The social media company today announced a policy change that would bar such promotion following an inquiry from The Intercept and an earlier controversy over similar propaganda related to demonstrations in Hong Kong.

In Xinjiang, a western province in China, the United Nations has estimated that 1 million ethnic minority Muslim Uyghurs — including children, pregnant women, elderly people, and people with disabilities — have been detained under the pretext of fighting extremism. According to Human Rights Watch, Chinese authorities are “committing human rights abuses in Xinjiang on a scale unseen in the country in decades.”

A review of Twitter advertisements from between June and August this year showed that the social media giant promoted more than 50 English-language tweets from the Global Times, a Chinese state media organization. Several of the tweets deliberately obscure the truth about the situation in Xinjiang and attack critics of the country’s ruling Communist Party regime.

The Global Times paid Twitter to promote its tweets to a portion of the more than 300 million active users on the social media platform. The tweets appeared in users’ timelines, regardless of whether they followed the Global Times account. In July, amid global condemnation of the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Twitter began promoting several Global Times tweets about the region.

One of the promoted tweets, from July 11, included a embedded video in which the Global Times’ editor-in-chief claimed that people who refer to the facilities in Xinjiang as “mass detention camps” have “smeared the vocational education and training centers established to help people avoid extremism.” He went on to attack “European politicians and media workers,” who he claimed had “tried to defend terrorist activities in Xinjiang,” adding, “their hands are in a way soiled with the blood of the Chinese people who died in violent attacks.”

Another promoted tweet, from July 4, included a video purportedly taken in Xinjiang, in which people are seen shopping in the street and eating in restaurants to a soundtrack of piano music. The video describes riots in 2009 that occurred in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and states that residents there “now live a happy and peaceful life” because they work together to fight terrorism and extremism. There is no mention in the video of the mass detention camps.

“Twitter is helping to promote false allegations and government propaganda. Allowing such advertising sets an alarming precedent.”

Other Global Times ads promoted by Twitter follow a similar theme, presenting the region as a happy and peaceful place where no human rights abuses have occurred. One promoted tweet includes video of an elderly woman receiving a package of medical supplies from government officials before breaking down in tears of joy. The tweet claims that poverty has been alleviated in the area because local residents have “access to high-quality medical care and affordable medicines.”

Patrick Poon, China researcher for Amnesty International, said he found Twitter’s promotion of the advertisements to be “appalling.”

“This is a very important, serious issue that Twitter needs to address,” said Poon. “Twitter is helping to promote false allegations and government propaganda. Allowing such advertising sets an alarming precedent.”

On Monday, Twitter said that it would no longer accept advertising from state-controlled media, in order to “protect healthy discourse and open conversation.”

The announcement was published three hours after The Intercept had contacted the company for comment on its promotion of the Global Times’ Xinjiang tweets. Earlier on Monday, TechCrunch highlighted Twitter’s promotion of tweets from a different state news entity, China Xinhua News, which portrayed largely peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong as violent.

Twitter’s promotion of Chinese government propaganda had appeared to contradict its own policies, which state that advertising on the platform must be “honest.” The advertisements also undermined statements from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who told the Senate Intelligence Committee last year that the company was working to combat “propaganda through bots and human coordination [and] misinformation campaigns.”

Like many Western technology companies, Twitter has a complex relationship with China. The social media platform is blocked in the country and cannot be accessed there without the use of censorship circumvention technologies, such as a virtual private network or proxy service. At the same time, however, Twitter generates a lot of advertising revenue in China and has a growing presence in the country.

In July, Twitter’s director in China reportedly stated that the company’s team there had tripled in the last year and was the company’s fastest growing division. In May, the social media giant held a “Twitter for Marketers” conference in Beijing. Meanwhile, Twitter was criticized for purging Chinese dissidents’ accounts on the platform – which it claimed was a mistake – and has also been the subject of a protest campaign, launched by the Chinese artist Badiucao, after it refused to publish a “hashflag” symbol to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Poon, the Amnesty researcher, said police in China have in recent months increasingly targeted human rights advocates in the country who are active on Twitter, forcing them to delete their accounts or remove specific posts that are critical of the government. These cases have been reported to Twitter, according to Poon, but the company has not taken any action.

