially odd relationship given that PimEyes makes images of children searchable to the general public, while Thorn aims to protect children from stalkers and abusers.

“There has been one exploratory call between our Safer team and PimEyes to show how Safer helps platforms detect, report and remove CSAM,” a Thorn spokesperson said, using the acronym for child sexual abuse material. “No partnership materialized after that single call and they are not users of Safer or any tools built by Thorn.”

When asked about concerns about its facial recognition tool, Thorn sent a statement through a spokesperson. “Spotlight is a highly targeted tool that was built specifically to identify child victims of sex trafficking and is only available to law enforcement officers who investigate child sex trafficking.”

In the United States, PimEyes could run up against a 1998 law requiring the Federal Trade Commission to protect children’s online privacy. But so far, U.S. regulators have homed in on sites that store images or information, said Emma Llansó, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. PimEyes crawls images hosted on other sites. “PimEyes is just scraping whatever they can get their hands on on the web and isn’t making promises to users about what it will and won’t do with that data,” Llansó said. “So it’s something of a gray area.”

Gobronidze is keenly aware of the distinction. “We don’t store any photos,” he claimed. “We don’t have any.”

That is not entirely true. PimEyes’s privacy policy holds that for unregistered users — anyone who uses the site without a paid account — it retains facial images, along with the “fingerprint” of a face, for 48 hours and that data from the photos indexed in results is stored for two years. A sample PimEyes search showed thumbnail images of faces — photos returned in search queries that the site has edited to blur their backgrounds. A network traffic analysis showed that those photos are hosted on a PimEyes subdomain called “collectors.”

In an email, Gobronidze said he had not previously heard or read about that subdomain and was “intrigued” to learn of it. He noted that he had forwarded the results of The Intercept’s analysis to PimEyes’s tech and data security units, adding that he could not “disclose [the] full technological cycle” because it is proprietary.

Scott, of EPIC, would rather not wait around for courts and regulators to consider the storage question. “Congress needs to act to not only protect our children, but all of us from the dangers of facial recognition technology,” he said. “Services like this should be banned. That’s how you should regulate it.”

The post Facial Recognition Search Engine Pulls Up “Potentially Explicit” Photos of Kids appeared first on The Intercept.

Merth was pleased with the result, and she wrote a follow-up post a year later, as the coronavirus pandemic was spreading throughout the world and professionals with spare cash were overhauling their homes. Middle-class Americans were entering an era of immense choice in the workplace; at many companies, it was possible for the first time ever to work from practically anywhere. They just had to figure out where to put the home office.

In two blog posts on her flooring project, Merth linked to Home Depot’s Lifeproof page over a dozen times. But she didn’t realize at the time that the simplicity promised by Home Depot comes at an immense environmental and human cost. Vinyl flooring is seeing a surge of growth, boosted in part by pandemic-era renovations. The industry calls it “luxury vinyl tile.” In reality, it is layer upon layer of thin plastic, a heavily polluting concoction made with fossil fuels. Very often, a new report shows, that plastic is produced using forced labor.

The story of vinyl flooring begins 6,600 miles away in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, where it is intertwined with the persecution of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs. The same month that Merth wrote her 2020 blog post, in a village in southern Xinjiang, 30-year-old Abdurahman Matturdi was herded onto a bus emblazoned with the words “Zhongtai Chemical.” That’s short for Xinjiang Zhongtai Chemical Company, a Chinese government-owned petrochemical firm that is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a type of plastic that is a critical ingredient in vinyl flooring. The World Health Organization had just declared Covid-19 a pandemic, and factories across China were shutting down to protect workers and prevent the coronavirus’s spread, but Zhongtai’s PVC plants were humming. Matturdi, whose story is detailed in a post on the company’s WeChat account, left behind his wife, newborn baby, and ailing mother. Hours later, he arrived in the regional capital of Ürümqi, where people in his group were assigned dormitory beds and given military fatigues to wear. Instead of watching his baby learn to walk or caring for his mother, he would spend his days laboring in Zhongtai’s facilities, exposed to both toxic chemicals and a frightening new virus.

Zhongtai did not respond to a detailed list of questions from The Intercept.

Merth and Matturdi are connected by a troubling supply chain. At one end is Zhongtai, a mammoth state-owned enterprise with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party that is among the top users of forced labor in Xinjiang. By its own account, Zhongtai has brought in more than 5,500 Uyghurs like Matturdi to work at its factories under a government program that human rights advocates say amounts to a grave injustice. To make the plastic resins that go into the flooring under Americans’ feet, Zhongtai belches greenhouse gases and mercury into the air. Its executives uproot lives, tear families apart, and expose workers to coal dust and vinyl chloride monomer, which has been linked to liver tumors.

At the other end of the chain are many major flooring companies, small contractors, and Home Depot. “The Home Depot prohibits the use of forced or prison labor in its supply chain,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “This is an issue we take very seriously, and we will work to review the information in the report and to take any additional steps necessary to ensure that the product we sell is free from forced labor and fully compliant with all applicable regulations.”

The new report, by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice in England and at the Maine-based toxic chemical investigative outfit Material Research, details the toll taken by the flooring industry, painting a devastating picture of oppression and pollution in the Uyghur region, all to help consumers in the United States and other wealthy countries cheaply renovate their homes. The report calls on the industry “to identify its risk and extract themselves from complicity in Uyghur forced labor.” It also asks all companies that source from China — including Home Depot — to scrutinize their supply chains.

The report is “very significant,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent labor monitoring group that was not involved with the research. “It has major implications for the retailers and marketers of flooring. And there are a lot of people walking around their homes right now on floors that are virtually certain to be made in part with forced labor.”

Fully 10 percent of global PVC comes from the Uyghur region, the majority of it from Zhongtai. From Xinjiang, Zhongtai’s PVC resin is transported to eastern China, India, and Vietnam, where it is turned into flooring before being exported to the U.S. and other parts of the world. PVC is also used to make everyday products like shower curtains and credit cards; the Sheffield Hallam and Material Research team says it is likely that Zhongtai plastics are used to make PVC piping for global buyers.

The researchers focus in part on a flooring factory in Vietnam called Jufeng New Materials that supplies Lifeproof tiles to Home Depot, via a Georgia-based company called Home Legend. Over one-third of Jufeng’s imports of PVC resins come from Zhongtai, shipping records show. Another half come from Jufeng’s parent company in eastern China, which itself sources heavily from Zhongtai. All of this leads the researchers to conclude that the Lifeproof line is at “high risk of being made with Xinjiang Zhongtai PVC.”

The Home Depot spokesperson sent The Intercept a letter from Home Legend, dated June 10, claiming that Jufeng’s parent company had assured it that Xinjiang PVC was not used to produce flooring for the big box retailer. The spokesperson also directed The Intercept to a Home Depot report stating that it audits suppliers to ensure compliance with “human rights, safety and environmentally sound practices,” including a ban on forced labor. Home Depot did not answer questions about when it last audited Home Legend or its downstream factories. Home Legend did not respond to requests to comment.

Researchers, customs officials, and journalists have previously documented a disturbing array of products linked to Uyghur forced labor, including surgical masks, laptops, cotton, solar panels, and wigs. But PVC flooring adds another dimension: severe health and environmental effects. The report details how workers involved in its production breathe in several toxic substances, including carcinogens, and how massive amounts of climate pollutants are released in the process of creating plastic resin for flooring.

Tainted Supply Chain

PVC production occurs in countries around the world, including the U.S., and creates pollution wherever it happens. But in Xinjiang, the process uses mercury, which has been phased out of PVC production in the U.S., and generates more waste than in many other parts of the world, the report notes. Uyghur workers living in dormitories near the plants bear the costs. “In those conditions, at that scale, where the state is in control of production and there’s no accounting for the impacts, it’s almost unimaginable what’s happening,” said Jim Vallette of Material Research, one of the report’s authors. “There’s nothing like it on Earth in the combination of climate and toxic pollution. And workers are living there 24/7.”

Lifeproof is Home Depot’s in-house flooring line. But the problem extends far beyond Home Depot. The researchers trace PVC from Zhongtai to over two dozen other flooring brands. They also highlight Zhongtai’s long list of investors in the U.S. and Europe, among them the Norwegian Government Pension Fund, Dimensional Fund Advisors, and Vanguard. None of the funds responded to questions from The Intercept about their investments in Zhongtai; in an email to the researchers, Vanguard confirmed an investment of $7 million in Zhongtai.

“There’s nothing like it on Earth in the combination of climate and toxic pollution.”

Consumers in the U.S. are shielded from vinyl flooring’s dark backstory. Flooring companies promote vinyl flooring as ideal for families and environmentally friendly because it doesn’t rely on lumber and, manufacturers claim, lasts longer than wood flooring. Some brands even portray their products as liberating for women because they are easy to install and clean — and enlist female influencers to promote their floors. (Merth said Home Depot did not compensate her for her posts in any way and that she hasn’t made significant money from the affiliate links in them.)

Merth said she carefully researched vinyl flooring before settling on the Lifeproof brand. She said she ran across people online who warned against the general use of plastics in the home, but she wasn’t sure whether to trust them. Otherwise, she said, she did not find any information that concerned her.

Home Depot uses multiple manufacturers for Lifeproof floors, and the particular Lifeproof style that Merth installed does not appear to have a direct tie to Xinjiang. But several other Lifeproof styles that she recommended to her followers are sourced from Jufeng, the Vietnamese factory that imports large amounts of PVC from Zhongtai. The researchers identified these tiles by comparing the product codes and flooring thickness listed on Home Depot’s site with those in shipping records. The products have whimsical names, like Sundance Canyon Hickory and Maligne Valley Oak, making it sound as if the tiles originated in a serene forest.

“It’s certainly shocking to hear that,” said Merth of Lifeproof’s supply chain, adding that she would consider appending a note to her posts. She said that the findings raise questions about Home Depot. “It’s something that I would be very concerned about, if they knew and still were selling it.”

Next week, U.S. customs officials will start enforcing a key provision of a new law, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which requires companies to vet their supply chains for any use of labor in Xinjiang. President Joe Biden signed the act into law last December following a campaign by workers’ rights and Uyghur activist groups; it allows Customs and Border Protection to assume that all goods from Xinjiang are made with forced labor, putting the onus on the importer to prove otherwise. But because PVC products often pass through multiple countries before arriving in the U.S., many vinyl floors wouldn’t automatically face scrutiny. The Sheffield Hallam and Material Research investigators hope to change that. “A lot of businesses have resisted looking beyond the veil that they put up in their supply chains,” said lead author Laura Murphy, who studies forced labor at Sheffield Hallam. “From my desk and from the desks of my research team, we figure this out every day.” Increasingly, she said, there is no excuse for such myopia.

A Coal-Blackened Wasteland

Around a decade ago, factories in eastern China introduced the tiles that had so entranced Merth, the DIY influencer. Water-resistant, cheap, and lightweight, the innovation revolutionized the flooring industry. Laying down a floor became as simple as building with Legos; suddenly anyone could do it, no contractor required. American companies soon brought the Chinese-made flooring planks to market as luxury vinyl tile, calling the new assembly method “click and lock.” HGTV gushed that the new tiles were “Not Your Father’s Vinyl Floor.” Guests plugged them on the “Today” show and on “This Old House.” Between 2010 and 2020, according to shipping figures compiled by Material Research, U.S. imports of vinyl floors from China quintupled.

The combination of cheap fossil fuels and forced labor in the production of Chinese PVC proved impossible for American flooring companies to match.

American flooring factories couldn’t compete. Vallette, who has tracked the environmental effects of plastic flooring for years, has counted 18 factories that closed as manufacturing shifted overseas. The combination of cheap fossil fuels and forced labor in the production of Chinese PVC proved impossible for American flooring companies to match. More than 2,500 American workers lost their jobs. The U.S. brands remained, but only because they reinvented themselves as distributors in a complex global supply chain.

Into this upturned market came Zhongtai. Like many state-owned enterprises in China, Zhongtai has a web of subsidiaries. It produces chemicals used in polyester, spandex, and polyurethane, and it grows tomatoes, grapes, peppers, and cotton. But its main business is plastics. Zhongtai’s four factories in Xinjiang churn out more than two million tons of PVC resin per year.

In 2017, Zhongtai began bringing in Uyghurs to work at its factories. Many of these laborers were, like Matturdi, from poor villages in southern Xinjiang. Their journeys start when Zhongtai representatives show up at their door. “Companies like Zhongtai recruit workers through state-sponsored programs, and people are not allowed to refuse,” said Murphy, the forced labor scholar. In one instance reported by Chinese state news agency Xinhua, Zhongtai representatives repeatedly visited the home of a young woman named Maynur on the edge of Xinjiang’s Taklamakan Desert. Her parents balked at the thought of her leaving, but their protests were ultimately ignored. Before long, Maynur was operating packaging machines at a Zhongtai PVC factory.

The Chinese government euphemistically calls this a “labor transfer” program and claims that it is aimed at alleviating poverty in the region. But it has been rolled out against a backdrop of escalating repression. Since 2016, the Chinese government has interned more than 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in inhumane camps. The government has separated Uyghur children from their parents, carting them away to boarding schools reminiscent of institutions in the U.S. and Canada to which Native American kids were taken beginning in the mid-19th century. It has locked up Uyghurs for imagined transgressions and seized their land. One of the report’s authors, Nyrola Elimä, has a cousin in prison and parents under house arrest. “They don’t like us,” she said of the Chinese government. “In their eyes, we don’t look like them. We’re different, so we’re the enemy.” Human Rights Watch says that the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghurs amounts to crimes against humanity, making it a violation of international law.

Zhongtai’s executives are active participants in broader government repression in the Uyghur region, according to the report. In 2017, the company held an event devoted to “social stability” in which representatives encouraged Uyghurs to bring their thinking in line with that of the Communist Party. Zhongtai’s employees have helped the Chinese government surveil Uyghur villagers by collecting their personal details and entering them into a widely criticized policing app, according to a WeChat post by a local propaganda department. And Zhongtai executives often publicize their participation in the labor transfer program, allowing state news reporters to film Uyghurs as they arrive by bus or join in military drills. Such workers have reason to fear anyone affiliated with the company, which, as a state-owned enterprise, implicitly represents the Chinese government. When Uyghurs arrive at Zhongtai’s facilities, the company’s corporate communications show, Communist Party officials are often there to receive them.

After undergoing training at Zhongtai, Uyghurs are put to work feeding furnaces, mixing and crushing materials for PVC production, and handling caustic soda, a byproduct of the production process. They face respiratory hazards from coal and PVC dust in the air, neurological effects from mercury, and carcinogens from coal reacting with chlorine.

Forced study is another part of the program, both at Zhongtai and at other plants in the region that use Uyghur labor. Elimä collected state press news clips about Zhongtai that show Uyghurs in military garb, studying Chinese. Some talk woodenly about how happy they are, as if reading from a script. “Thanks to the Party and Zhongtai for giving us this good opportunity!” says one.

“Zhongtai sees it as a corporate success because they’ve managed to turn Uyghurs away from being farmers, away from their homogenous culture, away from their Islamic piety and toward a culture that is more industrialized, urbanized, and ideologically appropriate in the government’s view,” said Murphy.

“First-person testimony tells us that people are typically not paid or are even in debt to the companies they work for.”

State media reports claim that the workers are paid enough that they can send money home to their families. According to Xinhua, Maynur earned 4,000 yuan a month, equivalent to around $580 at the time of the article. But the Xinjiang Victims Database, an independent project that compiles accounts from victims of persecution in the region, has collected many stories from former Uyghur laborers and their relatives who paint a very different picture of working conditions in the region. “First-person testimony tells us that people are typically not paid or are even in debt to the companies they work for,” said Murphy. Companies often deduct money for food and housing — or they promise to pay salaries and don’t deliver. The article featuring Matturdi’s case says that each worker in his group had 1,000 yuan ($145 at the time) of their first monthly paycheck applied toward meals.

The workers suffered anew as a novel coronavirus spread through the world in 2020. Over a two-week period in March, as factories in other parts of China remained closed, Zhongtai boasted that it had brought in over 1,000 Uyghurs from poor villages to work on its assembly lines. Some, like Matturdi, were bused in. Others arrived by train, flooding into halls where it was impossible to maintain social distance, wearing only surgical masks for protection from the virus.

Zhongtai profited by keeping its factories open. As home decorating supply sales surged in the U.S., the company was poised to rake in further gains.

From Vietnam to America

In America, meanwhile, middle-class workers had more flexibility than ever before. Even after companies started reopening their offices, many chose to continue to work from home. The change ushered in a renovation boom. Basement dens became offices. Bathrooms got an overhaul. Bedrooms were split in two. As labor costs rose, people often made these alterations themselves, rather than shell out money for a contractor. In 2020 and 2021, Home Depot broke records, adding $40 billion to its overall sales.

Merth, the DIY influencer, was not alone in turning to vinyl flooring for her Covid home reboot. Pandemic-related concerns about hygiene drove a shift toward hard-surface flooring, particularly vinyl. A recent report from the nonprofit Center for Environmental Health found that in 2020 alone, the vinyl flooring that was shipped from China to the U.S. would cover over 1 million miles if laid out end to end. That’s long enough to stretch from Earth to the moon four times over.

And that’s not even the full picture. Other flooring very likely made with Chinese raw materials — including some of Home Depot’s Lifeproof floors — was arriving in the U.S. via Vietnam. Much of it came from a single factory: Jufeng New Materials.

The industry’s solution was to ship PVC from China to a third country and manufacture the flooring there before exporting it to the U.S.

In 2018, as part of his trade war with China, President Donald Trump slapped tariffs on Chinese-made floors, making it costly for U.S. flooring companies to import directly from China. The industry’s solution was to ship PVC from China to a third country and manufacture the flooring there before exporting it to the U.S. In 2020, an executive at Zhongtai told Chinese state media that the company was turning to Southeast Asia because “conditions there are more stable.” That same year, Zhongtai began working with a company in eastern China called Zhejiang Tianzhen, according to a prospectus that Zhejiang Tianzhen recently released in a bid to go public on the Shenzhen stock exchange.

Zhejiang Tianzhen had just set up Jufeng as a subsidiary, building a series of warehouses in an industrial park north of a bend in the Cau river. The sprawling complex resembled a series of airplane hangars with blue roofs. A sign outside featured Chinese characters, and three flags flew overhead: Vietnamese, American, and Chinese. Jufeng held regular job fairs, eventually employing around 1,000 workers, according to Vietnamese media.

Jufeng became a critical destination for Zhongtai’s plastics. From March 2020 to February 2022, the Vietnamese factory received enough PVC resins from Zhongtai to make over 16.3 million square meters of vinyl flooring, according to Vallette of Material Research.

In an email, Zhejiang Tianzhen said it bans the use of forced labor by its suppliers and places “great emphasis on supply chain compliance,” requiring suppliers to adhere to a code of conduct on labor rights. “We haven’t found any forced labor in our suppliers during regular visits,” the manufacturer wrote. “Our company will continue to keep an eye on the situation. If any evidence of forced labor is found, we will take quick action.”