“Twitter has allowed the Chinese government to advertise its propaganda while turning a deaf ear on those who have been persecuted by the Chinese regime,” Poon said. “We need to hear how Twitter can justify that.”

The post Twitter Helped Chinese Government Promote Disinformation on Repression of Uyghurs appeared first on The Intercept.

In partnership with Psiphon, an anti-censorship organization based in Canada, we are launching a custom app for Android and Windows devices that bypasses China’s so-called Great Firewall and will allow our readers there to visit theintercept.com once again. (The app is not currently available for iOS in China because Apple has removed it from the app store there, citing local regulations.)

To get the app, readers in China and other countries where The Intercept is not accessible can send a blank email to china@theintercept.com, and they will receive an automated response from Psiphon containing a download link.

The Psiphon app encrypts all data that it carries across networks and uses proxy technology to defeat censorship, transmitting traffic between a network of secure servers. The app does not log any personally identifying information, and the software is open-source. You can read more about Psiphon’s technology here.

“Internet users in China face some of the most pervasive and technically sophisticated online censorship in the world,” said a spokesperson for Psiphon. “Psiphon is designed to provide robust, reliable access to the open Internet in the most difficult circumstances. Through our tools and technology, we support millions of people worldwide in their right to freely access information, and the organizations that stand for it.”

For years, China has blocked thousands of websites. But under the rule of President Xi Jinping, attempts to stifle the free flow of information have dramatically increased. The ruling Communist Party government often adds Western news organizations to its banned list after they have published stories exposing corruption within the regime or that otherwise reflect negatively on the country’s officials.

In June, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, The Intercept’s website was blocked, as were the websites of The Guardian, the Washington Post, HuffPost, NBC News, the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, and Breitbart News. The New York Times, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and Reuters have all previously been censored in China.

Charlie Smith, co-founder of GreatFire.org, an organization that monitors Chinese government internet censorship, told The Intercept following the crackdown in June that the country’s authorities appeared to be “accelerating their push to sever the link between Chinese citizens and any news source that falls outside of the influence” of the ruling Communist Party regime. The Chinese government has not responded to requests for comment on the matter.

The post A New App Allows Readers in China to Bypass Censorship of The Intercept appeared first on The Intercept.

Prior to your arrival at the airport, using your own computer, you log on to a website, upload an image of your passport, and are greeted by an avatar of a brown-haired man wearing a navy blue uniform.

“What is your surname?” he asks. “What is your citizenship and the purpose of your trip?” You provide your answers verbally to those and other questions, and the virtual policeman uses your webcam to scan your face and eye movements for signs of lying.

At the end of the interview, the system provides you with a QR code that you have to show to a guard when you arrive at the border. The guard scans the code using a handheld tablet device, takes your fingerprints, and reviews the facial image captured by the avatar to check if it corresponds with your passport. The guard’s tablet displays a score out of 100, telling him whether the machine has judged you to be truthful or not.

A person judged to have tried to deceive the system is categorized as “high risk” or “medium risk,” dependent on the number of questions they are found to have falsely answered. Our reporter — the first journalist to test the system before crossing the Serbian-Hungarian border earlier this year — provided honest responses to all questions but was deemed to be a liar by the machine, with four false answers out of 16 and a score of 48. The Hungarian policeman who assessed our reporter’s lie detector results said the system suggested that she should be subject to further checks, though these were not carried out.

Travelers who are deemed dangerous can be denied entry, though in most cases they would never know if the avatar test had contributed to such a decision. The results of the test are not usually disclosed to the traveler; The Intercept obtained a copy of our reporter’s test only after filing a data access request under European privacy laws.

IBorderCtrl’s lie detection system was developed in England by researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University, who say that the technology can pick up on “micro gestures” a person makes while answering questions on their computer, analyzing their facial expressions, gaze, and posture.

An EU research program has pumped some 4.5 million euros into the project, which is being managed by a consortium of 13 partners, including Greece’s Center for Security Studies, Germany’s Leibniz University Hannover, and technology and security companies like Hungary’s BioSec, Spain’s Everis, and Poland’s JAS.

The researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University believe that the system could represent the future of border security. In an academic paper published in June 2018, they stated that avatars like their virtual policeman “will be suitable for detecting deception in border crossing interviews, as they are effective extractors of information from humans.”

However, some academics are questioning the value of the system, which they say relies on pseudoscience to make its decisions about travelers’ honesty.

Ray Bull, professor of criminal investigation at the University of Derby, has assisted British police with interview techniques and specializes in methods of detecting deception. He told The Intercept that the iBorderCtrl project was “not credible” because there is no evidence that monitoring microgestures on people’s faces is an accurate way to measure lying.

“They are deceiving themselves into thinking it will ever be substantially effective and they are wasting a lot of money,” said Bull. “The technology is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what humans do when being truthful and deceptive.”

In recent years, following the refugee crisis and a spate of terrorist attacks in France, Belgium, Spain, and Germany, police and security agencies in Europe have come under increasing political pressure to more effectively track the movements of migrants. Border security officials on the continent say they are trying to find faster and more efficient new ways, using artificial intelligence, to check the travel documents and biometrics of the more than 700 million people who annually enter the EU.

“They are wasting a lot of money.”

The European Commission — the EU’s executive branch — has set aside a proposed €34.9 billion for border control and migration management between 2021 and 2027. Meanwhile, in September last year, European lawmakers agreed to establish a new automated system that will screen nationals from visa-free third countries — including the United States — to establish whether or not they should be allowed to enter the EU.

In the future, a visa-free traveler who, for whatever reason, has not been able to submit an application in advance will not be granted entry into the Schengen zone, an area covering 26 countries in Europe where travelers can move freely across borders without any passport checks.

IBorderCtrl is one technology designed to strengthen the prescreening process. But transparency activists say that the project should not be rolled out until more information is made available about the technology — such as the algorithms it uses to make its decisions.

Earlier this year, researchers at the Milan-based Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights used freedom of information laws to obtain internal documents about the system. They received hundreds of pages; however, they were heavily redacted, with many pages completely blacked out.

“The attempt to suppress debate by withholding the documents that address these issues is really frightening,” said Riccardo Coluccini, a researcher at the Hermes Center. “It is absolutely necessary to understand the reasoning behind the funding process. What is written in those documents? How does the consortium justify the use of such a pseudoscientific technology?”

A study produced by the researchers in Manchester tested iBorderCtrl on 32 people and said that their results showed the system had 75 percent accuracy. The researchers noted, however, that their participant group was unbalanced in terms of ethnicity and gender, as there were fewer Asian or Arabic participants than white Europeans, and fewer women than men.

Giovanni Buttarelli, head of the EU’s data protection watchdog, told The Intercept that he was concerned that the iBorderCtrl system might discriminate against people on the basis of their ethnic origin.

“Are we only evaluating possible lies about identity or we are also trying to analyze some of the person’s somatic traits, the edges of the face, the color of the skin, the cut of the eyes?” Buttarelli said. “Who sets the parameters to establish that a certain subject is lying or not lying?”

A spokesperson for iBorderCtrl declined to answer questions for this story. A website for the project acknowledges that the lie detection system will “have an impact on the fundamental rights of travellers” but says that, because the test is currently voluntary, “issues with respect to discrimination, human dignity, etc. therefore cannot occur.”

The reporting for this story was supported by the Investigative Journalism for Europe grant and the Otto Brenner Foundation.

The post We Tested Europe’s New Lie Detector for Travelers — and Immediately Triggered a False Positive appeared first on The Intercept.

The device is one of several spy tools manufactured by a Chinese company called Semptian, which has supplied the equipment to authoritarian governments in the Middle East and North Africa, according to two sources with knowledge of the company’s operations.