From Vietnam, Jufeng exports finished floors all over the world, including to Home Legend, the Georgia-based company. Home Legend markets its flooring as “earth minded” and claims on its website to manage forests in China and to source wood and bamboo from sustainable sources. It outlines a commitment to social responsibility and to protecting people at every stage of the floor’s life cycle. The website says nothing about the pollutants released during the creation of its vinyl floors or about how the workers who make components of those floors are treated.

Home Legend, in turn, supplies Home Depot with flooring for its Lifeproof line. It was Home Depot that sent The Intercept a letter from a vice president at the Georgia floormaker stating Zhejiang Tianzhen had assured the company that “no PVC from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has been used in any Home Legend products sold to the Home Depot.”

The letter further claimed that on January 24, Jufeng’s parent company had instructed all of its PVC sourcing agents to stop buying PVC from Xinjiang.

The researchers say that’s a weak defense. Vallette noted that shipping records show that Jufeng received at least 12 shipments of PVC from Zhongtai after January 24, most recently on February 21. “The easiest way to protect consumers and these companies’ reputations would be to get all floors that are potentially containing resins produced by forced labor out of the country and return them to sender,” he said.

A Zhejiang Tianzhen representative declined to answer questions about why Jufeng had continued to import PVC from Xinjiang. “We apologize for not being able to answer your inquiry because it involves business secrets and confidentiality agreements between the company and the customer,” the representative wrote.

Staggering Toxicity

The fire that broke out in November spread quickly. Black smoke billowed into the night sky. Loud booms echoed through the air. Hundreds of soldiers and firefighters rushed to the scene. Within minutes, flames had consumed a Jufeng warehouse in Vietnam that stored PVC resins. Videos captured by witnesses show the structure burning to the ground.

The next day, the site was still smoldering. Exhausted firefighters stood by, wearing gas masks, weakly spraying the remains.

There is no evidence that workers were harmed in the fire, but the blaze released cancer-causing dioxins into the air and put firefighters and bystanders at risk. It could also have long-term effects. After a 1995 fire at a plastics warehouse in Binghamton, New York, dioxin levels in the soil were over 100 times higher than at other locations in the same community. In general, the disaster shows just how dangerous working with PVC can be. The chemicals involved are highly flammable. In this case, according to the Zhejiang Tianzhen prospectus, the fire was caused by an electrical problem. A Vietnamese government report subsequently found that Jufeng had not taken proper precautions, like conducting fire drills.

Workers and the people who live in surrounding neighborhoods are at risk even when factories aren’t burning. “All plastics carry significant toxic risks of one kind or another,” said Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law, who is not affiliated with the organizations that produced the report. “But PVC is remarkable in the staggering toxicity that occurs at every stage of its lifecycle. We see massive quantities of hazardous air pollutants being released into surrounding communities, which are disproportionately poor and marginalized.”

The fire at Jufeng’s Vietnamese plant slashed $11.5 million off Zhejiang Tianzhen’s profits, according to the IPO prospectus. But satellite images show that Jufeng’s other warehouses remained untouched. Zhejiang Tianzhen claimed that its Vietnamese plants were humming again the next day. In the months following the fire, the company’s shipments to the U.S. actually increased.

In the first quarter of 2022, the Sheffield Hallam and Material Research report says, Jufeng sent 5,200 shipments of PVC flooring to the U.S., worth a total of $80 million. Nearly one quarter of that flooring — $17.2 million worth — went to Home Legend and bore product codes matching those sold by Home Depot.

Once the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act comes into full effect next week, the researchers worry that manufacturers will find other workarounds. Last month, four members of Congress asked the House and Senate appropriations committees for expanded funding to enforce the law.

But on Home Depot’s responsibility, Murphy is resolute. Consumers, she said, have a right to know. “We need to know that the things we’re buying aren’t cheap simply because someone else is being forced to work.”

Zhongtai, for its part, recently announced plans to build a fifth, even bigger plant in Xinjiang. When the new facility is complete and running at full capacity, Zhongtai’s PVC factories will spew an estimated 49 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. More difficult to measure is the human toll: the children separated from their parents, the workers who contract cancer decades later, the Uyghurs who lose the most productive years of their lives, all so that Americans can cheaply redo their home offices.

Additional reporting by Myf Ma

The post How Vinyl Flooring Made With Uyghur Forced Labor Ends Up at Big Box Stores appeared first on The Intercept.

What he did next would become important for a little-known CPD task force overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Called the Social Media Exploitation, or SOMEX, team, the task force had been set up to help the FBI find informants and intelligence using information gleaned from social sites. The Intercept and Chicago-based transparency groups obtained more than 800 pages of emails and other documents about the team through public records requests. These show that the team’s officers were given broad leeway to investigate people across platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, using fake social media accounts furnished by the FBI, in violation of some platforms’ policies. Campbell’s work would be held up as a model for the team.

“Found This POS”

Across the United States, federal and local authorities were combing social sites for scraps of information, disseminating alarmist notices about “revolutionary anti-capitalist” gatherings, suburban candlelight vigils, and children’s peace marches. Campbell thought maybe he could identify the man in the Joker mask. In the comments beneath the tweet, people had noted the man’s unusual tattoos: scrawled across his neck was the word “PRETTY.” At 5:09 a.m., the police officer believed he had found a match. Campbell emailed the Crime Prevention and Information Center, or CPIC, a Chicago-area fusion center set up for sharing intelligence among police and federal agencies. “Did a little digging and found this POS,” he wrote, using an abbreviation for “piece of shit.” He did not say how.

Campbell determined that the man in the tweet was Chicago resident Timothy O’Donnell. A few hours later, his tip was turned into a Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, and entered into the FBI’s eGuardian system, through which law enforcement agencies share threats. Soon after, officers searched O’Donnell’s apartment. In a bedroom they found a Joker mask.

O’Donnell was charged with arson. In February, following nearly two years in custody, he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of civil disorder. A 2021 report by Chicago’s Office of Inspector General found that the night of the fire, police had kettled protesters in an area with many department vehicles, potentially contributing to the damage. “He was a target, really simply, because he had a mask on his face,” said O’Donnell’s attorney, Michael Leonard, who said that surveillance camera footage shows dozens of other people trying to damage the police car. “This was about the guy in the Joker mask because he was seen in photos, and that’s sexy from a police standpoint.”

Documents back up the claim that Chicago police were keen to work with sensational social media imagery. In the hours after Campbell sent in his tip, congratulatory emails pinged through the department. The context surrounding his email to CPIC suggests that Campbell had done his research while off-duty, which would have been a violation of department policy. But supervisors focused on his success. “Nice use of social media,” wrote a lieutenant. Although Campbell belonged to another part of the department, his sleuth work was celebrated by the SOMEX task force supervisors.

“This is a great job! Awesome work,” emailed a sergeant, later adding, “This is what I was talking about using our SOMEX teams for.”

By any measure, the week that followed George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer was an intense moment in Chicago’s — and U.S. — history. Thousands of people took to the city’s streets to peacefully demonstrate against police violence, marching along Lake Shore Drive and gathering outside the Trump Hotel. Despite ample warning, the Office of Inspector General report found, Chicago’s police were unprepared. When they did react, their response was chaotic and excessively violent, with officers variously hiding their badge numbers, turning off their body cameras, blasting people with pepper spray at close range, bantering about shooting people who were fleeing police in the head, and telling an arrestee that they would be raped in jail.

The SOMEX team’s reaction was also troubling. Ostensibly, the team’s mission was to provide both the FBI and the CPD with useful intelligence. But the documents show what the SOMEX officers did instead: flag potential damage of police cars, investigate the social media connections of people who had made threats online, and cull videos for the department’s YouTube channel. In a few instances, they also circulated posts about upcoming demonstrations, including an event called Northside Protest for Black Lives.

SOMEX team supervisors did not apparently see this as a failure, though. Documents show that in the protests and their aftermath, commanding officers spotted an opportunity to prove the recently established task force’s worth. They had officers trawl social media for posts that appeared to show arson or destruction of police property, with an eye toward finding footage for so-called seeking to identify videos – basically, “Wanted” videos — to be disseminated on the YouTube channel. They also deepened partnerships with surveillance tech outfits, including Amazon Ring.

Taken together, the documents are a rare window into the daily work of secretive social media investigators, whose ranks have grown within both local police departments and the FBI. They show Chicago police merging open-source intelligence, or information available to the public, with invasive online undercover work and granular data procured using surveillance tech. They also raise troubling questions at a moment when courts and civil liberties advocates are challenging the reach of powerful new policing tools.

“This is surveillance in the digital age,” said Matthew Guariglia, an historian and policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which for years has tracked the use of fake social media accounts by police and federal agencies. The pressure to identify threats and preserve “Wanted” videos raises the specter of police assuming guilt by association, he noted. “The real fear is that people who have done nothing wrong are going to be punished and face reprisals for just being in proximity.”

Freddy Martinez, a founder and organizer with the police accountability nonprofit Lucy Parsons Lab, noted that CPD has a poor track record of interpreting the meaning of online posts. Lucy Parsons Lab found that the department has surveilled residents who were simply grieving for loved ones who had died due to violence in the city. “There’s a lot of context that is lost online, and it makes it challenging to discern motive,” he said. “Is this a meme, is this a reference to something online? Social media monitoring is a tool that lends itself to potential abuse because it flattens that context into a thin window.”

The documents show that SOMEX officers have broad leeway to investigate people using online aliases. According to the special order that established the task force in 2019, the FBI can provide officers with fake accounts or “alias identities.” Elsewhere, the document says that fake profiles must use “uniquely created” photos — presumably images generated by AI. Officers are even allowed to take full control of informants’ online identities and, with permission, pose as them in their social media investigations.

A 2019 CPD special order, obtained by Transparency Chicago, establishing the SOMEX Team.

The order defines social media broadly to include dating sites, delivery apps, online shopping, and “any and all online communication sites known and unknown which collect user data.” It says that the FBI helps oversee the team’s day-to-day work, noting, “The FBI will detail personnel to assist in the implementation of the SOMEX Team.” The emails obtained by The Intercept suggest that during the George Floyd protests, some of the task force’s plans were in fact relayed to the FBI.

“I’ve never seen an internal police department policy that seems to abdicate authority to the FBI like this,” said Michael German, a former undercover FBI agent and a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice. “These types of policies rarely come into public view this way.” But in general, he noted, the FBI has a long-standing interest in monitoring social media. “We know that they’re collecting massive amounts of information about people based on no suspicion of wrongdoing.”

The FBI also uses the term “SOMEX” at the national level. It recently inked a $27.6 million contract for software for social media surveillance, the Washington Post reported in April. The contract covers 5,000 licenses to use Babel X, a software made by surveillance tech company Babel Street that allows users to search social media within bounded geographic areas. The call for bids that preceded the contract says it is “intended to satisfy the gaps in the FBI’s SOMEX capabilities.”

The FBI had sought software that could retrieve data within eight minutes of it being posted “from as many websites as possible, in a low-footprint and/or anonymous manner” and retain it for at least a year, according to the tender document. The bureau outlined plans for the software to be used by employees logging in with “generic accounts which do not indicate name or affiliation of the users.”

The FBI also has a Social Media Exploitation Team within the National Threat Operations Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, that “addresses online threats to life from social media associated with unknown subjects, victims, and locations,” according to the 2020 annual report of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division.

To what degree that national SOMEX team works with the Chicago task force is unclear. The Intercept also could not determine whether the FBI has similar task forces with other police departments, as is the case with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces. A bureau spokesperson did not respond to a list of detailed questions about the Chicago SOMEX task force and the national SOMEX team, instead sending a statement: “The FBI works with its federal, state, local, tribal and territorial law enforcement partners in task forces across the country in order to detect, investigate, and disrupt federal crimes and threats to national security and to protect the American people. In every instance, the FBI’s investigative activity complies with Department of Justice guidelines, applicable laws and the United States Constitution. The FBI does not investigate or collect information on solely First Amendment protected activity.”

From the Chicago Police Department, The Intercept obtained SOMEX emails from May-June 2020 and November 2021. The SOMEX team order was obtained by Transparency Chicago, and the SAR that Campbell sent to the fusion center was obtained by the Policing in Chicago Research Group at University of Illinois at Chicago. All of the documents were released following public records requests.

According to the order, Chicago’s SOMEX officers can interact with people online using fake profiles or assumed identities only after submitting a written request. But police are permitted to use fake profiles to “friend” targets and like posts under a broader range of conditions.

CPD declined to comment. Campbell did not respond to requests for comment sent to his department email.

Conventional undercover work is also prone to abuse. But when police go undercover in real life, says Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director with the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program, “They have one persona. That persona has to be fairly well developed. It has to be really consistent. They can’t show up at a meeting on one side of town as one person and then go to a meeting on the other side of town as another person.” Fake online profiles are “a force multiplier,” she said. “You can sit at your desk and gin up a lot of covert identities.”

And in some circumstances, officers on the SOMEX team are allowed to take their fake online personae into the real world, to interact with targets in person.

Guariglia, of Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the SOMEX documents reminded him of the 1908 G.K. Chesterton novel ‘‘The Man Who Was Thursday,” about an anarchist council that turns out to be primarily comprised of undercover cops. “I can imagine one Chicago activist whose twelve Facebook friends are all different agencies’ undercover identities,” he said.

“A Great Mission”

As protests against police violence grew, CPD’s response remained scattered. Officers would later describe it as “whack-a-mole.” But on May 30, the day that O’Donnell was photographed wearing a Joker mask, CPD leaders hatched a half-hearted plan. They told officers across the department to ready their riot gear. “All RDOs are canceled,” read an email from a lieutenant, referring to regular days off. Going forward, shifts would stretch to 12 hours. Even the SOMEX team’s digital investigators had to prepare. “In uniform,” wrote Sgt. Patrick Kinney, a former homicide detective who serves as one of the team’s supervisors, to his officers. “Make sure you have your helmets and batons.”

Kinney saw a bright side to the demonstrations: They were an opportunity to show the value of his team’s digital investigations. The task force officers had begun archiving social media footage showing potential destruction of property. “I think this will be a great mission for the SOMEX and help to highlight their need,” Kinney wrote to other commanding officers about the effort.

A SOMEX team sergeant discusses archiving social media footage during the George Floyd protests.

CPD Bureau of Detectives Chief Brendan Deenihan had meanwhile given Kinney and other supervisors an additional goal. He wanted their teams to each cull two “Wanted” videos per week from social media. Even as Kinney privately worried about pushback from overworked officers, he tried to convince his team that the quota would be easy to meet. “This only works and becomes less cumbersome if everyone does their due diligence and enters possible videos into the list,” he wrote. “For example, if you pull video for and [sic] shooting and the video captures the suspect or a vehicle used enter it onto the list. … This is not a heavy lift.”

Kinney did not respond to requests for comment sent to his department email.

The SOMEX team is housed within CPD’s Bureau of Detectives. As of May 2021, according to a roster obtained by Transparency Chicago, the SOMEX task force had 15 officers, in addition to the commanding officers. But its work overlaps with that of the department’s two Area Technology Centers, data-driven policing centers that local news outlets report were set up with funding from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin.

CPD has been surveilling social media for over a decade, as The Intercept previously reported. It has even monitored social media use in public schools, an investigation by ProPublica and WBEZ Chicago found. The department has had a procedure for approving covert accounts since at least 2014, according to a document obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois in a public records lawsuit. “Young Black and brown people who are heavily policed are aware that cops use fake accounts,” said Maira Khwaja, who directs public impact strategy and outreach for Chicago’s Invisible Institute, a nonprofit investigative group. “There are always jokes on how to detect that someone’s a cop online — like someone asking obviously about drugs.” In Memphis, police have been accused of snooping on Black Lives Matter activists and their friends using a fake persona improbably named Bob Smith.

Fake profiles violate Facebook’s authenticity policy, and on occasion police departments have gotten into trouble for using them. Following attention from the press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Facebook changed its law enforcement guidelines and asked two police departments to stop using fake profiles. But abuses remain, on Facebook and on other platforms. In April, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights released a report criticizing the Minneapolis Police Department for not having a policy “to ensure that covert accounts are being used for legitimate investigative purposes, and not, for instance, to send messages to City Council Members criticizing them.”

The SOMEX task force appears to be an attempt to formalize CPD online undercover work. Documents show that the FBI keeps records of the fake identities it assigns to officers, giving them tracking numbers called Confidential Alias Numbers.

Roy L. Austin Jr., vice president and deputy general counsel for civil rights at Facebook’s parent company Meta, said there are no exceptions to Facebook’s authenticity policy, even for the FBI. “It is absolutely a violation of our policies to create a fake account, for any reason, no matter who you are,” he said. “ We require everyone, including law enforcement authorities, to use their authentic names on Facebook and we make this policy clear in our Community Standards. It is our intention to make sure that people can continue using our platforms free from unlawful surveillance by the government or agents acting in inauthentic ways.”

But documents make clear that CPD’s SOMEX officers routinely use fake Facebook profiles.

In March 2019, SOMEX officers repeatedly used Facebook aliases in the investigation of actor Jussie Smollett, who was accused of fabricating his own assault. Files from Smollett’s case that were unsealed by the Circuit Court of Cook County show that SOMEX officers assumed fake identities even for routine searches. An intelligence report from the case describing research on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, for example, says that a detective “logged on to the Internet through a non-attributable computer, utilizing departmental approved covert account AC08, with the Internet Protocol (IP) address of [REDACTED] which resolved to Chicago, IL.”

The documents show that SOMEX officers can also take over the accounts of informants, or what the department euphemistically calls “social media assets.” The department has a form that informants fill out to grant police use of their online identity. The form gives police full account access, even allowing CPD to change an informant’s password so that they cannot log into their account. “I find that totally astonishing,” said Levinson-Waldman, of the Brennan Center.

Following the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed that the bureau had failed to act swiftly because it lacked the ability to fully monitor social media. “What we can’t do on social media is, without proper predication and an authorized purpose, just monitor ‘just in case’ on social media,” he told Congress last summer, in response to a question from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. He added, “Now, if the policies should be changed to reflect that — that might be one of the important lessons learned coming out of this whole experience. But that’s not something that currently the FBI has either the authority or certainly the resources frankly to do.”

“That is false,” said German, the former FBI agent, who noted that FBI agents have been able to do online research without any criminal predicate since 2002. (According to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office report, social media companies also tipped off the FBI to potential violence at the Capitol.) “Whenever they are criticized for failing to protect Americans, rather than allow an investigation of how they’re using or misusing the authorities they have, FBI blames it on a lack of authority, because that makes it easier for a policymaker to say, ‘OK, we’ll give them new authority,’” he said. Following Wray’s pitch, the bureau released the call for bids for SOMEX software, though the contract followed on FBI use of other social media surveillance software.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, too, has claimed that police need more resources for social media surveillance. In August 2020, she announced the creation of a second social media team: a 20-person unit within CPIC, the fusion center, tasked with keeping round-the-clock tabs on social sites to identify potential property damage. “As we’ve seen over these past few months, social media platforms have repeatedly been used to organize large groups of people to engage in illegal activity,” she said.