As The Intercept first reported on Thursday, since 2015, Semptian has been using American technology to help build more powerful surveillance and censorship equipment, which it sells to governments under the guise of a front company called iNext.

Semptian is collaborating with IBM and leading U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more quickly. The Chinese firm is a member of an American organization called the OpenPower Foundation, which was founded by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to “drive innovation.”

Semptian, Google, and Xilinx did not respond to requests for comment. The OpenPower Foundation said in a statement that it “does not become involved, or seek to be informed, about the individual business strategies, goals or activities of its members,” due to antitrust and competition laws. An IBM spokesperson said that his company “has not worked with Semptian on joint technology development,” and refused to answer further questions.

Semptian’s equipment is helping China’s ruling Communist Party regime covertly monitor the internet and cellphone activity of up to 200 million people across the East Asian country, sifting through vast amounts of private data every day.

But the company’s reach extends far beyond China. In recent years, it has been marketing its technologies globally.

After receiving tips from confidential sources about Semptian’s role in mass surveillance, a reporter contacted the company using an assumed name and posing as a potential customer. In emails, a Semptian representative confirmed that the company had provided its surveillance tools to security agencies in the Middle East and North Africa — and said it had fitted a mass surveillance system in an unnamed country, creating a digital dragnet across its entire population.

The mass surveillance system, named Aegis, is designed to monitor phone and internet use. It can “store and analyze unlimited data” and “show the connections of everyone,” according to documents provided by the company.

“We have installed Aegis in other countries [than China] and covered the whole country.”

“We have installed Aegis in other countries [than China] and covered the whole country,” stated Semptian’s Zhu Wenying in an April email. He declined to provide names of the countries where the equipment has been installed, saying it was “highly sensitive, we are under very strict [nondisclosure agreement].”

Similar equipment has been used for years by Western intelligence agencies and police. However, thanks in part to companies like Semptian, the technology is increasingly finding its way into the hands of security forces in undemocratic countries where dissidents are jailed, tortured, and in some cases executed.

“We’ve seen regular and shocking examples of how surveillance is being used by governments around the world to stay in power by targeting activists, journalists, and opposition members,” said Gus Hosein, executive director of London-based human rights group Privacy International. “Industry is selling the whole stack of surveillance capability at the network, service, city, and state levels. Chinese firms appear to be the latest entrants into this competitive market of influence and data exploitation.”

Asked whether there were any countries it would refuse to deal with in the Middle East and North Africa, Zhu wrote that Iran and Syria were the only two places that were off limits. The company was apparently willing to work with other countries in the region — such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Sudan, and Egypt — where governments routinely abuse human rights, cracking down on freedom of speech and peaceful protest.

Documents show that Semptian is currently offering governments the opportunity to purchase four different systems: Aegis, Owlet, HawkEye, and Falcon.

Aegis, Semptian’s flagship system, is designed to be installed inside phone and internet networks, where it is used to secretly collect people’s email records, phone calls, text messages, cellphone locations, and web browsing histories. Governments in most countries have the power to legally compel phone and internet providers to install such equipment.

Semptian claims that Aegis offers “a full view to the virtual world,” enabling government spies to see “location information for everyone in the country.” It can also “block certain information [on the] internet from being visited,” censoring content that governments do not want their citizens to see.

The Owlet and Falcon devices are smaller scale; they are portable and focus only on cellphone communications. They are the size of a suitcase and can be operated from a vehicle, for example, or from an apartment overlooking a city square.

When the Owlet device is activated, it begins tapping into cellphone calls and text messages that are being transmitted over the airwaves in the immediate area. Semptian’s documents state that the Owlet has the capacity to monitor 200 different phones at any one time.

“Massive interception is used to intercept voice and SMS around the system within the coverage range,” states a document describing Owlet. It adds that there is an “SMS keyword filtering” feature, suggesting that authorities can target people based on particular phrases or words they mention in their messages.

The device taps into cellphone calls and text messages that are being transmitted over the airwaves.