Emails from November 2021, meanwhile, show that Area Technology Centers officers, including some on the SOMEX team, used GeoTime, a geolocation tool made by Uncharted Software, and that they were exploring joining Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader and camera network after the company offered them free accounts.

One incident from the George Floyd protests shows how SOMEX investigations could easily ensnare the innocent. On May 28, 2020, CPD learned of a man who had threatened to kill police and burn down a precinct. According to the Office of the Inspector General report, the threat had been identified by the fusion center, CPIC, on “open source social media” and had caught the attention of Lightfoot, who asked what was being done. A SOMEX officer checked the man’s Facebook accounts. One account was private, and a second account had last been updated in 2017. Other social sites turned up little. “There is nothing on his Instagram page either,” wrote the investigator. “Only five posts and nothing related to the police department.” The officer, who is unnamed in the emails obtained by The Intercept, went on to dig into the man’s social media contacts: “I took the liberty in observing public posts made by his friends.”

Emails from the first week of the George Floyd protests show that officers amassed a large volume of content. They captured so much social media footage, in fact, that Kinney complained that they were running out of storage.

Of the SOMEX team work described in available documents from that week, the unmasking of the Joker appears to be the only research that resulted in criminal charges. But officers did achieve one goal: The Chicago Police Department published over a dozen “Wanted” videos on its YouTube channel. The videos zoom in on people’s faces. Overlaid, in red, is text that reads, “If you see these individuals do not approach. Call 911.”

Documents published with this article:

Chicago Police Department SOMEX George Floyd protests emails — a great mission

Chicago Police Department SOMEX team ATC emails — Ring

Chicago Police Department SOMEX team George Floyd protests emails — worries about pushback

Chicago Police Department SOMEX team George Floyd protests emails — capturing videos for YouTube

Chicago Police Department SOMEX team emails — RDOs are canceled

Chicago Police Department SOMEX team ATC 11-2021 emails

Jussie Smollett Chicago Police Department SOMEX report 

Chicago Police Department SOMEX George Floyd Protests — Examining Social Networks

Chicago Police Department Social Media Policies 2014-2015

CPIC fusion center – Suspicious Activity Report 2020-00044 – George Floyd protests 

The post FBI Provides Chicago Police With Fake Online Identities for “Social Media Exploitation” Team appeared first on The Intercept.

Gas extraction in Groningen, a province in the north of the Netherlands that is home to Europe’s largest natural gas field, has caused over 1,000 earthquakes since Exxon Mobil and Shell began drilling there in 1963. The Dutch government has designated hundreds of homes acutely unsafe, and thousands of others must be reinforced or repaired. After repeatedly taking to the streets at night with flaming torches, residents have pushed the government to increase the number of compensation payments and pledge to end extraction. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, forcing governments across Europe to reconsider their dependence on Russian oil and gas, Dutch pundits blithely offered a solution: further extraction in Groningen.

Before the war, the Netherlands got 15 percent of its gas from Russia. (Across the European Union, the figure is a whopping 41 percent.) Now, as Europe tries to decrease that dependency, its leaders are looking at fossil fuels close to home. “Everybody is afraid that if [Russian President Vladimir] Putin closes down gas flows to Europe, the only option is to increase production in Groningen,” said Peter Kodde, a senior organizer with Milieudefensie, an environmental group based in Amsterdam. On Monday, following reports of mass killings of civilians in Ukraine, some European leaders called for sanctions on Russia’s energy industry — a move that could increase pressure to extract inside the EU.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reignited a painful debate over fossil fuels across Europe and North America, as the oil and gas industry has seized on the war to push for more extraction. In the United Kingdom, members of Parliament have called to restart fracking. In Germany, the finance minister has proposed lifting a ban on new drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea. In the United States, Republican lawmakers have proposed resuming drilling in the Arctic. In February, Bloomberg columnist Karl W. Smith went so far as to assert: “Fracking may be America’s most powerful weapon against Russian aggression.”

“We have the damage, the uncertainty. And there’s nothing in return. It’s starting to feel like we’re a colony.”

The victims of this approach are people like Groningen resident Coert Fossen. One summer day in 2012, he was sitting at home when his chair began shaking and swaying. Overhead, he could hear the wooden beams that supported the roof of his 80-year-old house creaking. Fossen had experienced earthquakes while living in Pakistan 20 years earlier, but this was different. It felt as if a train were passing underneath his house. It turned out that he was just over a mile from the epicenter.

Fossen became a member of the Groninger Bodem Beweging, whose name means “Groningen earth movement.” All told, some 350,000 people live in the immediate earthquake zone; the group was formed to give them a voice. On its website, the GBB compiles data on earthquakes and their effects. The group’s data showed that the quakes had grown both more severe and more frequent over time. But its activists maintained that the Richter scale wasn’t an adequate measurement because the earthquakes happen just 1.9 miles beneath the earth’s surface, in a layer of damp peat. Because the soil is so wet, quakes pulse out across a broad area. The earthquake that shook Fossen’s house clocked in at magnitude 3.6, which elsewhere in the world is considered minor, but it was strong enough to knock dozens of items off the shelves of a nearby grocery store and damage hundreds of homes.

The Dutch government earns revenue from extraction in the Groningen gas field. In 2018, the Dutch central statistics agency found that the government had reaped more than 417 billion euros from extraction in the province since 1965. Much of that money has been invested back into development projects in the west and south of the Netherlands, in cities including Amsterdam and Rotterdam. “We have the danger,” said Fossen. “We have the damage, the uncertainty. And there’s nothing in return. It’s starting to feel like we’re a colony.”

In January, the Dutch government announced that it planned to double gas extraction in Groningen in 2022 to meet demand in Germany. The news sparked a torch march through the provincial capital that drew 8,000 to 10,000 people despite strict coronavirus measures. Another 1.2 million joined digitally. The government took note, and in March, State Secretary for the Extractive Industries Hans Vijlbrief slashed the target extraction amount. When I visited Fossen the following week, the mood in Groningen was subdued. Some people were satisfied with that concession. But those who took a long view of the problem were not. In the latest issue of the GBB’s magazine, Fossen had written, “Anyone living in Groningen knows that fairy tales do not exist. Thunderclouds are looming again.” The magazine’s cover showed a government minister with his hands on a gas valve defecating on a wooden brace marked “Groningen.” The same kinds of braces prop up vulnerable houses across the province.

Only a few years earlier, the government had set 2022 as the date when extraction would cease entirely. Since then, leaders have continually postponed the end date while reserving the right to extract more gas in emergency situations. “We have been saying for years already, ‘Fix a date,’” said Fossen. “Because that will give people here some certainty about the future.” On Friday, the Dutch government said that a closure of the fields in 2023 “remains within reach,” at the same time acknowledging that the energy crisis brought on by the war in Ukraine could lead to more extraction in Groningen as a “last resort.”

We left the station. It was a sunny spring day, the sky a brilliant cloudless blue. Across the street from the GBB office, a house built around the turn of the 20th century was being reinforced. The entire edifice was wrapped in scaffolding, and the property was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. “The complete structure has to be checked,” Fossen said. “The walls may need to be made thicker and strengthened. And they’ll look at the windows.”

Fossen stopped in front of the house next door. To me it appeared intact, but Fossen pointed to a discolored patch of brick. “See there, below the windowsill? Those are repaired cracks.”

We kept walking. Everywhere were cranes, piles of wood and cement, and empty, bulldozed lots. The sound of chirping birds mixed with the din of clanking metal and humming machines. In 2020 alone, 63 homes were marked for demolition in Loppersum.

Gas was discovered in Groningen in 1959. In an interview for the 2017 documentary “Geschenk uit de bodem” (“Gift from the Earth”), retired Exxon engineer Douglass Stewart described visiting the Netherlands at the time and calculating how much gas was in the ground. “I said to myself, that would be almost the biggest gas field in the world.” He recalled thinking, “When I go back to Exxon, I’m going to tell them they’ve got a lot of gas, and you’re going to make a lot of money.” In 1963, Shell and Exxon began drilling and extracting through a joint venture called Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij, or NAM.

Much of the Netherlands is reclaimed land at or below sea level, and its complex network of dikes, dams, and canals functions only with extensive engineering and oversight. When the waterworks fail, the consequences can be disastrous. In 1953, for example, a storm breached dikes in the south of the country, killing 1,800 people. In Groningen, fossil fuel interests acknowledged early on that extraction would cause the earth to sink, prompting a need to adjust the waterworks. But they otherwise downplayed the possible side effects of tinkering with such a delicate landscape, along with the broader impact of drilling for gas, which they touted as a cleaner alternative to coal.

Residents started to feel earthquakes in the 1970s, but the government only installed seismometers in 1986. In the years that followed, the tremors intensified. A local scholar and hobby geologist named Meent van der Sluis warned that the tremors were related to drilling. NAM ridiculed him. “It was denied until it was impossible to deny any more,” said Kodde, of Milieudefensie. Today there is a monument to van der Sluis alongside a road in Groningen: a 26-foot-tall sheet of steel, split by a giant crack.

Technically, NAM was subject to government regulation. In practice, though, the company maintained close ties with regulators. “It’s my impression that the system was designed for them to hold hands forever,” said Tom Postmes, a social psychologist at the University of Groningen who studies the effects of damage from extraction.

“It’s my impression that the system was designed for them to hold hands forever.”

The fossil fuel companies and the Dutch government nonetheless fell out after it became clear that thousands of houses would need to be repaired. NAM — and, for a while, an institute closely aligned with the joint venture — was responsible for assessing damage, an arrangement that led to many dissatisfied residents. In 2017, following public pressure, the Dutch government took control of the process, while NAM continued to cover the costs of repairs. But inequities persisted.

To many, the repair and compensation process feels arbitrary. The homes on one side of a street I walked with Fossen had been rebuilt, yielding tidy duplexes on treeless lots. Across the way, people still lived in vulnerable housing. “How do you explain that on the one side of the street the houses are unsafe and need to be reinforced, and on the other side of the street they are safe and don’t need to be reinforced?” said Ina Blink, the director of Stut-en-Steun, an organization in Loppersum that supports residents affected by extraction. “The result is social disruption.”

Residents end up battling the authorities over whether the cracks in their kitchen were caused by gas extraction or normal aging. “Many people perceive this isn’t just,” said Postmes. “They go and appeal. They get bogged down in procedures. The bureaucracy and the risk of getting into conflict with authorities, that is the most disruptive.” The process can drag on for so long that some choose to avoid it, either opting for one-time compensation payments or foregoing damages altogether. In a 2016 survey of 16,300 Groningen residents, Postmes and colleagues found a significantly elevated risk of stress-related health complaints among people whose houses had been damaged more than once.

Left/top: A new earthquake-resistant school in Loppersum, Netherlands. Right/bottom: A construction site where a house was razed following earthquake damage. Photos: Mara Hvistendahl

As the war in Ukraine drags on, the profit incentive to extract more natural gas is high. During the 1970s energy crisis, both fossil fuel companies and the Dutch government reaped significant profits. Even today, some fossil fuel proponents contend that because there have so far been no fatalities in the Netherlands, extraction is safe. (Activists say that’s a low bar.)

In March, a local newspaper claimed that 60 percent of Groningen residents supported increasing extraction to counter Putin. Activists immediately questioned the survey of 1,000 residents. Had they asked people whose homes were damaged, whose livelihoods were destroyed? “We know many residents who think otherwise,” said Blink. “They might feel solidarity with Ukrainians. But if you chat with them for longer, then it turns out that they actually don’t want more extraction. The past 10 years were not an example of how we should go forward.” A market researcher for the company that conducted the survey, Enigma Research, told The Intercept that the sample was not randomly selected. Instead, Enigma relied on results from two different internet polls: an ongoing panel of Groningen residents and a poll on the newspaper’s website in which people were asked to fill in their postal codes. The researcher, Robert Oosterbaan, said that Enigma had then selected responses by age and gender so that they reflected the overall demographics of the province. Only 34 percent of respondents live in the part of Groningen affected by earthquake damage — the same ratio as in the province as a whole.

Whether more gas will ultimately be extracted in the Netherlands because of the war remains unclear. At the very least, Groningen residents and activists hope that the conflict will provide an opening for a public discussion of the consequences of the country’s reliance on gas. “It’s a silver lining,” said Postmes. “We start asking ourselves the question, ‘Where does all this energy come from?’”

One obvious solution is to decrease the use of fossil fuels altogether, through rationing and other policy changes. “What we now need is a real understanding that this is a crisis, and we need a crisis approach,” said Kodde. “That means dumping everything that’s market-based and voluntary. And it has to be way more total and way more demanding.” On Friday, the Dutch government seemed to move in that direction, launching an energy conservation campaign and announcing that thermostats in government buildings would be adjusted to reduce reliance on Russian gas. The EU recently released a more ambitious plan to increase reliance on renewables, but the EU does not have the power to enforce this at the member state level. For now, the decisions made in Brussels are far from the reality of life in Groningen.

Even after gas extraction in Groningen stops, the earthquakes will continue for years. Decades of drilling and extraction have left fluctuations in pressure beneath the ground. To compensate, gas will continue to flow from areas where the pressure is higher to areas where it is lower. No one knows exactly when the tremors will cease. “There’s hardly any experience in what the effects are over time in highly populated areas,” said Fossen.

The last earthquake to hit Loppersum was on Friday. A Groningen resident tweeted that they and their partner had taken bets on the magnitude, adding: “The winner gets to send an angry email to NAM.” The quake registered at magnitude 2.7, prompting 250 damage claims as of Sunday.

Before we parted ways, Fossen took me through Loppersum’s sleepy downtown. Several storefronts were under construction; most businesses were closed. But stenciled on one window was a torch. Underneath it, in Dutch, were the words “Fight for Groningen.”

The post Ukraine War Sparks Fears of More Gas Extraction in Quake-Prone Region appeared first on The Intercept.

Peter Daszak is the head of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that partners with labs around the world to research emerging diseases. He addressed his organization’s controversial grant documents in a Zoom interview and a series of emails with The Intercept. Daszak said that EcoHealth filed a progress report to NIAID in June 2021 for a grant called “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” The filing of the report is supported by an agency email recently released by NIH to The Intercept following the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Daszak alluded to additional grant documents in a letter to NIH published by the Wall Street Journal last October, but he did not give details at the time.

NIH regulations require grant recipients to file yearly updates detailing experiments and explaining how U.S. government money was spent. EcoHealth’s progress reports have been front and center in calls for greater transparency from the agency, and in public sparring between the agency and Daszak over work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was a sub-awardee on the multimillion-dollar grant. Other NIH communications newly released to The Intercept add to previous evidence of oversight issues at the agency.

“They clearly demonstrate material gaps in reporting surrounding NIH grants involving research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” said Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, after reviewing several of the emails. “There is no obvious explanation for these gaps, which are deeply concerning.” NIH, he added, “has a public duty to be transparent and accountable.”

Grant documents and emails released to The Intercept in recent months have reshaped public understanding of the research done in Wuhan. But they have also contained notable omissions and inconsistencies. As NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have clashed over whether the work constituted so-called gain-of-function research, there is another, perhaps more important battle playing out over paperwork. This one hinges on when the grant’s progress reports were filed, why one was updated after the start of the pandemic, and why NIH has failed to release all available information about the reports to the public.

The latest salvo in that battle comes from members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who last week wrote to NIH acting director Lawrence Tabak asking for detailed explanations about discrepancies in the progress reports, among other alleged issues.

Daszak addressed many of those concerns in the interview. He also provided new details on the apparent paperwork anomalies.

The bat coronavirus grant initially spanned 2014 to 2019. It was renewed in July 2019 for another five-year cycle, then suspended the following year amid scrutiny of the Wuhan lab’s U.S. funding. Daszak said that the report submitted in June 2021 covers Year 6, or the first year of the grant’s renewal. “Even though we didn’t have access to the funding, we still had to file reports on it,” Daszak told The Intercept. “So we then filed the Year 6 and 7 reports. … We have tried in every possible way to be compliant.”

When asked about the Year 6 progress report, a lawyer for NIH said that the agency had looked for additional progress reports and had not found them but that the agency would review reports for possible FOIA release if located. A spokesperson for the agency said, “NIH does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation.” She declined to reply to a list of other questions about the progress reports that are unrelated to the litigation.

“These grants and their oversight have become a significant public interest issue.”

“These grants and their oversight have become a significant public interest issue,” said Filippa Lentzos, co-director of King’s College London’s Centre for Science and Security Studies. “The responsible thing for NIH to do would be to openly and frankly explain what appear to be substantial deviations from standard reviewing processes.”

Last March, members of Congress asked Francis Collins, then NIH director, for all progress reports for recent awards involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology. “If there are additional progress reports that have not been disclosed, that requires an explanation,” said Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University.

FOIA Clues

The Intercept asked about the report after obtaining an automated notification email sent to an NIAID staffer describing the submission of an “RPPR,” or progress report, on June 9, 2021. In the email, which was released in Freedom of Information Act litigation, the grant number and principal investigator’s name are redacted. But The Intercept received the email after requesting from NIH all communications regarding two specific grants, and the program officer and grants management specialist named in the email match those on the bat coronavirus grant. (The second grant covered in the FOIA release was an NIAID grant to EcoHealth funding viral surveillance in Southeast Asia.) Daszak confirmed that the redacted information describes the bat coronavirus grant.

The Intercept has published hundreds of pages of grant documents that shed light on the EcoHealth grant. While NIH officials are correct that none of the experiments outlined in those documents could have directly led to SARS-CoV-2, the risky nature of some of the work has alarmed experts and raised questions about whether NIH and EcoHealth have been forthcoming about the research.

The initial release contained two apparent anomalies. The Year 4 progress report released by NIH was dated September 2020, over two years late. The report for Year 5 was missing entirely. Along with the first half of Year 6, those two years cover the period leading up to the pandemic. The agency subsequently released to The Intercept a second version of the Year 4 progress report that was dated April 2018, along with a Year 5 report dated August 2021, nearly two years after it was due.

Daszak told The Intercept that EcoHealth filed the Year 4 report on time in 2018, as indicated by the second version of the document, and that the late submission date was a mistake. He said that in September 2020, while working on another EcoHealth report in eRA Commons, NIH’s grant portal, EcoHealth’s chief of staff Aleksei Chmura noticed an error message attached to the human subjects section of the Year 4 report — a section unrelated to the controversial experiments — and called the portal’s help desk to try to fix it. Chmura “had been in the ERA commons system repeatedly during summer/fall 2020,” Daszak noted, and did not have notes on what grant he had been working on. During the call with the help desk, an NIH staffer later told EcoHealth, an agent opened the Year 4 report to check it, automatically resetting the submission date to the day’s date.

“This is a good example of how the very tedious and complicated process of doing science via federally funded grants can be easily misconstrued by people.”

Daszak sent The Intercept a chain of emails that partially supported this account, adding, “you should know that we made NO changes to our Yr 4 report after it was submitted and accepted by the system in 2018. … I think this is a good example of how the very tedious and complicated process of doing science via federally funded grants can be easily misconstrued by people who approach the COVID origins issue, and our work, with a mindset that we were somehow engaged in a cover-up or lack of transparency.”

The emails show that in October 2021, one day after The Intercept published the earlier Year 4 report, Chmura wrote NIH’s lead grants management analyst to note that the submission date on the Year 4 report in eRA Commons appeared as September 2020. He later followed up to explain that the routing history for the grant indicated the earlier submission date — a fact that EcoHealth also established in a proof video the organization sent to Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban at the time — but that the September 2020 date appeared on the downloadable document. In a reply in late December, the analyst described Chmura’s 2020 eRA Commons help desk call and said NIH had restored the 2018 submission date in the system. The analyst also said the agency had kept a copy of the original report in its files.

An email exchange, provided by EcoHealth Alliance, between EcoHealth’s chief of staff and an administrator at NIH discussing the existence of two versions of a grant progress report.

NIH has never publicly explained the reason for the two different versions of the Year 4 reports nor said how it produced the document with the earlier date.

Another question surrounding the reports has been why EcoHealth submitted the Year 5 document two years late. While scientists sometimes send in project documents after their due date, sources described the extremely late submission as unusual, especially for a grant that has come under intense scrutiny.

Daszak has repeatedly said that EcoHealth was unable to submit the Year 5 report on time because of a technical glitch. “We first uploaded this report on time, in July 2019,” he wrote in the letter to NIH published by the Wall Street Journal. “However, by the time we tried to officially submit, our R01 grant had been renewed (July 24th 2019) and the system locked us out from submitting a normal annual final Year 5 report at that point.”

In their letter last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee members questioned that account. They noted that emails obtained by the animal rights group White Coat Waste through a FOIA request show that on July 24, 2019 — the date that Daszak implied the group was locked out — Chmura wrote to an NIAID grants management specialist acknowledging the renewal of the grant and noting that EcoHealth was able to access the system. “I see that now we may commence our Year 5 annual report in eRA Common’s RPPR,” Chmura wrote. “Peter just initiated our Year 5 report.”

Daszak maintained to The Intercept that the FOIA email supported his account of what happened. “The emails you cite from the White Coat Waste report do not challenge our explanation of what happened with respect to filing our Year 5 report, but provide some of the background on what happened,” he wrote in an email.

He sent The Intercept a screenshot from EcoHealth’s eRA Commons account in showing that the Year 5 report was initiated on July 24, 2019. To support his claim that EcoHealth had sought assistance with filing the report, he also sent additional email exchanges, including one between Chmura and the same grants management specialist from July 30, six days later. The exchanges do not mention technical problems, however. Instead, Chmura asks when the report is due. Daszak subsequently said all of the communication with NIH about the technical difficulties happened by phone.

According to Daszak, the agency never responded to several of EcoHealth’s questions. “The fact that we got the renewal funding and the fact that they never responded to our request said to us, ‘Well, there’s no problem with this. You should just carry on and do a Year 1 report on the next grant,'” he said. “And that’s what we did. Unfortunately, [the grant] got terminated, and then there were all these attacks and inquiries.”

“The relevant data had already been included in our renewal application,” he wrote in an email to The Intercept. He noted that EcoHealth had not previously had funding renewed for an NIH research project grant. As a result, he wrote, “It was unclear to us whether you have to file a final report when a grant is renewed.”

Gaps and Contradictions

Emails newly obtained by The Intercept add to the mystery of why NIH overlooked the Year 5 report for two years. During the period when the document was overdue, the FBI was conducting an inquiry that involved EcoHealth Alliance, and NIH was carrying out an internal investigation that hinged in part on the progress reports. Officials at the agency’s investigative arm exchanged a number of letters and emails with Daszak about his group’s collaboration with the Wuhan Institute. Several of these discuss progress reports, but until July 2021, none of the communications obtained by The Intercept so far note that one was in fact missing.

When NIH terminated EcoHealth’s grant in April 2020 at the request of President Donald Trump, for example, NIH deputy director for extramural research Michael Lauer requested detailed information about EcoHealth’s work in China. Daszak responded, “Concerning the request for information on all of the sites linked to this award in China, you should be aware that these are documented in our progress reports over the course of the grant.”

Twenty minutes later, Lauer responded, “We note that … all foreign sites for the Type 1 and Type 2 awards have been documented in the progress reports submitted to NIH.” At that point, the Year 5 report was more than six months overdue.

When asked why the late report didn’t come up in this exchange, Daszak wrote in an email, “That’s a question for NIH, not EcoHealth Alliance.” He noted that Lauer’s office is typically uninvolved in the annual report process, and that it is the job of the NIAID program office to follow up on paperwork issues.

NIAID would have had ample notice of overdue documents. The newly obtained emails show that for several months, at least, an NIAID staffer who handled paperwork for the grant was receiving automated notifications every Monday listing outstanding progress reports. “Below is a listing of Type 5 progress reports assigned to you and not yet completed,” the emails read, referring to reports for grants that have already been funded. “Please complete these reviews as soon as possible.” Most grantees filed their reports on time, the messages show. But in each weekly email, NIH redacted one or two grant numbers, along with their submission status.

As with the email indicating the submission of the Year 6 progress report, the messages were provided in response to The Intercept’s lawsuit for records from two EcoHealth Alliance grants, suggesting that at least some of the redacted information concerns EcoHealth’s progress reports.

“In any large organization, there can be errors,” said Ebright, the Rutgers molecular biologist, who has been a vocal critic of both NIH and EcoHealth. “Papers fall through the cracks. Deadlines are missed. But the number of violations in this case and the gravity of the violations in this case are so extreme that there does not appear to have been standard handling of grants.”

A July 2021 letter to EcoHealth Alliance from NIH official Michael Lauer requesting all progress reports within 30 days.

On July 23, 2021, other newly obtained emails show, Lauer demanded the Year 5 progress report within 30 days. EcoHealth complied, though Daszak told The Intercept that his group again encountered technical problems. “Even then, there was significant back-and-forth with the NIH Program Office to make the electronic system work as expected, so that we could submit the report,” he wrote in an email.

The document that EcoHealth finally submitted contains significant errors, as noted in the House Energy and Commerce Committee letter last week. In the report, Figure 8 comes directly after Figure 4, Figure 5 follows Figure 10, and Figure 7 follows Figure 13. The text says that one figure shows evolutionary transitions among a type of coronavirus, but the actual figure, which appears six pages later, in fact shows a completely unrelated measurement on MERS viruses.

“The minor inconsistencies in the figure numbers in our report are simple editing errors as we changed the order of different sections to fit the report’s narrative to the specific aims,” Daszak wrote in an email.

Cutting and pasting is common with such documents; many scientists loathe grant paperwork and reuse passages from draft or published papers in progress reports. Simon Wain-Hobson, a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, noted that there is a “pervasive attitude that such reports will not be read.” To test that assumption, he once pulled a sentence in German off the internet and inserted it into a French lab report to see if it would be noticed; no one caught it. Nonetheless, he added, the anomalies in the EcoHealth Year 5 report are exceptional. “Sloppiness is one thing, but this is beyond the pale,” he said. “The disconnect is amazing.”

Last fall and again in January, NIH’s Lauer requested from EcoHealth detailed lab notebook entries for the research documented in the organization’s Year 4 and Year 5 reports. (Daszak said that EcoHealth has replied to Lauer’s letter and passed on the request for lab notebook entries to the Wuhan lab.) But it is unclear whether the agency has asked for the errors in the Year 5 report to be corrected.

“They may have been human error but could be deliberate withholding of information.”

Experts are now calling on NIH to release the missing Year 6 report — and to be transparent about what happened with the other reports. “The information in these progress reports would be very much in the public interest,” said Gostin, of Georgetown University. “What we still do not know is why those gaps exist. They may have been human error but could be deliberate withholding of information. NIH should make clear the reasons for the gaps.”

Years before the coronavirus wreaked havoc on the world, NIH was caught up in controversy over risky experiments that made flu viruses more transmissible in humans. The pandemic has revived a debate over whether the agency should be regulating itself with such research. “By only communicating through litigation requests, it comes across as though they’re covering something up,” said Lentzos, of King’s College London. “And that doesn’t give anyone confidence that these high-risk projects have been adequately regulated.”

Documents published with this article:

The post Emails Point to Oversight Problems With NIH Bat Coronavirus Grant appeared first on The Intercept.

Across the federal government, agencies that don’t use Cellebrite technology are increasingly the exception, not the rule. Federal purchasing records and Cellebrite securities documents reviewed by The Intercept show that all but one of the 15 U.S. Cabinet departments, along with several other federal agencies, have acquired Cellebrite products in recent years. The list includes many that would seem far removed from intelligence collection or law enforcement, like the departments of Agriculture, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Housing and Urban Development; the Social Security Administration; the U.S. Agency for International Development; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Cellebrite itself boasted about its penetration of the executive branch ahead of becoming a publicly traded company in August. In a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said that it had over 2,800 government customers in North America. To secure that reach, The Intercept has found, the company has partnered with U.S. law enforcement associations and hired police officers, prosecutors, and Secret Service agents to train people in its technology. Cellebrite has also marketed its technology to law firms and multinational corporations for investigating employees. In the SEC filing, it claimed that its clients included six out of the world’s 10 largest pharmaceutical companies and six of the 10 largest oil refiners.

Civil liberties advocates said the spread of Cellebrite’s technology represents a threat to privacy and due process and called for greater oversight. “There are few guidelines on how departments can use our data once they get it,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “We can’t allow every federal department to turn into its own spy agency.”

But Cellebrite’s extensive work with U.S. authorities may be providing it with something even more important to the company than money: political cover. Like NSO Group, whose formidable phone malware recently made headlines, Cellebrite is based in Israel. While NSO’s Pegasus malware is far more powerful than Cellebrite’s technology, providing near-effortless remote infection of devices, both companies have stirred controversy with their sales to authoritarian governments around the world. Cellebrite’s technology is cheaper and has been used in China to surveil people at the Tibetan border, in Bahrain to persecute a tortured political dissident, and in Myanmar to pry into the cellphones of two Reuters journalists. (Under pressure, the company has pledged to stop selling in China and Myanmar, though enforcement is spotty.)

But unlike NSO and the lesser-known Israeli spyware company Candiru, which were added to a Commerce Department trade blacklist in November, Cellebrite has yet to face calls for sanctions. There are signs that people at the company are worried: The day before the NSO listing, D.C. lobbying firm Alpine Group registered with the U.S. Senate to lobby on behalf of Cellebrite. The contract was Cellebrite’s first engagement with outside lobbyists since 2019.

Cellebrite and Alpine Group declined to comment on the lobbying contract. But according to Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel for Access Now, “Cellebrite tries hard to distinguish themselves from NSO by claiming that they are not a spyware company that gets involved in foreign espionage.” While she did not know for certain the reason behind Cellebrite hiring Alpine Group, she said, “They are investing a lot of resources into aggressively defending their reputation, especially in the West.”

“Cellebrite is now trying to put the flashlight more on how much they are connected to the American government,” said Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack, who has repeatedly exposed abuses perpetrated with Cellebrite technology. “But I believe that they are very worried. They are working in many countries that the Americans have problems with. Because of the story of NSO Group, they are afraid that things could become difficult for them.”

So far, however, Cellebrite’s growth seems to be continuing unimpeded, pushing deeper and deeper into police, corporate, and bureaucratic surveillance.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, along with most of the U.S. departments and agencies contacted by The Intercept, did not comment for this article. A spokesperson with the strategic communications firm Reevemark, which represents Cellebrite, pointed The Intercept to the “Ethics and Integrity” page on Cellebrite’s website but otherwise declined to comment.

The Rise of Cellebrite

Cellebrite’s journey into the citadels of global power began in the 1990s, when it was started as a relatively benign consumer technology outfit. Its first product was a tool to migrate contacts from one cellphone to another. It eventually moved into coercive forms of data transfers, allowing customers to bypass phone passwords and vacuum data out of devices.

As smartphones came to contain more and more information about people’s daily lives, business boomed among police and militaries around the world. Cellebrite cashed out in 2007, selling to the Japanese conglomerate Sun Corp., although many of the researchers who collect cellphone vulnerabilities remain based at its campus in Petah Tikva, Israel.

In 2016, the company got a boost from speculation that the FBI had used a Cellebrite product to unlock the phone of one of the perpetrators of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. The rumors turned out to be false, but Cellebrite’s government work in the United States continued to grow. It gained clients within the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Air Force, as well as among local police departments, which have used its technology on people accused of minor crimes like graffiti, shoplifting, and being drunk in public.

“We talk about the sanctity of the home, but there’s so much more on your phone … than probably anything in your house.”

The company has a 4,000-square-foot showroom that it calls an “envisioning center” in Tysons Corner, Virginia, a stone’s throw from the nation’s capital. Today its chief marketing officer, Mark Gambill, is based in the area, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Cellebrite’s flagship offering is the Universal Forensic Extraction Device, or UFED, a phone-hacking kit, but it also offers software that can perform similar feats through a desktop computer as well as products to access data stored in the cloud.

This type of work has been lucrative. According to Cellebrite’s recent SEC filing, the company’s average government customer spends $415,000 on data collection devices and services, with additional millions if they add on analytics software.

The cost of that business, Cellebrite’s critics say, is borne by citizens, and not just in the form of tax dollars. “We talk about the sanctity of the home, but there’s so much more on your phone that gives a deeper and more intimate view than probably anything in your house,” said Jerome Greco, a public defender for the Legal Aid Society. Greco remembers police turning to a Cellebrite UFED-type device following a bar fight between strangers. “What could be on the person’s phone, when they didn’t know each other?” he said.

The proliferation of Cellebrite’s technology within the federal government is “deeply alarming,” said Cahn. While a 2014 Supreme Court ruling set new legal hurdles for searches of cellphones, citing the intimate information the devices now contain, this has “meant very little on the ground.”

“Very, very few people understand the power of the tools that Cellebrite offers.”

“Not only is there no justification for agencies like U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to use this sort of invasive technology, it’s deeply alarming to see agencies use these devices in more and more low-level cases,” he added. Federal wildlife investigators aren’t the only ones using Cellebrite tools in the great outdoors: Wildlife officers in Missouri and Michigan, for example, use such devices, and Cellebrite has heavily marketed its hardware and software for combating animal trafficking. Upturn, a nonprofit focused on justice and equity, last year published a report documenting the purchase of mobile device forensic tools, including Cellebrite technology, by over 2,000 smaller agencies. “Very, very few people understand the power of the tools that Cellebrite offers,” said Upturn’s Logan Koepke.

“Cellebrite should only be used by competent law enforcement agencies with proper oversight and screening, and only for more serious crimes,” said Krapiva. “It should be up for public discussion as to whether we as a society accept that such invasive tools are being used by educational institutions, private firms, and government agencies.” Other experts interviewed by The Intercept said they believed that cellphone crackers should never be used, even when investigating serious crimes.

Cellebrite’s federal customers provide little transparency as to how they’re using the powerful technology. Of the agencies that did respond to The Intercept’s requests for comments, few offered any concrete information about their use of the tools or answered questions about the implications of that usage. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, would not comment on specific technologies, according to a spokesperson, who said only that the department uses a “wide variety of tools” to “leverage technology” to advance its mission.

The Department of Education at least allowed through a spokesperson that it uses Cellebrite tools for “investigative work” by its inspector general and “to determine if a government-issued iPhone has been compromised and to what extent.” The Department of Energy, whose responsibilities touch on nuclear weapons and federal research labs like Los Alamos, said that it uses Cellebrite products in investigations by its Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and inspector general and to examine government-owned handsets “that have exhibited or been reported to exhibit strange or malicious behavior; or devices that were taken on foreign travel where there is an opportunity for compromise or tampering by a foreign adversary.”

A Social Security Administration spokesperson told The Intercept that Cellebrite tech is used in its office solely to investigate allegations of fraud, including stolen Social Security numbers, insurance fraud, and scams related to pandemic-related relief such as Paycheck Protection Program loans and unemployment benefits. The spokesperson declined to discuss specific instances.

After Hours, Lining the Pockets of Law Enforcement

Further complicating the ethics of government Cellebrite use is the fact that, according to LinkedIn, Cellebrite has employed more than two dozen U.S. government employees from across the country as contract instructors or forensic examiners. The contract employees have apparently included police detectives, a Secret Service officer, and people who claim to work for the Defense Department and defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

Other contractors say they work for the Florida attorney general’s office and the United States Postal Service Office of the Inspector General.

“Cops teaching cops is not anything new,” said Greco, the public defender. “But I would be concerned that there is a financial incentive to choose Cellebrite’s tools over others.”

“Cops teaching cops is not anything new. But I would be concerned that there is a financial incentive to choose Cellebrite’s tools over others.”

“Even if it’s an appearance of impropriety, it’s concerning,” said Krapiva.

Cellebrite’s apparent payments to police officers and prosecutors may also violate some police departments’ policies on moonlighting. The Florida attorney general’s office did not respond to questions about its policy on taking on side work. A Postal Service spokesperson approached with the same questions said that The Intercept would need to submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the Office of the Inspector General. The policy, which was eventually provided following a request, requires agents with the office to seek formal approval of outside employment in writing so that the position can be reviewed for potential conflicts of interest. It is not clear whether that happened in this case.

In another instance of government collaboration, Cellebrite has also brokered a partnership with an influential attorneys general’s association, with the goal of “creating legal policy and procedures” that allow for the use of a Cellebrite cloud tool.

Cellebrite may need all the U.S. government work it can get. Its stock prices have taken a dip. Recent exits from authoritarian countries have made its U.S. contracts even more critical to staying afloat. In December, facing recruitment difficulties in Israel following negative press coverage, the company launched a public relations campaign comparing its employees to superheroes.

Mack, the human rights lawyer, said the campaign had an air of desperation to it. “They have already been marked because they are working in some very bad places,” he said. “And things are going to keep being exposed.”

The post Use of Controversial Phone-Cracking Tool Is Spreading Across Federal Government appeared first on The Intercept.

The new information gives an unprecedented window into the high-profile tussle between EcoHealth Alliance and the NIH, and underscores the agency’s tenuous grasp of the biosafety protocols in place in its research projects, even with a project that has since come under scrutiny for a possible link to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“There doesn’t seem to be transparent and accessible record-keeping of incident reporting,” said Filippa Lentzos, co-director of the Centre for Science and Security Studies at King’s College London, after viewing some of the emails. “That is very worrying and underscores the need for an overhaul of biosafety oversight in the United States.”