The Falcon system, unlike Owlet, does not have the capability to eavesdrop on calls or texts. Instead, it is designed to track the location of targeted cellphones over an almost 1-mile radius and can pinpoint them to within 5 meters, similar in function to a device known as a Stingray, used by U.S. law enforcement.

When Falcon is powered up, it will “force all nearby mobile phones and other cellular data devices to connect to it,” and can help government authorities “find out the exact house which the targets [are] hiding in,” according to Semptian’s documents.

Falcon comes equipped with a smaller, pocket-size device that can be used by a government agent to pursue people on foot, tracking down the location of their cellphones to within 1 meter.

The fourth system Semptian sells to governments, HawkEye, is a portable, camera-based platform that incorporates facial recognition technology. It is designed to be placed in any location to create a “temporary surveillance scene,” the company’s documents say.

HawkEye scans people as they walk past the camera and compares images of their faces to photographs contained in “multi-million-level databases” in real time, triggering an alert if a particular suspect is identified.

Zhu, the Semptian employee, wrote that some of these tools had been provided to authorities in the Middle East and North Africa region, known as MENA. “Aegis, Falcon and HawkEye are our new solutions for [law enforcement agency] users,” wrote Zhu. “All the three products have successful stories and some in MENA.”

Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a policy think tank, said that Semptian’s exports appear to fit with a broader trend, which has seen Chinese companies export surveillance and censorship technologies in an effort to tap into new markets while also promoting China ideologically.

“The Chinese Communist Party seeks to bolster and support regimes that are not unlike itself,” Kania said. “It is deeply concerning, because we are seeing rapid diffusion of technologies that, while subject to abuses in democracies, are even more problematic in regimes where there aren’t checks and balances and an open civil society.”

The post Middle East Dictators Buy Spy Tech From Company Linked to IBM and Google appeared first on The Intercept.

The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to “drive innovation” — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.

Shenzhen-based Semptian is using the devices to enhance the capabilities of internet surveillance and censorship technology it provides to human rights-abusing security agencies in China, according to sources and documents. A company employee said that its technology is being used to covertly monitor the internet activity of 200 million people.

Semptian, Google, and Xilinx did not respond to requests for comment. The OpenPower Foundation said in a statement that it “does not become involved, or seek to be informed, about the individual business strategies, goals or activities of its members,” due to antitrust and competition laws. An IBM spokesperson said that his company “has not worked with Semptian on joint technology development,” but declined to answer further questions. A source familiar with Semptian’s operations said that Semptian had worked with IBM through a collaborative cloud platform called SuperVessel, which is maintained by an IBM research unit in China.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Intercept that he was alarmed by the revelations. “It’s disturbing to see that China has successfully recruited Western companies and researchers to assist them in their information control efforts,” Warner said.

Anna Bacciarelli, a researcher at Amnesty International, said that the OpenPower Foundation’s decision to work with Semptian raises questions about its adherence to international human rights standards. “All companies have a responsibility to conduct human rights due diligence throughout their operations and supply chains,” Bacciarelli said, “including through partnerships and collaborations.”

Semptian presents itself publicly as a “big data” analysis company that works with internet providers and educational institutes. However, a substantial portion of the Chinese firm’s business is in fact generated through a front company named iNext, which sells the internet surveillance and censorship tools to governments.

iNext operates out of the same offices in China as Semptian, with both companies on the eighth floor of a tower in Shenzhen’s busy Nanshan District. Semptian and iNext also share the same 200 employees and the same founder, Chen Longsen.

After receiving tips from confidential sources about Semptian’s role in mass surveillance, a reporter contacted the company using an assumed name and posing as a potential customer. In response, a Semptian employee sent documents showing that the company — under the guise of iNext — has developed a mass surveillance system named Aegis, which it says can “store and analyze unlimited data.”

Aegis can provide “a full view to the virtual world,” the company claims in the documents, allowing government spies to see “the connections of everyone,” including “location information for everyone in the country.”

The system can also “block certain information [on the] internet from being visited,” censoring content that the government does not want citizens to see, the documents show.

Chinese state security agencies are likely using the technology to target human rights activists.

Aegis equipment has been placed within China’s phone and internet networks, enabling the country’s government to secretly collect people’s email records, phone calls, text messages, cellphone locations, and web browsing histories, according to two sources familiar with Semptian’s work.

Chinese state security agencies are likely using the technology to target human rights activists, pro-democracy advocates, and critics of President Xi Jinping’s regime, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals.

In emails, a Semptian representative stated that the company’s Aegis mass surveillance system was processing huge amounts of personal data across China.

“Aegis is unlimited, we are dealing with thousands Tbps [terabits per second] in China more than 200 million population,” Zhu Wenying, a Semptian employee, wrote in an April message.

There are an estimated 800 million internet users in China, meaning that if Zhu’s figure is accurate, Semptian’s technology is monitoring a quarter of the country’s total online population. The volume of data the company claims its systems are handling — thousands of terabits per second — is staggering: An internet connection that is 1,000 terabits per second could transfer 3.75 million hours of high-definition video every minute.

“There can’t be many systems in the world with that kind of reach and access,” said Joss Wright, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute. It is possible that Semptian inflated its figures, Wright said. However, he added, a system with the capacity to tap into such large quantities of data is technologically feasible. “There are questions about how much processing [of people’s data] goes on,” Wright said, “but by any meaningful definition, this is a vast surveillance effort.”

The two sources familiar with Semptian’s work in China said that the company’s equipment does not vacuum up and store millions of people’s data on a random basis. Instead, the sources said, the equipment has visibility into communications as they pass across phone and internet networks, and it can filter out information associated with particular words, phrases, or people.

In response to a request for a video containing further details about how Aegis works, Zhu agreed to send one, provided that the undercover reporter signed a nondisclosure agreement. The Intercept is publishing a short excerpt of the 16-minute video because of the overwhelming public importance of its content, which shows how millions of people in China are subject to government surveillance. The Intercept removed information that could infringe on individual privacy.

The Semptian video demonstration shows how the Aegis system tracks people’s movements. If a government operative enters a person’s cellphone number, Aegis can show where the device has been over a given period of time: the last three days, the last week, the last month, or longer.

The video displays a map of mainland China and zooms in to electronically follow a person in Shenzhen as they travel through the city, from an airport, through parks and gardens, to a conference center, to a hotel, and past the offices of a pharmaceutical company.

The technology can also allow government users to run searches for a particular instant messenger name, email address, social media account, forum user, blog commenter, or other identifier, like a cellphone IMSI code or a computer MAC address, a unique series of numbers associated with each device.

In many cases, it appears that the system can collect the full content of a communication, such as recorded audio of a phone call or the written body of a text message, not just the metadata, which shows the sender and the recipient of an email, or the phone numbers someone called and when. Whether the system can access the full content of a message likely depends on whether it has been protected with strong encryption.

Zhu, the Semptian employee, wrote in emails that the company could provide governments an Aegis installation with the capacity to monitor the internet activity of 5 million people for a cost of between $1.5 million and $2.5 million. To eavesdrop on other communications, the cost would increase.

“If we add phone calls, SMS, locations,” according to Zhu, “2 to 5 million USD will be added depending on the network.”

In September 2015, Semptian joined the OpenPower Foundation, the U.S.-based nonprofit founded by tech giants Google and IBM. The foundation’s current president is IBM’s Michelle Rankin and its director is Google’s Chris Johnson.

Registered in New Jersey as a “community improvement” organization, the foundation says its aim is to share advances in networking, server, data storage, and processing technology. According to its website, it wants to “enable today’s data centers to rethink their approach to technology,” as well as “drive innovation and offer more choice in the industry.”

Semptian has benefited from the collaboration with American companies, gaining access to specialized knowledge and new technologies. The Chinese firm boasts on its website that it is “actively working with world-class companies such as IBM and Xilinx”; it claims that it is the only company in the Asia-Pacific region that can provide its customers with new data-processing devices that were developed with the help of these U.S. companies.