The correspondence contains letters going back to April 2020, when Trump administration officials were blaming the Wuhan Institute of Virology, without sufficient evidence, for causing the pandemic. On April 17, President Donald Trump was asked in a press conference about the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance, under which the Chinese lab was a partner. He responded, “We will end that grant very quickly.” Two days later, Michael Lauer, NIH deputy director for extramural research, informed Daszak that the agency was suspending grant funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and instructed his group to cease providing grant money to the institute. On April 24, according to a letter included in the new communications, Lauer followed up with the news that the NIH was terminating the entire grant because it did not “align with the program goals and agency priorities.” He told EcoHealth Alliance officials that nearly $370,000 needed to be remitted back to the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with their access to the remaining grant funds restricted “effective immediately.” (Politico reported the existence of the letter that same month, and Science later published an excerpt of it.)

The confrontation earned Daszak sympathy in the press and from other scientists. NIH officials, meanwhile, refuted the possibility of a lab origin, at least in public. It would later be revealed, however, that in February 2020 NIAID Director Anthony Fauci and then-NIH Director Francis Collins had privately consulted with prominent scientists who had seriously considered the possibility of a lab origin for the pandemic, and that two months later some leading researchers still believed a lab accident was possible. “Wondering if there is something the NIH can do to help put down this very destructive conspiracy,” Collins wrote in an email to Fauci in late April, in reference to a Fox News segment mentioning the lab-origin hypothesis. While a handful of biosafety experts had openly called for scrutinizing the NIH’s funding of EcoHealth Alliance, their entreaties were largely drowned out by political wrangling.

Trump officials had reportedly instructed U.S. intelligence agencies to search for evidence linking the Wuhan lab to the pandemic. Trump’s interest appeared to be scapegoating China, and officials in his administration homed in on sketchy evidence from Wuhan. But the emails obtained by The Intercept indicate that the FBI looked where biosafety experts had suggested they should: at EcoHealth Alliance’s NIH grant, though it’s unclear what prompted the FBI’s request for information. On May 22, 2020, Ashley Sanders, an officer with the NIH’s Office of Management Assessment, emailed FBI agent David Miller under the subject line “FW: Grant Questions – FBI Inquiry – 1-R01AI110964-01 – 2-R01AI110964-06”: the numbers the NIH had assigned to the grant and its renewal.

The correspondence suggests that NIH administrators provided Miller with detailed information about the grant. “In preparation for our call on Tuesday, Erik (cc’d) has provided responses to your initial questions below,” Sanders wrote, referring to Erik Stemmy, a program officer for the grant. The several pages of text that follow are redacted, except for the title of an attachment that includes the grant number and “SF424.” The SF 424 is a detailed NIH form that grant applicants must submit.

Last October, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report assessing the possible origins of the pandemic. In the document, which followed a 90-day review by the spy agencies ordered by President Joe Biden, one agency assessed with moderate confidence that the pandemic had a lab origin, “probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” While the DNI report did not name the agency, the New York Times reported at the time that it was the FBI. (Four other intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council concluded with low confidence that the pandemic had a natural origin.)

Experts have puzzled over whether the spy agencies gained access to EcoHealth Alliance’s grant documents. The DNI’s detailed report did not list grant documents or communications as a source of information, but the email about the inquiry now suggests that the FBI had previously obtained at least some internal information about the EcoHealth Alliance grant. The FBI declined to confirm the existence of the inquiry or otherwise comment.

Separately, in December 2020, the NIH cited a law enforcement exemption when denying a public records request from The Intercept for the EcoHealth Alliance grant documents. In a July 2021 hearing, a federal litigator explained the agency’s rationale: “At the time that they asserted the exemption, they were told and were under the impression there were ongoing investigations, law enforcement investigations, into what plaintiffs are alleging is a lab-leak hypothesis, what caused COVID,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander J. Hogan, referring to the NIH’s 2020 denial of The Intercept’s FOIA request. “And because of the implication of those investigations, they withheld these documents in full.”

The NIH released the bat coronavirus grant proposal to The Intercept in September 2021.

In a previously unpublished email sent in April 2021, Daszak told an NIH administrator that following a trip to China as part of the World Health Organization investigation, he had briefed the FBI and other intelligence agencies, as well as the National Security Council.

“Fishing for Material”

The newly released emails detail how EcoHealth Alliance fought back against the NIH’s termination of its grant. On May 22, 2020, lawyer Andrew Krinsky of the New York firm Tarter Krinsky & Drogin wrote to Lauer on behalf of EcoHealth Alliance. The lawyer said that NIAID had ranked the grant as “extremely high priority” when it was considered for renewal in mid-2019 and that EcoHealth Alliance had already agreed not to pass any more funding on to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

While the NIH had said that “the decision not to award a grant, or to award a grant at a particular funding level, is at the discretion of the agency” and cited a clause that allowed it to terminate grants at will, Krinsky argued that the NIH didn’t have the legal right to cut off the funding and that according to the NIH’s own rules, there was “no rational basis to terminate” the grant.

The NIH, EcoHealth Alliance, and Tarter Krinsky & Drogin did not immediately respond to requests to comment.

In a July 2020 letter previously published by Vanity Fair, Lauer informed Daszak that the grant could be reinstated, but only if EcoHealth Alliance could meet seven conditions. Those included providing a sample of “the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus that WIV used to determine the viral sequence” and explaining apparently unusual activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including roadblocks and diminished cellphone traffic, as well as the deletion of the online profile of a staffer at the lab named Huang Yanling.

The next month, the newly released emails reveal, the Tarter Krinsky & Drogin lawyers sent Lauer a detailed, seven-page rebuttal, demanding that the NIH reinstate the grant and immediately release the grant funds. The rebuttal suggested that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were being unfairly scrutinized. Daszak echoed that idea in an interview with Nature that same month in which he called the NIH’s conditions “heinous.” 

In October 2020, Lauer responded, arguing that the agency was within its rights to cut off the grant. “EcoHealth’s responses have not satisfied the NIH’s concerns that EcoHealth had failed to adequately monitor the compliance of its subrecipient, and that the subrecipient, WIV, had failed to comply with safety requirements,” Lauer wrote. Still, he offered the nonprofit one last chance to respond to its seven conditions — and added three more requests about the research in Wuhan. Among the new requests, which have not been previously reported, were descriptions of EcoHealth Alliance’s efforts to monitor risk at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and copies of all WIV biosafety reports from June 2014 through May 2019.

Six months later, in April 2021, Daszak wrote a lengthy letter to Lauer — this time signed by him and not his lawyers — addressing the 10 conditions. He offered to meet with Lauer “without legal counsel in a scientist-to-scientist conversation,” adding, “I look forward to your reply and hope that these will allow NIH to lift the suspension on funding so that we can continue our work to help protect our nation, indeed the global population, against future coronavirus pandemics.”

Yet, in a confiding email he sent to NIH officials and program officers later in April, he struck a less conciliatory tone. “I believe he’s fishing for material to support his earlier insinuation that EHA has done a poor job of monitoring biosafety,” Daszak wrote about Lauer in the email. Daszak interpreted the NIH official’s oversight efforts as a possible attempt to “provide cover so that he can say that we weren’t in compliance” and asked the NIH staffers to intervene.

Among the recipients of the email was Erik Stemmy, the program officer on the EcoHealth Alliance grant. The Intercept previously reported that Stemmy was one of two agency employees who had allowed Daszak to draft a rule governing his group’s research. The recipient list also included several NIH section heads, including Emily Linde, the director of the NIH’s grant management program; Matthew Fenton, director of the agency’s division of extramural activities; and Emily Erbelding, director of the division of microbiology and infectious diseases.

“Any nudging you could give to Dr. Lauer would be welcome,” Daszak wrote to the group. He also nodded at recent developments. In the preceding weeks, dozens of scientists had signed open letters calling for a robust investigation of the origin of the pandemic. “I realize that the politics are not great right now, but this is science, not politics, and we have a job to do in trying to identify the next COVID-like disease, which is surely out there and probably already spilling over somewhere in S. China.”

As NIH-funded research in Wuhan was thrust into the spotlight in 2020, agency communications added to the sense that staffers had a flimsy grasp of the biosafety of both that project and others. In August 2020, a ProPublica article about a biosecurity lapse at a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill lab sparked a flurry of emails at NIAID. Two days after the article was published, the communications show, staff scrambled to find information about the incident, in which a researcher was bitten by a mouse infected with a coronavirus and did not isolate afterward.

The NIAID employees appear to have had no record of it. “Was this February 2016 incident reported to NIAID and, if so, for which grant was this incident report filed?” a staffer in the NIH’s Office of Extramural Research and Policy Operations wrote to Stemmy, the NIH program officer, on August 19. She said her office had been asked to determine whether researchers at UNC followed proper biosafety procedures but “was unable to locate incident report memos in the grants folders” for five grants. The office had checked folders for two grants for research on coronaviruses at UNC, as well as the folder for the grant funding EcoHealth Alliance’s bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, possibly because the nonprofit worked closely with UNC. (UNC was a partner on the bat coronavirus grant, as well as on a new grant that NIH awarded to EcoHealth Alliance in August 2020.)

According to ProPublica, federal lab safety officials at the NIH had confirmed that the UNC incident involved types of “SARS-associated coronavirus” and the university had said in a statement that it had informed the proper oversight agencies. But several staffers looked for and were unable to find records of the risky episode. In one email, an administrator said that the incident had been reported to another division at the NIH but not to NIAID. He added that the program officer for the grant only knew about a more recent safety breach because a scientist had told him.

“That just seems to indicate that they do not have their house in order,” said Lentzos, the biosecurity researcher. “It underscores that as a funder, NIH is not the independent oversight body that you would want for this kind of research.”

“Great Personal Burden”

In his April 2021 letter to Lauer, Daszak said that he had traveled to China with a World Health Organization team in part to satisfy the NIH’s demands for more information. “I have made extensive efforts to satisfy NIH’s broad concerns,” Daszak wrote. “This includes serving as an expert on the WHO-China joint Mission on the Animal Origins of COVID-19, which involved 1 month on the ground in China (including 2 weeks locked in quarantine), at great personal burden and risk to me, to our organization, and to my family.”

While admitting that EcoHealth Alliance would not be able to meet some of the agency’s conditions, Daszak nevertheless appeared hopeful that the NIH might reassess its decision to terminate the funding. He again pushed back against some of the agency’s requests. Specifically, Daszak said that the questions about roadblocks near the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the deletion of Huang’s online presence — both of which had been focal points of online speculation — could be easily explained without any malfeasance.

“While many conspiracy theorists have suggested that the lack of a web presence of this person suggests some nefarious activity, there are dozens of unremarkable and routine reasons why a person may be removed from a web listing of employees or students,” he wrote of Huang. Similarly, Daszak noted, roadblocks and diminished cellphone traffic could be due to unremarkable road repair or other ordinary occurrences.

Daszak also had a different read on State Department cables from January 2018 that Lauer had asked about in his letter. The cables detailed a shortage of trained technicians for the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s BSL-4 laboratory, the first lab in China certified to deal with the most dangerous pathogens.

While in April 2020, Washington Post opinion columnist Josh Rogin had interpreted excerpts of the cables as evidence of safety and management weaknesses in the lab, Daszak disagreed. Indeed the full cables, which were released in July 2020, give a more complex picture, favorably describing research at the lab to which Daszak had contributed. “These do not in fact provide evidence of safety concerns at the laboratory,” he wrote to Lauer. “Neither do they convincingly imply safety issues.”

Lauer had also asked EcoHealth Alliance to arrange for an outside inspection of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak argued that cutting off the grant had made it virtually unthinkable that the Wuhan lab would assist with such requests. “This termination of a funded relationship with the institute makes it extraordinarily difficult and more likely impossible to provide the information requested,” Daszak wrote to Lauer. International politics made the situation worse, as he noted in an explanation of why EcoHealth Alliance was unable to procure a sample of the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had used to determine its viral sequence.

“During the last 16 months, there has been a series of vitriolic attacks from the US Government accusing China of bioengineering and releasing SARS-CoV-2 or of otherwise allowing COVID to become pandemic,” he wrote to Lauer. “Given these attacks, and WIV’s status as a government entity, it seems to us incredulous that any request, particularly without scientific rationale, from a US non-profit to a Chinese Government laboratory for an active sample of a pathogenic human virus would likely be successful.”

Daszak also cited strained international relations when explaining why he couldn’t produce copies of the WIV biosafety reports, which might have provided insight into what precautions the lab had taken in its work on bat coronaviruses and whether any breaches of protocol had occurred.

“Some of [NIH’s] demands were a little impractical,” said Alina Chan, co-author of the book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” “How would EcoHealth Alliance be able to obtain information about the missing staffer?” But Daszak should have been able to provide lab safety records, which are “much more significant,” she said.

To Lauer, Daszak noted that the media attention and resultant public curiosity about the work EcoHealth Alliance conducted in Wuhan had cost him personally. “This type of harassment has accelerated to the point that personal security guards are now stationed at my home address, where I have also had to install invasive equipment and set up procedures to protect my family against expected violent attacks,” Daszak wrote. “Additionally, I now meet regularly with FBI agents and others at my home to monitor these threats.” As he did in communications The Intercept published in December, Daszak referred to a letter containing white powder that he had received at his home. Local news media reported the incident at the time.

Denying Document Requests

Meanwhile, EcoHealth Alliance was also pushing on another front. In January 2021, Matthew Torsiello, one of its lawyers, emailed Lauren Bartok, an information specialist in the NIH’s Freedom of Information Act Office, to request that a FOIA request for EcoHealth Alliance’s grant documents be denied. Torsiello asked that the request, which was made by a member of the public through the transparency organization MuckRock, be denied because the grant termination was under appeal and because “a law enforcement investigation concerning WIV remains ongoing.” Torsiello explained that his law firm had previously asked for the NIH to deny a request for EcoHealth Alliance grant documents made in 2020, also by a member of the public.

The lawyer’s email went on to make a tenuous argument. “As demonstrated by the recent attack on the US Capital [sic] fueled by disinformation and conspiracy theories, the need to protect the privacy of EcoHealth Alliance’s employees and affiliates is more important than ever.” The email did not offer further explanation, but Daszak had previously argued to the press and in the pages of the medical journal The Lancet that the notion that the pandemic could have a lab origin was a conspiracy theory.

The day after Torsiello sent his email, another NIH FOIA officer wrote an email to an undisclosed recipient rejecting the lawyer’s arguments for withholding the records. The officer noted that “there are no pending investigations” into the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Nine months later, the NIH FOIA office closed the public records request, pointing the requester to documents that the NIH had released online.

While EcoHealth Alliance’s intervention in the FOIA request is not unusual, agencies are required by law to independently determine whether records should be disclosed, said Gunita Singh, an attorney for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “Agencies subject to FOIA are obligated to serve the public’s interest in learning about government functions,” she wrote in an email. “They cannot operate at the behest of private parties.”

The post FBI Sought Documents Related to U.S.-Funded Coronavirus Research in China appeared first on The Intercept.

For women living a second-class existence, activists sentenced to years in prison because of their Facebook posts, and LGBTQ+ people jailed after kissing in public, the UAE is of course not a happy place, and the branding effort might have flopped if not for the efforts of one man: renowned Columbia University economist and United Nations power broker Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs helped the UAE take its message to the world. He supercharged the happiness drive, giving speech after speech linking it to pressing global issues. He called Emirati leaders “exemplary” and “wise.” At one point, he even sat on a Dubai stage with two other white male economists and CNN anchor Richard Quest and helped lead a crowd of Emiratis and expats in a round of “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands.”

A nonprofit led by Sachs, the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, known as SDSN, has received at least $3 million from the UAE. The outlay has been used to fund work on the World Happiness Report, an annual ranking of countries’ quality of life, and on the Global Happiness Policy Report, a collection of cheery policy recommendations that accompanies the rankings. The UAE government has separately donated $200,000 to Columbia University for happiness research, according to Sachs, who provided The Intercept with the Columbia and SDSN donation figures in response to questions about their finances. Spending records from the Earth Institute, a research institute at Columbia formerly headed by Sachs, confirm that it has received UAE funding, but a spokesperson for the university declined to say how much.

The happiness project might be easy to dismiss if it didn’t confer legitimacy on a repressive government. Sachs has presented on SDSN’s happiness index everywhere from Google to “Morning Joe,” and within the U.N., where he has advised three successive secretary-generals, he has tethered the happiness work to official sustainability targets. A federation of seven states where political parties are banned, the UAE often finishes ahead of some European countries in the index — results that are touted on the UAE government’s website and in the local press.

“The second you start taking money from authoritarian states to illustrate happiness indexes, dystopian doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

“It’s whitewashing,” scholar Matthew Hedges said of Sachs’s work. In 2018, while conducting research for a dissertation on the UAE’s security strategy, Hedges was detained by Emirati police. In his telling, he spent seven months in a windowless room, sedated with a cocktail of drugs, hearing screams through the walls. His captors repeatedly interrogated him, at one point for 15 hours on end. After being forced to sign a confession saying that he worked for MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service, Hedges was convicted without a lawyer present and sentenced to life in prison; he was released only after the U.K. applied diplomatic pressure. “The second you start taking money from authoritarian states to illustrate happiness indexes, dystopian doesn’t even begin to describe it,” said Hedges, who is now a postgraduate scholar at the University of Exeter. “It’s more like a nightmare.”

A frequent television commentator and prolific writer who once traveled sub-Saharan Africa with Bono to advocate for poor people, Sachs is one of the world’s most famous economists. After a controversial early career as a neoliberal reformer, he remade himself as a progressive, publishing searing and accessible critiques of the U.S. government that have made him a frequent guest on cable news shows. During the 2016 presidential election, Sachs endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders, conferring legitimacy on his campaign at a time when other experts wrote him off. Sanders wrote the foreword to one of Sachs’s books. Pope Francis appointed Sachs to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Angelina Jolie made a documentary about him.

Sachs, now 67, is one of 17 celebrity U.N. Sustainable Development Goals advocates tasked by the secretary-general with promoting lofty objectives like boosting access to education, fighting the climate crisis, and ending hunger by 2030. Beyond the U.N., Sachs has been anointed an expert on a dizzying array of topics, including broadband access, energy engineering, and Covid-19. He heads a Lancet commission charged with addressing the economic and humanitarian costs of the coronavirus pandemic and, until recently, with investigating its origins.

But Sachs has another side. In 2013, he praised Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan for winning three consecutive general elections, “each time with a greater share of the popular vote,” without noting growing concerns about his repression of dissent. More recently, Sachs has downplayed concerns about China’s crackdown in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, including at a Chinese government online event hosted at a “guesthouse featuring traditional Uyghur-style decorations.” And in 2020, 16 months after the dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he flew to Riyadh to speak at a forum hosted by a Saudi investment firm.

In some cases, Sachs has long-standing relationships with the leaders he praises. SDSN has affiliated centers in the UAE and China, and the nonprofit’s leadership council includes officials from both countries, among them the vice chair of the China Development Research Foundation, which reports to China’s State Council. Sachs also holds an advisory position at Beijing’s Tsinghua University that does not appear on his CV, his public LinkedIn profile, or his bios published outside China. The position is at an institute set up to promote China’s foreign policy goals within the U.N.