Last year, the OpenPower Foundation stated on its website that it was “delighted” that Semptian was working with IBM, Xilinx and other American corporations. The foundation said it was also “working with some great universities and research institutions in China.” In December, OpenPower’s executives organized a summit in Beijing, at the five-star Sheraton Grand Hotel in the city’s Dongcheng District. Semptian representatives were invited to attend and demonstrated to their American counterparts new video analysis technology they have been developing for purposes including “public opinion monitoring,” one source told The Intercept.

“Sometimes it seems like there’s a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ policy.”

It is unclear why the U.S. tech giants have chosen to work with Semptian; the decision may have been taken as part of a broader strategy to establish closer ties with China and gain greater access to the East Asian country’s lucrative marketplace. A spokesperson for the OpenPower Foundation declined to answer questions about the organization’s work with Semptian, saying only that “technology available through the Foundation is general purpose, commercially available worldwide, and does not require a U.S. export license.”

Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a policy think tank, said that in some cases, business partnerships and academic collaborations between U.S. and Chinese companies are important and valuable, “but when it is a company known to be so closely tied to censorship or surveillance, and is deeply complicit in abuses of human rights, then it is very concerning.”

“I would hope that American companies have rigorous processes for ethical review before engaging,” Kania said. “But sometimes it seems like there’s a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ policy — it’s profit over ethics.”

Semptian, which was founded in 2003, has been a trusted partner of China’s government for years. The regime has awarded the company “National High-Tech Enterprise” status, meaning that it passed various reviews and audits conducted by the Ministry of Science and Technology. Companies that receive this special status are rewarded with preferential treatment from the government in the form of tax breaks and other support.

In 2011, German newsmagazine Der Spiegel published an article highlighting Semptian’s close relationship with the Chinese state. The company had helped establish aspects of China’s so-called Great Firewall, an internet censorship system that blocks websites the Communist Party deems undesirable, such as those about human rights and democracy. Semptian’s “network control technology is in use in some major Chinese cities,” Spiegel reported at the time.

By 2013, Semptian had begun promoting its products across the world. The company’s representatives traveled to Europe, where they appeared at a security trade fair that was held in a conference hall in the northeast of Paris. At that event, documents show, Semptian offered international government officials in attendance the chance to copy the Chinese internet model by purchasing a “National Firewall,” which the company said could “block undesirable information from [the] internet.”

Just two years later, Semptian’s membership in the OpenPower Foundation was approved, and the company began using American technology to make its surveillance and censorship systems more powerful.

The post How U.S. Tech Giants Are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State appeared first on The Intercept.

On Friday, people in China began reporting that they could not access the websites of The Intercept, The Guardian, the Washington Post, HuffPost, NBC News, the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, and Breitbart News.

It is unclear exactly when the censorship came into effect or the reasons for it. But Tuesday marked the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and Chinese authorities have reportedly increased levels of online censorship to coincide with the event.

Charlie Smith, co-founder of GreatFire.org, an organization that monitors Chinese government internet censorship, said that the apparent crackdown on Western news sites represented a significant new development and described it as a “censorship Black Friday.”

“This frenzied activity could indicate that the authorities are accelerating their push to sever the link between Chinese citizens and any news source that falls outside of the influence of The Party,” said Smith, referencing the ruling Communist Party regime.

For years, China has blocked several Western news organizations after they have published stories that reflect negatively on the government. The New York Times, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and Reuters have all previously been censored, rendering their websites inaccessible in the country.

China operates an internet censorship system known as the Great Firewall, which uses filtering equipment to stop people in the country from accessing content published on banned websites that are operated outside China’s borders.

It is possible to circumvent the censorship using tools such as a virtual private network, or VPN. However, use of technology that bypasses the Great Firewall is banned — and people in the country who sell access to these services have been jailed.

In the last year, The Intercept has published a series of reports revealing Google’s plan to launch a censored search engine in China. The reports highlighted the extensive online blocking in China of information about human rights, democracy, peaceful protest, and religion. They also revealed secretive, high-level meetings between Google CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official named Wang Huning.