“I always had the sense that Jeffrey was not a person concerned about human rights and that he was often an apologist for abusive governments,” said Aryeh Neier, former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union and co-founder of Human Rights Watch. Neier oversaw the funding of Sachs’s work in the 2000s while serving as president of Open Society Foundations, during which he said he was bothered by Sachs’s willingness to work with Ethiopia’s government, among other concerns.

“I always had the sense that Jeffrey was not a person concerned about human rights and that he was often an apologist for abusive governments.”

Sachs takes issue with such claims. He called the UAE’s financial support a “contribution to the UN effort to promote the worldwide use of happiness and well-being indicators and goals in national development policy design.” He later wrote: “If you believe that it is inappropriate for SDSN to accept funds from the Government of the UAE for academic work or for me to speak about energy decarbonization to a meeting in Saudi Arabia, then you are free to write that, though I disagree.” (Sachs declined to be interviewed by phone for this article, instead responding to a series of questions by email.)

“I speak and write very often about the importance of human rights and of the importance of the Universal Declaration and the work of the UN Human Rights Council,” he wrote, referring to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document adopted in 1948 that enshrines values such as nondiscrimination and freedom from arbitrary detention. He said that he was not paid for his Tsinghua position and that SDSN had not received any donations from the Chinese government, Chinese corporations, or individuals with close ties to the government. (The group received only $30,000 from “an international non-governmental organization based in Beijing devoted to decarbonization” to fund research assistants, he said.) “If there is an oversight on my CV, I will correct it,” he said. “I am proud of my cooperation with colleagues at Tsinghua University, which is a great university.” In general, he added, his work in China is driven by a desire for global peace and collaboration.

But human rights activists complain that Sachs mainly speaks about U.S. abuses, while minimizing those elsewhere in the world. SDSN has offices in New York, Paris, and Kuala Lumpur, and outposts or networks on six continents, and Sachs himself constantly appears at events across the globe. At the U.N., he has been caught up in an effort led by China to prioritize softer rights over political and civil rights.

In June 2020, as people across the United States took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd, he posted an eloquent letter to SDSN’s website. “I thank you, colleagues, for your daily efforts for global justice,” he wrote. “This work never stops, and it is obviously more urgent than ever.” Three days later, the UAE government reported that Sachs had joined leaders for the virtual launch of the Wellbeing Academy, an institute that trains UAE government employees on how to integrate happiness into their work. Acquaintances and former colleagues of Sachs said that he is driven by a genuine desire to do good in the world. But they also say that the former neoliberal economist never quite lost his taste for power.

Dr. Shock and Mr. Development

Sachs has been in the public eye for decades, continually reinventing himself while showing a Teflon-like resistance to reputational damage. In the 1980s and 1990s, as a young Harvard University economist who had spent his career inside the ivory tower, he advised countries including Bolivia, Poland, and Russia to adopt a strategy known as shock therapy. These extreme market reforms helped plunge some countries deeper into collapse, later earning him the nickname “Dr. Shock.” Then in 2002, Columbia recruited him from Harvard with a plush package that included an $8 million town house on 85th Street in Manhattan. (The university bought the house but rented three of its five floors to Sachs and his family at what a spokesperson called a “normal faculty rate.”)

As the director of Columbia’s Earth Institute, Sachs shifted his attention to Africa, securing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for an effort intended to jumpstart development across the continent. The Millennium Villages project had a noble goal: to improve health outcomes and basic living standards in impoverished areas. But Sachs had little experience in the region, and his approach of pouring money into communities and then cutting the purse strings so that they could become self-sufficient struck some critics as blunt and potentially harmful.

When George Soros pledged $50 million for the Millennium Villages project through his Open Society Foundations, he sparked an uproar within the organization. Neier, the former president, was among those who opposed the decision. “The countries included some which had authoritarian regimes,” he said. “I didn’t like to see scarce resources spent in those countries.” But according to Neier, Soros had promised Sachs the money and wanted to make good on his pledge. “I lost that debate.”

Some people who worked with Sachs on the ground admired his pluck and headstrong determination to end poverty. Rebbie Harawa was hired to head the Malawi Millennium Village, a role she held until 2009. She said that Sachs had a convincing manner with government officials and other influential people. At one point, Madonna visited the village. But Sachs was overly optimistic that he could replace aid dependency in countries like Malawi with investment, said Harawa, who is now with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Kenya. “That was his dream,” she said. “But that’s not the way the world works.”

Sachs was often in the limelight, and others noted signs that to achieve his goals, he seemed willing to take funding from just about anyone. As the Millennium Villages project got underway, the writer Nina Munk tailed him on his travels, recording scenes that she eventually turned into the book “The Idealist.” At one point, Sachs urged a district commissioner in Kenya to dream big about his region’s potential. “What’s the chance of getting investors from the United Arab Emirates?” he asked the Kenyan official. At another moment, Sachs named the Chinese government and corporate donations as potential sources of funding for his development work. “The amounts required are very small,” he told Munk. “So if it ends up coming through companies, if it ends up coming through China, if it ends up coming through individual contributions … that is not really the main point. The main point is that it happens.”

Sachs told The Intercept that the Millennium Villages project did not receive funding from either the UAE or China. But it did not escape his notice that as Western nations declined to invest in his villages, China was funding desperately needed infrastructure throughout Africa. And the view he staked out during that period — that in decisions about accepting money for his projects, the end justifies the means — would follow him into his work elsewhere in the world.

After the Millennium Villages project petered out in the early 2010s, Sachs emerged as a strong progressive voice in the United States. He spoke and wrote extensively about rising inequality and the plight of migrants, and he ran for the presidency of the World Bank as a dark-horse candidate. He even showed up at the Occupy Wall Street protests, to the annoyance of activists who remembered his neoliberal past.

Sachs saw that discontent with capitalism was running high and that there was a growing recognition that traditional economic markers alone were insufficient. He became a proponent of one solution being floated at the time: measuring happiness. At first, he focused on Bhutan. The small country in the Himalayas was promoting the idea of “gross national happiness,” first proposed by Bhutan’s king in the 1970s, to reinvent itself as an idyllic paradise. In 2011, its delegates advocated for the U.N. to adopt Resolution 65/309, which proposed that member states look into measuring happiness alongside metrics of economic performance like gross domestic product. Soon after, Sachs flew to Thimphu, Bhutan’s capital, to co-chair a meeting on positivity. Bhutanese collaborations with Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs and the Earth Institute ensued, as did a paean by Sachs to the Bhutanese government. In the spring of 2012, Sachs spoke at a Bhutan-led U.N. “high-level meeting” on well-being, and soon afterward the U.N. General Assembly declared March 20 the International Day of Happiness. (Sachs was hardly the only prominent intellectual to embrace the idea of measuring contentment. His Columbia colleague Joseph Stiglitz also spoke at the U.N. meeting. Stiglitz, through his assistant, declined to speak with The Intercept.)

But a happiness metric also turned out to be a brilliant marketing tool. A Bhutanese government minister boasted in a World Economic Forum publication that between 2012 and 2019, the number of tourists visiting the country tripled. The campaign also helped drown out concerns about the Bhutanese government’s discrimination against the Lhotshampa ethnic group. Gross national happiness was, New Delhi-based journalist Vishal Arora wrote in 2014, “a cover for an inadequate human rights record.” Bhutan’s example would be replicated by the UAE.

“You Become Complicit”

In early 2018, the daughter of Dubai’s ruler fled the UAE on a Jet Ski, aided by her Finnish capoeira coach and a former French spook. In a harrowing video, Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum accused her father of locking up her sister years earlier and restricting her own basic freedoms. The episode ended in a dramatic confrontation in international waters, in which Indian commandos stormed the yacht where Latifa was hiding, captured her, and handed her over to Emirati authorities. Her Finnish friend, Tiina Jauhiainen, was detained for three weeks before being released.

For many, the incident was a wake-up call to repression in the country. But Sachs had been taking money from Sheikha Latifa’s father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, to research the very thing the princess had so desperately wanted to attain, and he continued to do so. Most of the UAE money for Sachs’s happiness work came from Sheikh Mohammed’s office and was donated to SDSN between 2017 and 2021, Sachs told The Intercept. The nonprofit names “the Prime Minister’s Office of the United Arab Emirates” as a donor on its website, along with over two dozen others. (Although electoral freedom is limited in the UAE, Sheikh Mohammed technically holds the title of prime minister.) After Sheikha Latifa’s capture, SDSN accepted at least $1 million from Sheikh Mohammed’s office.

In 2019, Sheikh Mohammed was again accused of mistreatment when one of his wives, Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, fled to the U.K. with their two children, seeking political asylum.

Sachs does not draw a salary from SDSN, according to its tax forms, but the nonprofit has helped fund his research at Columbia, according to Earth Institute spending records and the tax filings. When asked whether he had ever raised concerns about Sheikha Latifa’s treatment, he did not reply.

Jauhiainen, who lived in Dubai for 17 years before helping Sheikha Latifa escape, finds Sachs’s involvement in the happiness drive deeply troubling. “The UAE is a police state where all your moves are monitored,” she said. “You’re scared to criticize anything in your social media because you’re scared of the consequences. How can people possibly be happy living in a society like that?”

Sachs formed SDSN in the wake of the U.N.’s 2012 summit in Rio de Janeiro, where member states discussed what would become the Sustainable Development Goals. The nonprofit’s launch was announced in a press release from then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who explained that the new network would help “business, civil society, UN agencies and other international organizations to identify and share the best pathways to achieve sustainable development.” But although it uses the U.N. name, SDSN is registered as a nonprofit in Delaware, and practically speaking, it is Sachs’s baby. Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, told The Intercept that “the UN and SDSN collaborate on a range of projects and knowledge products,” but said that the nonprofit “has no formal legal relationship with the United Nations.” For a while, SDSN’s administrative work was done at Columbia’s Earth Institute.

The U.N. goals the nonprofit was set up to promote are broad and somewhat open to interpretation, leaving a lot of leeway for SDSN in its work. Although aimed at reducing poverty and injustice, the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, avoid addressing the sort of serious structural changes that would actually reduce inequality and improve living conditions in developing countries, according to a recent report by Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and co-chair of New York University’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. The goals also do not require commitments to specific civil and political rights, making them attractive to authoritarian regimes.

“By creating international partnerships with … individuals like Jeffrey Sachs, they’re trying to bring prestige but also establish for the UAE an international profile.”

For Emirati leaders, who have been seeking to expand the UAE’s influence globally, sustainability and happiness offer a way in at the U.N. “By creating international partnerships with respected global institutions like Columbia and with individuals like Jeffrey Sachs, they’re trying to bring prestige but also establish for the UAE an international profile,” said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Tax forms for 2017 and 2018 filed with the New York State Attorney General suggest that in those years, the UAE was SDSN’s second largest government donor, behind the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. The Intercept was not able to obtain government donor lists for later years.

The Emirates Competitiveness Council, a government group, has separately funded research at the Earth Institute since at least 2013. Sachs stepped down as the institute’s director in 2016 to lead a smaller organization under its umbrella, the Center for Sustainable Development.

At first, UAE donations to the Earth Institute and SDSN went toward work on a world happiness index. The rankings are calculated using data from the Gallup World Poll. Gallup asks people from around the world to answer questions about life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10. Sachs and colleagues then attempt to explain each country’s ranking by assessing the roles played by factors including social support, life expectancy, and perceptions of corruption, and comparing the outcome against a fictional unhappy nation called Dystopia.

But while northern European countries typically top the ranking, further down the list, governments pay no apparent cost for repression, such that some actual dystopias end up doing just fine. In the most recent report, Saudi Arabia ranked ahead of Spain, Bahrain ahead of Japan.

The UAE typically finishes high as well. In one comparison from the most recent report, the country ranked at 19 out of 95 countries in overall happiness for the 2017-2019 period. For 2020, the UAE slid to 27 in the same assessment, but Sachs and his co-authors took care to explain that this was due to a drop in life satisfaction among the Emirates’ migrant workers and foreign population, who make up 88 percent of residents. The report added that “life evaluations of the locally-born increased.” Sachs did not respond to a question about potential bias in the survey. An FAQ on the index says that his team merely interprets and does not determine the results, which are based on the Gallup survey scores.

One major problem with the index lies in its design: Gallup representatives conduct lengthy interviews with people over the phone or in their homes. But they face limitations on how and where they can collect data; in China, the survey excludes residents of Tibet and, until 2020, excluded residents of Xinjiang, where there is widespread discontent with government repression. Also until 2020, Gallup’s UAE survey was only conducted in English and Arabic, leaving out South Asian migrant workers who might not be able to answer in those languages. In other places where speech is monitored or restricted, people might not always tell the truth about how happy they are.

Gallup itself has ties to the UAE that raise questions. From 2010 to 2012, the polling company had a center in Abu Dhabi funded by the Crown Prince Court. A Gallup executive told Fast Company that while Gallup maintained full editorial control over projects, Emirati leaders assisted “on topic selection.” (Gallup did not respond to emailed questions.)

Researching happiness in the UAE requires a sort of moral gymnastics, said Ulrichsen: “You have to take a position that involves turning a blind eye to a lot of internal developments in the country. And to some extent, you become complicit.”

“Close Partnerships”

Sachs’s leadership of the Global Happiness Council, the group that devises policy recommendations to accompany the annual happiness rankings, brought him still closer to the Emirati government. The UAE announced the council’s formation at U.N. headquarters in New York on the International Day of Happiness in 2017. In an interview at the event, the UAE’s then-happiness minister, Ohood bint Khalfan Al Roumi, linked the effort to the SDGs. Fully $1 million of Sheikh Mohammed’s donations to SDSN have been earmarked for the council, Sachs told The Intercept. 

The council’s reports are unapologetically subjective, often praising the UAE government. At one point, the Global Happiness Council’s membership included an Emirati government official: Aisha Bin Bishr, the director general of Smart Dubai, a program that has included the installation of thousands of surveillance cameras around Dubai.

Bin Bishr was the lead author of a chapter on smart cities in the 2018 report that cited a tech-driven collaboration between Smart Dubai and local police to solicit feedback on traffic fines. The project, called HappyToPay, “not only increases transparency, but also gives people a way to voice their opinion to the city leadership,” the chapter claimed. It did not mention Smart Dubai’s expanding use of facial recognition. (Bin Bishr did not respond to The Intercept’s requests to comment.)

In the same report, Sachs wrote of the Emirati happiness drive: “It is the responsibility of scholars and moral leaders everywhere to encourage the UAE’s important initiative and help it grow.”

“The UAE’s use of surveillance technology against human rights defenders — most famously Ahmed Mansour, now in prison for exercising his right to freedom of expression — stands as a caution on its own,” said David Kaye, a law professor at University of California, Irvine and former U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. “The idea that a government with such a nefarious approach to surveillance technology would be lauded for the surveillance cities it proposes building is just preposterous.”

Kaye said that he did not have specific knowledge about Sachs’s work on happiness and the SDGs but noted: “Any human rights organization would be cautious, to put it mildly, in taking funds from the UAE or otherwise cooperating with it. Most would refuse it on principle.”

Sachs’s relationship with the UAE may not be all that singular, though. SDSN has a center in Beijing hosted at Tsinghua University’s Institute for Sustainable Development Goals, which was founded in 2017 on the sidelines of a major Chinese Belt and Road Initiative conference. Sachs chairs the institute’s international academic committee.

China’s U.N. delegation has sought to link Belt and Road, a massive effort to finance infrastructure and extend Chinese influence across more than 130 countries of all income levels, to the SDGs. China’s broader campaign to gain influence within the U.N. has thrice landed businesspeople in prison in the United States; all three were convicted of using sustainability-linked ventures to bribe former U.N. General Assembly presidents. (One former U.N. official was charged as well, but he died in 2016 while awaiting trial, after a barbell fell on his neck.)

Sachs has faced scrutiny for his apparent ties to one of the people convicted in the bribery probes, though he denies the connection.

In at least one instance, an SDSN center like the one in Beijing was established following donations to the nonprofit. To set up the Jeffrey Sachs Centre on Sustainable Development at Malaysia’s Sunway University, property magnate Jeffrey Cheah told the Asean Post that he endowed SDSN with $20 million over five years.

Sachs confirmed Cheah’s donation, writing that some of the money went directly to SDSN and that some went to SDG-related programs in Malaysia, but said that the Beijing center is set up differently. “SDSN is a voluntary network of organizations, mainly universities,” he said. “The universities fund themselves,” adding: “There is little transfer of money to or from member institutions.”

According to its website, the Beijing center focuses on promoting “close partnerships” with the United Nations and other international organizations. Sachs recently said in a video address to the U.N. mission in China that he is a “big fan of the Belt and Road Initiative.”

As with the UAE, Sachs’s stances on human rights issues in China have baffled experts. In April, he downplayed concerns about the Xinjiang internment camps by evoking a post-September 11 narrative about terrorism. In an op-ed titled “The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified,” co-authored with the legal scholar William Schabas, he wrote that although “there are credible charges of human rights abuses … we must understand the context of the Chinese crackdown in Xinjiang, which had essentially the same motivation as America’s foray into the Middle East and Central Asia after the September 2001 attacks: to stop the terrorism of militant Islamic groups.” Schabas had represented Myanmar’s government against genocide charges in the International Court of Justice.

Sachs also recently appeared at an event hosted by No Cold War, a group that often promotes Chinese foreign policy interests, including on human rights issues. Its supporters recently clashed with Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters at an anti-racism rally in London.

“There was a saying when I was in college,” Sophie Richardson, China director for Human Rights Watch, said of Sachs’s involvement with No Cold War. “You want to keep an open mind, but not so much that your brain falls out.”

Sachs says that he is merely countering Beltway hawkishness. “I have been writing and speaking on China for decades,” he wrote. “My overarching view is the importance of peace and cooperation between the US and China, not the cold-war mentality that is prevalent in Washington, and that perhaps characterizes your own thinking.”

Happytalism

This past spring, Sachs spoke at a virtual happiness conference in conversation with Luis Gallardo, author of the book “Why Happytalism Matters for the Continued Existence of the Human Race.” Gallardo heads the World Happiness Foundation, a Florida-based nonprofit that has given awards to UAE leaders. In one breath, Sachs took easy swings at Donald Trump, who was no longer president. In the next, he complimented the Chinese government for its low Covid-19 death toll. Partway through, Gallardo asked a softball question about equity, praising Dubai leaders for their approach to happiness. Sachs took the bait. “You mentioned three places: New Zealand, Scotland, and the Emirates,” he said. “In all three, the leader of the happiness initiative is a woman.” He was referring to either the UAE’s former happiness minister, Al Roumi, or to the current minister of community development, Hessa bint Essa Buhumaid. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence.” He elaborated: “Men just seem more hard-wired for conflict, more hard-wired to find division. Women, probably, psychologically and biologically are more caring.” Happiness, he continued, “comes easier to women.”

Happiness was not coming easy for the daughter of Sachs’s primary Emirati donor. The month before, the BBC program “Panorama” had aired smuggled footage in which Sheikha Latifa said she was being held in a villa with barred windows, with no access to medical help. She also said that during her failed escape, commandos had forcibly injected her with tranquilizers before forcing her limp body onto a private jet. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights had asked the UAE government for proof that Sheikha Latifa was still alive. At the time of the happiness festival, the commissioner had not yet received it.

Images of Sheikha Latifa later surfaced, but so did evidence that her phone had been hacked with the spyware Pegasus. Last month, a British court cited her capture in a decision ordering Sheikh Mohammed to pay his ex-wife Princess Haya and her two children £554 million, or about $734 million, following their own 2019 escape.

In his riff on women at the happiness event, Sachs did not mention Sheikha Latifa or Princess Haya, or the fact that UAE law still effectively gives men control over their wives. Instead, he brought the discussion back to U.N. targets. “One thing I would recommend for all of us is more women in politics and more women in power,” he said. “And that is SDG No. 5: Gender Equality.”

The post U.N. Power Broker Jeffrey Sachs Took Millions From the UAE to Research “Well-Being” appeared first on The Intercept.

The rare retraction by the journal, Human Genetics, follows a two-year crusade by a Belgian scientist to push publishers to investigate research that he and others say is complicit in human rights violations.

The paper’s authors used DNA samples from across China to assess genetic variation among and within ethnic groups. The journal’s editors retracted the paper because of doubts about the informed consent process. According to a retraction notice published December 11, three authors, including the two lead authors, agreed to withdraw the paper. Human Genetics is published by Springer Nature, which retracted two other papers for similar reasons in August and September.

The scientist who spearheaded the retraction campaign, Yves Moreau, said he was thankful that Springer Nature had investigated but that there was more work to be done, noting that the paper’s findings had been used in over two dozen other papers. “This is not only a matter of informed consent, but also a matter of retracting and not publishing research clearly linked to serious harm,” said Moreau, who is a bioinformatician at the University of Leuven in Belgium. “It raises the question of what will happen to those almost 40,000 DNA profiles.” The anonymized profiles remain in an online database in Germany that can be freely queried by anyone.

At least nine of the paper’s 30 co-authors are affiliated with Chinese police departments or police academies, and several others are affiliated with forensic science departments at Chinese universities. Researchers are often given co-author slots in exchange for collecting samples and data, said Moreau, making it likely that at least some of the Chinese samples were collected by police. China’s Ministry of Public Security, which oversees police across China, has been building out a national DNA database, over the objections of human rights activists.

One of the lead authors on the retracted paper, Lutz Roewer, oversees the German database, which is housed at the Charité research hospital in Berlin. Called the Y-Chromosome Haplotype Reference Database, or YHRD, it is often used by police around the world who are seeking more information about specific DNA samples. It has recently come under scrutiny for including DNA from the persecuted Roma ethnic group as well as Uyghur and Chinese DNA that ethicists presume was collected without informed consent.

Roewer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

An explosion in accessible DNA technologies has also sparked police misuse in the United States. In China, said Emile Dirks, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto who studies Y-STR data collection, “you have a nationwide, multiyear campaign to target individuals for genealogical or genomic collection, none of whom are targets in an investigation, nor are they known to be or suspected of being related to someone who is a target of a criminal investigation.”

YHRD, the German database, is the largest collection of Y-STR samples in the world, containing 300,000 profiles. The profiles do not have names attached, but police often use them to zero in on a likely geographic origin for a suspect, then use that marker to make assumptions about the suspect’s ethnicity.

“If our community is perceived to be condoning or even tolerating human rights abuses, public trust in genetics will rapidly crumble.”

Moreau first raised concerns about the paper with Springer Nature editors in June 2020. This past July, he wrote to the journal’s editorial board to ask for help, appealing to the Hippocratic oath that many took when they became doctors. “Public trust in human genetics depends on our community’s ability to transparently abide by its moral duties,” he wrote. “If our community is perceived to be condoning or even tolerating human rights abuses, public trust in genetics will rapidly crumble.”

In a later email to the editorial board, he worried that his inquiries were “being stonewalled because of strategic and business considerations by publishers, who are afraid of poking a mighty bear,” referring to the financial interests of journals operating in China.

Springer Nature did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Moreau’s email to the editorial board sparked a heated discussion. One scientist responded to his comment about business interests, observing that science was “‘slipping’ from the hands of actual practicing scientists — and not just in human and medical genetics.”

“The work included DNA probes of sources that did not respect ethical obligations, thereby violating contemporary ethical norms and regulations,” Gudrun Rappold, a geneticist at the University of Heidelberg and a member of the editorial board, wrote to The Intercept. She said that she had previously used Y chromosome data in her own work but that she saw the retraction as “a warning sign for the future.”

In August, Moreau’s emails to the editorial board of another journal that had published fraught research, Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, prompted eight scientists to resign in protest.

“China is the best and the clearest example that one can think of because we all agree that human rights violations in China are so severe,” said Veronika Lipphardt, a science historian at the University of Freiburg in Germany who, along with Rappold, recently authored a comment article in Nature on abuses involving Roma DNA. “But we should not forget to look elsewhere. A lot of data from marginalized populations around the world, in nondemocratic regimes as well as in democratic countries, has been collected in similar ways by police forces.”

Correction: December 14, 2021
This article has been updated to clarify that the database containing the anonymized DNA profiles on which the retracted Human Genetics paper was based does not require registration and can be queried by anyone with access to the internet.

The post Journal Retracts Paper Based on DNA of Vulnerable Chinese Minorities appeared first on The Intercept.

Scientists consulted by The Intercept described the late date as highly unusual and said it merited an explanation, given the controversy surrounding the EcoHealth Alliance’s work at the time that the report was submitted. The scientists spoke under the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic with the NIH, the world’s leading funder of biomedical research.

The annual report described the group’s work from June 2017 to May 2018, which involved creating new viruses using different parts of existing bat coronaviruses and inserting them into humanized mice in a lab in Wuhan, China. The work was overseen by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci.

Neither the NIH nor the EcoHealth Alliance offered an explanation for the date of the report or responded to questions from The Intercept about whether another version of the report had been submitted on time and, if so, in what ways that version may have been altered.

The Intercept is seeking any missing progress reports, among other documents, through ongoing litigation against the NIH.

The agency has been criticized for withholding information that might relate to the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, which is now responsible for more than 4.5 million deaths around the world. “NIH has a public responsibility to be fully transparent on why it gave funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, whether it considered the potential of a possible accidental leak of dangerous bat viruses, and the ethics of approving the study,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University’s school of law and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. “Overall, it is important to fund good basic research on bat viruses, but the project has been shrouded in uncertainty and lacks full transparency.”

The progress report and other documents were released by the NIH over a year after The Intercept and others requested them. “What [the NIH] really needs to do is not just react to FOIA requests. They need to be proactive and say, ‘OK, here’s the process, and here’s the outcome.’ And they haven’t done that,” said Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University. “That just raises questions about why they’re dragging their heels. They should have provided all relevant information months ago.”

The EcoHealth Alliance and its longtime partner the Wuhan Institute of Virology have come under intense scrutiny in the search for the pandemic’s origins. The two groups are at the center of the lab-origin hypothesis, the idea that the coronavirus could have emerged through a lab accident, the collection and storage of thousands of bat coronavirus samples, or through divisive research that makes viruses more transmissible in order to study how they evolve.

There has been no shortage of unsubstantiated ideas in circulation about SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, several of which continue to be used as political wedges by former President Donald Trump and the far right. But EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak helped organize scientists to tar any discussion of a possible lab origin, even if it was science-based, as a conspiracy theory.

In February 2020, the medical journal The Lancet published a statement decrying the spread of “rumours and misinformation” around the origins of the pandemic. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” read the letter. Emails later obtained by U.S. Right to Know showed that Daszak had orchestrated the effort. Daszak has also served on two international committees tasked with investigating the origins of the pandemic, despite having a clear conflict of interest. (Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that one of these committees, a task force convened by The Lancet, would be disbanded.)

For months, Daszak continued to push the notion that a lab origin was preposterous. “They’re coming at this with the belief system that there’s a cabal of mysterious international folks who are trying to kill people,” he said in an online seminar in October 2020, of those who believe it’s possible that the virus that causes Covid-19 emerged from a lab. “They come at it with a belief system. So logic jumps out the window.”

The unusually dated EcoHealth Alliance progress report adds to a string of missing, incomplete, or disappeared information that could be relevant to the origins of the pandemic.

The report describes work done in year four of the five-year, $3.1 million NIH grant “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence.” It was due in April 2018. The version released by the NIH was submitted over two years later, after The Intercept had filed a public records request seeking the bat coronavirus and other NIH grants to the EcoHealth Alliance.

The NIH sends out automatic reminders ahead of key due dates and makes the distribution of new funding contingent upon receipt of the previous years’ annual reports. According to an NIH instruction manual, submission dates are automatically generated, meaning that the date could not be a typo.

Adding to the evidence that the annual update was submitted in 2020 are references to studies that were published after 2018, when the update was due. NIH progress reports include a section in which researchers list any papers that have been published or accepted for publication. In the EcoHealth Alliance progress report, the section lists papers published in 2019 and 2020.

Many researchers say the experiment that involved infecting humanized mice with altered bat coronaviruses described in the annual report qualifies as “gain-of-function research of concern.” None of the viruses described in the experiment are related to SARS-CoV-2 closely enough to have evolved into it. But scientists said the odd submission date raises questions about whether information in an earlier draft of the report had been altered — or omitted — amid controversy over the EcoHealth Alliance’s work in Wuhan.

Early on, several groups, media outlets, and individuals requested the grant documents and communications surrounding them, an effort that apparently irked Daszak. “Conspiracy-theory outlets and politically motivated organizations have made Freedom of Information Act requests on our grants and all of our letters and e-mails to the NIH,” he told Nature in August 2020. “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.”

The Intercept requested the grant documents from the NIH on September 3 of that year. The anomalous progress report was submitted less than two weeks later, on September 16.

The documents released to The Intercept are also missing a year-five progress report, covering the crucial period of June 2018 to May 2019, which was due in September 2019, according to NIH guidelines. Scientists said that NIH program officers sometimes overlook reports for the final reporting period, but taken together with the odd date on the year-four report, the omission raises questions that the agency should answer.

Federal funding documents are routinely released under the Freedom of Information Act. In this case, public interest in the origins of the pandemic should have led to a timely and full release of documents, transparency experts say. “The presumption of disclosure is all the more crucial when dealing with documents that are squarely in the public interest,” said Gunita Singh, a staff attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “And records about how the pandemic may have originated and where our taxpayer dollars have been spent are clearly worthy of public observation and scrutiny and debate.”

“Records about how the pandemic may have originated and where our taxpayer dollars have been spent are clearly worthy of public observation and scrutiny and debate.”

The origins of the pandemic remain hotly debated. In August, President Joe Biden announced that a three-month inquiry into the matter by U.S. intelligence agencies was inconclusive. Many scientists lean toward a natural origin, but in recent months an increasing number of prominent researchers have gone on record as saying that a lab origin deserves thorough investigation.

The progress report is just one of many missing puzzle pieces that could shed light on the question. In June, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom reported that key data from Wuhan had been deleted from an NIH database, a move allowed by NIH rules but that is nonetheless unusual. From a Google Cloud server, he recovered 13 partial viral sequences collected from people in the city in the early days of the pandemic. These added to evidence that the coronavirus was circulating in the city long before the December 2019 outbreak at the city’s Huanan seafood market, which was a major focus of the recent WHO report on the origins of the pandemic. It turned out that researchers from Wuhan University had emailed the NIH in June 2020 to request that the sequences be deleted.

Then in July, after the Washington Post reported on other discrepancies in early WHO data, the WHO changed the virus sequence IDs associated with three early patients described in the joint report.

There are also important gaps in what we know about the history of RaTG13, a relative of SARS-CoV-2, which was sequenced and written about by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Last summer, Shi Zhengli, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, admitted to Science magazine that RaTG13 was a renamed version of a virus found in a Chinese mineshaft where miners fell ill in 2012. But that admission only came following pressure from independent scientists.

Also unresolved are questions about revisions made to public databases of viruses that infect pangolins and about a database that the Wuhan Institute of Virology took offline in September 2019, claiming that it had been hacked.

In 2019, the NIH renewed the EcoHealth Alliance bat coronavirus grant for a second five-year period. The Trump administration suspended funding in April 2020. (The NIH reinstated the grant in July 2020, under strict terms that Daszak said his group could not meet.) It is unclear whether the EcoHealth Alliance would have been required to file a progress report for the final year of the grant, given that it was terminated.

Correction: October 3, 2021

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Peter Daszak did not sign a February 2020 letter in The Lancet. Although Daszak had originally suggested keeping his name off the letter, in the end he did in fact sign it.

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The two scientists, who are both naturalized U.S. citizens working in the biomedical sciences, were informed of their termination at the same time on the morning of August 30, according to three sources and a document reviewed by The Intercept. One scientist declined to comment; the other did not respond to a request for comment.

The China Initiative was launched in 2018 under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to combat industrial espionage, technology transfer, and hacking from China but has faltered, prompting criticism from civil rights advocates and Asian American activists. Despite continued Justice Department hype, charges in several recent instances have been dropped. Earlier this month, a federal judge acquitted former University of Tennessee-Knoxville scientist Anming Hu following a mistrial. A juror who sat through the trial had told The Intercept that “it was the most ridiculous case.”

The China Initiative has been accompanied by an effort by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which administers federal grant money for biomedical research, to investigate hundreds of researchers who are suspected of failing to disclose foreign ties. In a June 2020 presentation, Michael Lauer, NIH’s deputy director for extramural research, said that close to a third of its investigations up until that date had involved the FBI, while 93 percent had involved undisclosed ties to Chinese institutions.

Baylor cited potential issues with federal grant compliance, among other concerns, as cause for dismissing the scientists. But two Baylor faculty members told The Intercept that they fear the school is penalizing people because of their spouses’ work. Both of the terminated scientists are married to scientists who have held positions in China. The faculty members asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to talk to the press.

Houston was the site of a sweeping 17-month FBI probe in 2018 that sent shockwaves through the scientific community. The inquiry involved FBI agents working in tandem with administrators at NIH and MD Anderson Cancer Center, whose campus abuts Baylor’s. For months, agents hounded ethnic Chinese scientists, gaining access to 23 MD Anderson employees’ network accounts, and in one case installing a surveillance camera near a researcher’s office. In 2019, MD Anderson revealed that it had ousted three scientists as a result of the probe, but none were ultimately charged with a relevant crime. One scientist was charged in county court with possession of child pornography and smeared in the local press, only to see the charge against him dropped.

A spokesperson for Baylor declined to comment, saying that the college does not discuss personnel matters. A spokesperson for NIH said that the agency “does not discuss internal oversight reviews of [grant] recipient institutions or their affiliated researchers, whether or not such reviews took place or are underway.” The FBI did not respond to a question about whether it had investigated the two scientists.

The China Initiative has attracted widespread scrutiny. A recent Justice Department fact sheet says that the effort is aimed at identifying “non-traditional [information] collectors (e.g., researchers in labs, universities and the defense industrial base) that are being co-opted into transferring technology contrary to U.S. interests.” Civil rights advocates worry that the “non-traditional collector” label is being broadly interpreted to mean anyone of Chinese descent.

“Either it’s true what the FBI and other intelligence agencies say about this enormous threat of non-traditional collectors and they’re just really bad at finding them, or the rhetoric is overwrought, and we need to be much more discerning,” said Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and a former FBI agent. In an interview with The Intercept, he called for “ensuring that resources devoted to economic espionage are actually focused on people directed by the Chinese government.”

Over the past few decades, many U.S. institutions have set up joint programs and projects in China, often putting forth ethnic Chinese researchers to build ties. Those scientists now say that their institutions have sent mixed messages about international collaboration. MD Anderson, for example, received a 2015 award from China’s State Council in a ceremony attended by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Two years later, an MD Anderson vice president flew to Beijing to meet with the director of the agency that administers China’s Thousand Talents program, a frequent target of the FBI.

Baylor also had several partnerships in China and, according to faculty, had encouraged researchers to work in the country. One such effort was a formal partnership at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou covering joint research projects and scholarly exchanges. On its website, Baylor touts the work as a powerful example of cross-border collaboration. And in 2014, the Chinese consulate in Houston published photos of a signing ceremony involving a Baylor center and a biomedical company affiliated with Peking University. (In July 2020, the Trump administration abruptly closed the Houston consulate, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleging that it was “a hub of spying and intellectual property theft.”)

Baylor did not respond to questions about its China work. It is unclear whether the partnerships are still active.

Although the China Initiative was launched under the Trump administration, the profiling of ethnic Chinese scientists long predates that. The FBI’s Counterintelligence Division created a dedicated Economic Espionage Unit in 2010, under the Obama administration. The Justice Department says that over 80 percent of its economic espionage prosecutions are China-related, and FBI Director Christopher Wray has repeatedly claimed that the bureau is opening a new case involving China every 10 hours. But civil rights advocates and legal scholars say that the Justice Department has few successful prosecutions to show for the effort. “I’m tired of being told, ‘There are big problems out there, and you just don’t have the security clearance,’” said Margaret Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall University whose research focuses on law in China and Taiwan. “That’s not good enough for me. I can’t be told, ‘Just trust us, we’re the government.’”

With both the China Initiative probes and earlier cases, Justice Department officials have argued that U.S. scientific research and corporate knowledge are matters of national security importance, regardless of the topic. Prosecutors have brought cases centering on GlaxoSmithKline pharmaceuticals, genetically modified Monsanto corn seed, and a DuPont whitener used in paint and Oreo cookies. At times, agents have resorted to extreme tactics. For a 2012 case involving glass block insulation, the FBI crafted both an elaborate sting operation and a stinker of a film publicizing its work.

Since 2018, the bureau has also chased down instances of unreported China ties flagged by NIH — a persistent problem in academia, but one that critics say doesn’t necessarily equate to stealing technology.

Baylor administrators had previously allowed scientists flagged by NIH the chance to correct potential grant reporting violations, rather than subjecting them to criminal investigation. That approach had earned the institution praise among Asian American activists nationally, as well as from local faculty. But the administrator who oversaw that effort recently left Baylor.

“Baylor is not the same any more,” said Steven Pei, an engineering professor at the University of Houston who is a co-organizer of the APA Justice Task Force, which advocates for Asian American scientists who have been unfairly accused of crimes. “The faculty is now as confused, frustrated, and scared as they were two to three years ago.”

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But even after Cellebrite said it withdrew from China and Hong Kong, an Intercept investigation has found, police on the mainland continued to buy the company’s Universal Forensic Extraction Device, or UFED, products, which allow officers to break into phones in their possession and siphon off data. While Cellebrite did deregister its Chinese subsidiary earlier this year, it appears to have done little about the brokers that peddle its hacking technology. Chinese government procurement award notices and posts on resellers’ websites show that police have continued to purchase powerful Cellebrite software, while resellers have continued to provide updates for the software. In one case, a reseller reported delivering the Israeli company’s software to border guards in Tibet and demonstrating how it could be used to search people’s WeChat accounts.

The findings follow reports of abuses involving Cellebrite technology elsewhere in the world — including in Bahrain, Botswana, Indonesia, India, and Saudi Arabia — that the company has not meaningfully addressed. “Cellebrite hasn’t demonstrated that they have made serious efforts to investigate the misuse of their technology,” said Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel for Access Now. “It seems it’s a part of their business model that they are just selling their technology to whoever will buy it, without any concern for what the consequences will be.”

Cellebrite aims to soon go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, a blank-check firm formed for the sake of the IPO. Shareholders in that company, TWC Tech Holdings II Corp., will vote on the merger Friday. Cellebrite said in filings that it expects to go public shortly after the shareholder vote.

“They are just selling their technology to whoever will buy it, without any concern for what the consequences will be.”

In response to a detailed list of questions, a public relations firm hired by Cellebrite sent a statement. “Cellebrite has developed a strong compliance framework, and our sales decisions are guided by internal parameters, which consider a potential customer’s human rights record and anti-corruption policies,” the statement reads. “Cellebrite remains committed to safeguarding human rights and has developed strict controls ensuring that our technology is used appropriately in legally sanctioned investigations.”

The company did not respond to specific findings about the continued sale of its products in China.

The revelations raise questions about Cellebrite’s ability to tamp down human rights controversies going forward, a key issue for the company. Access Now has called on the Nasdaq stock exchange to decline to approve Cellebrite’s listing.

Another Israeli digital forensics company, NSO Group, has made headlines over the past few months after its Pegasus spyware was found on the phones of journalists, human rights activists, and other prominent figures, suggesting that they had been remotely hacked. Cellebrite’s sweet spot is different. It is best known for its UFED products, which require physical access to a target’s phone but are both easy to use and relatively inexpensive. Police in China seem to favor UFED 4PC, a program that allows them to break into phones when they are connected to an investigator’s desktop computer. Cellebrite also sells portable field hacking devices, the smallest of which is around the size of an iPad. The Israeli company, which is a subsidiary of the Japan-based Sun Corporation, claimed in a recent SEC filing that its products are used by the 20 largest police departments in the United States. In 2019, OneZero obtained a contract that revealed the use of Cellebrite technology by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

Human rights groups have repeatedly sounded the alarm about policing in China, where security officials have used predictive policing software, facial recognition, and internet snooping to surveil ethnic minorities and other targeted groups. Cellebrite’s UFEDs can give police access to years’ worth of data. “The use of hacking is both targeted on dissidents and activists throughout China, but also routine in a place like Xinjiang,” the region where Chinese authorities have severely repressed Muslim Uyghurs, said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. “And in both cases it could lead to people being imprisoned arbitrarily, because there’s no rule of law in China in essence.” People in Xinjiang have reported being forced at police checkpoints to plug their phones into devices.

In October 2020, following an outcry over the use of its products to surveil Hong Kong protesters, Cellebrite announced that it would leave China and Hong Kong “effective immediately.”

For years before that, the company quietly built up a presence in the region. Cellebrite established a subsidiary in Beijing in September 2015, as the Chinese government was investing heavily in surveillance technology. According to LinkedIn, the company eventually hired a sales director for greater China. A source familiar with the telecommunications industry in China said that in addition to sales staff, Cellebrite also hired researchers in the country.

“It could lead to people being imprisoned arbitrarily.”

Many of the Cellebrite researchers who spend their days collecting vulnerabilities in different cellphone models are based at its campus in Petah Tikva, Israel, where they are recruited from other tech companies or from the Israeli military’s famed signals intelligence arm Unit 8200. But the company also had projects in the works at the time that would have benefited from a research presence in China. It boasts that its UFED CHINEX software add-on can help police extract data from certain Chinese-made phones, for example.

Cellebrite declined to comment on the size of its China operation or on whether it employed researchers there prior to its withdrawal from the market. As Cellebrite prepared to exit China, an Israeli lawyer in Shanghai was made the company’s chief representative there. When reached by phone, she hung up.

In 2016, when Apple refused to help the FBI gain access to the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter, one of two assailants in a shooting that left more than a dozen people dead, it turned to an unnamed hacking firm for help. Speculation that the company was Cellebrite generated widespread press in China. The claim turned out to be false, but it was nonetheless a publicity coup for the Israeli company in China, where digital security researchers became fascinated by Cellebrite.

As the Chinese government has built up its surveillance infrastructure, homegrown Chinese technology companies have managed to replicate many types of sophisticated technology, but the UFED has remained elusive. Daniel Sprick, a legal scholar and expert on Chinese policing at the University of Cologne, said he repeatedly ran across discussion of Cellebrite while preparing a survey of policing technology in China. In Chinese academic writing on the topic, he said, “Cellebrite and its UFED system were always presented as the benchmark, which Chinese producers apparently were yet not able to come close to.” The Chinese company that has come closest is Meiya Pico, but even some of its forensic devices are made to work with Cellebrite’s software and file format.

Surveillance technology in China is typically bundled with other products and sold to government buyers by well-connected brokers, called systems integrators. As Cellebrite grew its business in Asia, a network of local resellers hawked its technology to Chinese police. Employees of the Israeli tech company based in Singapore, meanwhile, publicized trainings on Cellebrite’s website in the simplified characters used on the mainland. The trainings covered topics of interest to existing customers, including how to extract data from phones with Qualcomm chips and how to use Cellebrite’s UFED Ultimate software.

Cellebrite employees also networked with high-level security officials in China.

A Singapore-based Cellebrite employee gave a speech at a Beijing policing conference in 2019.

In 2019, Frederick Huang, Cellebrite’s technical support manager in Singapore, traveled to Beijing to speak at a conference hosted by the People’s Public Security University of China, according to the conference agenda and an account published on the conference website. The event was a veritable who’s-who in surveillance technology. Other speakers included Hong-Eng Koh, a Huawei executive who formerly marketed Oracle policing technology in China, and University College of London professor Tao Cheng, who received a controversial grant from a flagship Chinese predictive policing lab. Huang’s speech was titled “A New Technology That Enables Rapidly Changing Digital Environments.”

Cellebrite’s hustle in China paid off. Police academies in Hunan and Henan provinces bought the company’s technology, procurement documents show.

One key Cellebrite partner was Beijing Information Security Technology, a reseller that in 2019 posted a letter appearing to be from Cellebrite to its WeChat account. The document, which was printed on official letterhead and bore the signature of Arthur Veinstein, then Cellebrite’s managing director for Asia Pacific, said that the Beijing reseller was a Cellebrite “gold distributor” and that it was authorized to distribute the Israeli company’s products and trainings in China. Procurement award notices detailing deals with police in China back up Beijing Information Security Technology’s claim that it distributed Cellebrite products.

Cellebrite declined to comment on the authenticity of the letter or on whether the company was ever an authorized partner. Beijing Information Security Technology did not respond to a request for comment.

Then came a major public relations crisis. In December 2019, amid massive protests in Hong Kong over a proposed extradition bill, police there seized the phone of activist Joshua Wong. Although Wong refused to hand over the password, he said that police managed to access his WhatsApp conversations. Wong later said that police had used Cellebrite technology to access his phone. Concern spread that Wong was not alone. Over the course of the 2019 protests, police had taken thousands of phones from protesters.

“What you can do with the UFED is detain a protest leader, get all the information about them and their connections, and then very quickly cut the opposition,” said Eitay Mack, a human rights lawyer who has unsuccessfully petitioned Israeli regulatory bodies to change how Cellebrite’s technology is regulated.

As activists campaigned for Cellebrite to pull out of Hong Kong, the newspaper Haaretz published a series of reports that put pressure on the company within Israel, detailing Cellebrite’s work in not just Hong Kong but also Belarus and Venezuela. On October 7, 2020, Cellebrite relented and announced that “effective immediately” it would stop selling products and services to China and Hong Kong. The company claimed that it had made the change to comply with new U.S. regulations.

“It was happy news when Cellebrite said we’re not going to do business with Hong Kong,” said Lokman Tsui, a fellow with the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto who was based in Hong Kong at the time. The move meant that Cellebrite’s representatives could not be called to give testimony in court cases in the territory, he added.

But while Cellebrite did eventually deregister its Chinese subsidiary, resellers continued to hawk Cellebrite technology and services on both the mainland and in Hong Kong. Just one week after Cellebrite’s announcement, a government procurement award notice revealed that police in Guangxi province had purchased UFED 4PC.

In December 2020, the Shenzhen-based reseller Smile said it had provided Cellebrite software to border guards in Tibet. According to a post on the reseller’s website, an engineer delivered UFED 4PC to guards in November and demonstrated how to extract WeChat data from a mobile phone. Attendees watched as the engineer displayed someone’s chat records, photos, and videos on a screen, the post claimed.

Brokers in Hong Kong continued to offer Cellebrite technology as well. In February, the website Intelligence Online reported that two technology brokers operating out of Hong Kong still advertised the company’s products on their websites. One of them subsequently removed the reference to Cellebrite but did not alter any claims about its cellphone forensics capabilities. A third Hong Kong-based reseller still advertises a purported partnership with Cellebrite on its website.

Customers in countries where agreements have been terminated “no longer receive active product support or have their licenses renewed,” Cellebrite said in its statement. “All resellers Cellebrite works with are subject to the same restrictions.”

Do you have information about the use of Cellebrite products that you want to share? Contact reporter Mara Hvistendahl at marahv@protonmail.com or via Signal at +1-651-400-7987.

But Mack, the human rights lawyer, said that the findings from China fit with a pattern seen elsewhere in the world: When Cellebrite withdraws from a country under pressure from human rights activists and the press, it does not take sufficient steps to disable the equipment that is already in the region. In 2019, Cellebrite’s former broker in Myanmar told the Washington Post that police there still had access to UFEDs, even though the company said it had pulled out of the country months earlier. Before Cellebrite’s departure, authorities in Myanmar used Cellebrite technology to comb the cellphones of two Reuters journalists.

A sample Cellebrite contract posted on its website gives the company the right to insert code into its software that can remotely disable it if the software is misused. That suggests that in some situations it is  possible for the company to deactivate existing products. “They need to cut everything,” said Mack. “They shouldn’t be working there. They should immediately withdraw because from the beginning they shouldn’t work in China.”

Cellebrite devices are also freely available on eBay. (EBay founder Pierre Omidyar provided the funding to launch The Intercept and continues to back the publication.)

In a recent SEC filing, Cellebrite claimed that going forward it would “prioritize a human rights-based approach” and practice “strict adherence” to “all relevant Israeli, U.S., and EU regulations and controls.” But the documents submitted by the company ahead of its anticipated IPO also emphasize Cellebrite’s potential for growth, something that has so far proven incompatible with protecting human rights.

“They claim that they have an oversight system, that they only sell to legitimate clients, and that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

“It’s their responsibility at the end of the day,” said Krapiva of Access Now. “They claim that they have an oversight system, that they only sell to legitimate clients, and that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

Mack said Cellebrite’s sales in countries like China raise the question of why the U.S. government hasn’t put more pressure on Israel’s Ministry of Defense, which issues a license to Cellebrite. “I don’t understand how the U.S. and the EU governments are turning a blind eye to the businesses that the Israeli government is allowing,” he said. “This is a privilege that the Israeli government and Israeli companies have that other countries don’t have.”

For the moment, Cellebrite continues to list a technical support hotline in China on its website. The hotline informs callers that phone support for the region is closed but offers the option of submitting requests online or by email.

Whatever the status of ongoing official sales of Cellebrite products in China, the devices and software seem to remain in use. In April, a reseller secured the right to run maintenance, repairs, and software updates on a UFED Touch device owned by police in the city of Wenzhou, according to a government procurement document.

And in May, Beijing Information Security Technology noted on its website that to avoid Cellebrite devices becoming unusable, customers should keep them offline. The reseller assured customers that going forward, it would furnish the services needed to operate the devices and update the software offline. The post concluded: “Beijing Information Security Technology will also continue to provide the latest product-related instructions and technical services. Please feel free to follow us.”

Both Beijing Information Security Technology and Smile, the broker that brought Cellebrite technology to border guards in Tibet, continue to offer the Israeli company’s products for sale on their websites.

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The journal, Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, is the latest to be caught up in controversy involving ethically fraught research. Emails obtained by The Intercept show that the journal’s editor-in-chief has been slow to respond to queries about the papers, which involve research on Tibetans and Uyghurs, among other ethnic groups, and were first brought to her attention in March. The journal is published by Wiley, a multinational company based in New Jersey that is one of the world’s premier scientific publishers.

Studies involving DNA profiling, facial recognition, and organ transplantation have sparked controversy at other journals, but this is the first time that so many members of a journal’s editorial board — eight of 25 — have resigned in response to such issues.

The papers were flagged by Yves Moreau, a bioinformatician at the University of Leuven in Belgium who over the past few years has waged a tireless campaign to get journals to retract troubling or unethical papers.

Moreau’s quest began in 2015, when Kuwait announced plans for compulsory collection of DNA from all citizens, residents, and visitors. He helped spearhead an international campaign against the law and won an early victory when it was overturned the following year. He became convinced that if left unchecked, science and artificial intelligence would be used to further authoritarianism. “In technology, we have this nice, comfortable geek image,” he said. “But when you really look at the history of technology, you see that it has been a nexus of power forever — for at least 2,000 years.” While many geneticists have worked for decades to overturn the idea that race is a scientific concept, Moreau saw that authorities around the world could exploit new technologies like readily available DNA testing for political gain.

Moreau later turned his attention to DNA profiling in China, particularly in Xinjiang, where an estimated 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities have been interned in camps or forced into labor. Authorities there have also collected DNA samples from residents. Moreau periodically runs an automated search for papers on ethically charged topics. Earlier this year, that search turned up 18 papers at Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine.

Some of the papers describe genetic differences between ethnic groups. Police can use such research for DNA profiling, to better match crime suspects with DNA samples from the broader population. Other papers relied on samples that Moreau suspected were taken without proper consent. The Chinese government has been collecting DNA from men of all ethnicities, with the aim of building out genetic information for all 700 million males in China. Chinese police also forcibly collect DNA from certain groups, including migrant workers and political dissidents.

While Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine isn’t a leading outlet for genetic research, it has an impact factor of 2.183, meaning that its papers are cited and read by other scientists. The Wiley name lends it an imprimatur of respectability.

As its title suggests, the journal was founded to focus on genetics research with medical applications. Many of the editorial board members study how genetics can help doctors treat patients or help scientists cure disease. But in 2019, the journal started publishing papers by authors in China on forensic genetics, a field that involves close collaboration with police. Forensic genetics has long been controversial in the United States. It is even more problematic in China, where DNA collection is part of a sustained effort to persecute ethnic minorities and other groups.

The title of one paper published by the journal is “Forensic characteristics and genetic affinity analyses of Xinjiang Mongolian group using a novel six fluorescent dye-labeled typing system including 41-Y-STRs and 3 Y-InDels.” Another maps genetic differences between branches of China’s majority ethnic group, Han Chinese, and other groups, including Tibetans and Hui Muslims. Several of the papers list co-authors or funding from institutions affiliated with Chinese police. One lists a co-author from the Public Security Bureau in Tibet, the police agency in the region.

Hart replied the next day. “I am looking into this matter and will respond shortly,” she wrote. Moreau sent several follow-up emails. But months passed without an update, he told The Intercept.

On Tuesday, in response to questions from The Intercept, the Wiley public affairs office emailed a statement from Hart. “We are actively investigating and driving toward a timely, transparent resolution,” Hart said. “We take the concerns expressed extremely seriously and regret that delayed communications may have indicated otherwise.”

In June, Moreau took the issue to the entire editorial board. In a lengthy email, he listed the suspect papers and explained how police in China use forensic genetics.

Other board members echoed his calls for an investigation. Several said they were not actively involved in the journal’s work and had no idea that the papers had even been published. The journal’s editorial board positions are honorary; scientists often sit on multiple boards at once.

In emails obtained by The Intercept, Hart wrote to the board that same day, explaining that she had experienced a death in her family and had drafted a message to Moreau that ended up trapped in her outbox. “I will send a message soon outlining our decision on how to address this issue,” she wrote.

A few weeks later, when she had not provided any further explanation to the board or to Moreau, board members started resigning.

“I would have wanted to hear much more quickly from the editorial staff,” said Ophir Klein, a pediatric medical geneticist at the University of California San Francisco and one of the board members who quit. The lack of communication “made me really concerned,” he added.

The lack of communication “made me really concerned.”

Another board member, Joris Veltman, told The Intercept that he has remained on the board so that he can push for scrutiny of the papers. On July 7, Veltman, who is the dean of the Biosciences Institute at Newcastle University Medical School in the United Kingdom, escalated the issue by emailing Wiley’s management. The publisher’s director of research integrity, Chris Graf, responded that Wiley would begin an investigation immediately. Veltman asked why Wiley had waited so long.

In a statement, a Wiley spokesperson wrote that the company’s Integrity in Publishing Group was overseeing the matter. “We have completed the first step of the investigation, which is to assess concerns vis-à-vis our publishing standards,” the statement read. “We are now proceeding to connect with the authors and the institutional review boards associated with the papers to clarify the consent procedures for the research undertaken.” The spokesperson said that the company could not provide a timeline for the investigation, beyond to say that it would likely continue into September.

Moreau said the focus on consent is too narrow. The larger question, he said, is whether the journal should be publishing research on vulnerable minorities, some of which directly involves the authorities persecuting them. Klein, the board member, said that if the research is determined to be unethical, “at a minimum it should be retracted.”

Moreau is not holding his breath. He has previously secured retractions from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, known as IEEE, and Springer Nature, two other major scientific publishers, but Wiley has declined to retract a paper on ethnicity and facial recognition that he and others flagged in 2019. In September 2020, the journal, WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, issued an expression of concern. The note focuses only on possible misrepresentation of a data set and figure in the article, not broader ethical issues.

Last month, The Guardian reported that the editor of another Wiley journal, Annals of Human Genetics, resigned in September 2020 after Wiley declined to publish a letter he co-authored with Moreau and others proposing that his and other journals boycott papers from China. In turning down the letter, Wiley senior managers said that publishing it could cause problems for its China office, he told the paper.

Moreau said he will persist. “At this point, you cannot stay silent,” he told the Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine editorial board in one email. “This situation is creating a shameful embarrassment that reflects poorly on all medical genetics journals and on the entire medical genetics community. Public trust in human genetics depends on our community’s ability to transparently abide by its moral duty.”

The post Mass Resignations at Scientific Journal Over Ethically Fraught China Genetics Papers appeared first on The Intercept.