Within China, censorship in recent weeks increased as the country prepared for the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprisings, a series of student protests that were violently suppressed by the army, leading to more than 10,000 civilian deaths, according to some estimates.

Prior to the anniversary, on June 4, Chinese internet users reported widespread censorship on social media websites. On popular messaging services such as Weibo and a streaming service run by the company YY Inc., users were prevented from entering search terms such as “Tiananmen incident,” “candlelight vigil,” “repression,” and “student movement.”

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment.

The post China Bans The Intercept and Other News Sites in “Censorship Black Friday” appeared first on The Intercept.

The Chinese dissident artist Badiucao had been busy preparing an exhibition in Hong Kong to celebrate Free Expression Week, a series of events organized by rights groups. His show was partly inspired by Google’s plan to build a censored search engine in China, and was set to include work that the artist had created skewering the U.S. tech giant for cooperating with the Communist Party regime’s suppression of internet freedom.

But just days before the exhibition was set to launch last year, at a high-profile event featuring members of Russian punk-activist group Pussy Riot, it was canceled by organizers. Badiucao had received threats from the Chinese government and soon went into hiding.

It was a nightmare scenario for the artist, one of China’s most prolific political satirists, who has never revealed his real name. Somehow, police in China had discovered who he was — and they were trying to track him down.

“China is trying to stop any chance for people in Hong Kong to resist.”

“The Chinese government sent two policemen to visit my family in China. They took one of my family members to a police station and interrogated them for three or four hours,” Badiucao told The Intercept. “They were sending a message that they wanted my show to be canceled, and they said they would show no mercy to me anymore. It was intimidation, a terror tactic in order to force me to shut my mouth.”

Badiucao — who goes by the name “Buddy” — was born in Shanghai and studied law in China before moving to Australia, where he has lived in exile for the last 10 years. Wearing masks and cross-dressing during public appearances, he has gone to extreme lengths to conceal his identity, fearing reprisals from China’s government over his work, which regularly mocks and criticizes President Xi Jinping and his regime’s authoritarian policies.

Once he discovered that police in China had uncovered his identity, Badiucao disappeared from the internet. For six months, his highly active Twitter and Instagram pages fell silent. But after taking a break to assess his future and his security, the 33-year-old artist has decided that he is ready to return. His latest project, “China’s Artful Dissident,” is a documentary film aired in Australia on Tuesday, in which he reveals his face to the public for the first time.

“The only way to maintain my safety is to show myself to the world and tell the world what happened in Hong Kong,” Badiucao said in a phone interview from Melbourne. “For a lot of people, it was a big defeat of human rights and free speech that my exhibition got canceled. I want to make sure that people know this is not the end. I am not away. I am back. I will be back with you. And we will fight together.”

Hong Kong is a special administrative region in China and has a degree of independence from the mainland, with devolved judicial powers and more human rights protections. However, the regime in Beijing has been increasingly asserting control over Hong Kong, and in the last few years, there has been a steady crackdown on political events, media freedom, independent bookstores, and pro-democracy activism.

“The situation is getting worse and worse,” Badiucao said. “China is trying to stop any chance for people in Hong Kong to resist. It is a different city now. This is no longer the Hong Kong that we know.”

The coerced cancellation of Badiucao’s exhibition in Hong Kong was a stark example of Beijing’s tightening grip on the region. The event had been titled “Gongle,” a play on words about Google, based on a Chinese phrase that translates to “singing for Communism.”

Badiucao’s work for the show had included drawings celebrating the Umbrella Movement, a series of street protests against China’s interference in Hong Kong’s electoral system, staged between September and December 2014. The exhibition also featured portrayals of Xi as the cartoon character Winnie the Pooh, a reference to a meme, despised by the regime, mocking the Chinese leader’s plump appearance; images and mentions of Winnie the Pooh are now routinely blocked on Chinese social media sites.

Prior to the planned exhibition, Badiucao had created several pieces satirizing Google’s planned censored search engine for China. He drew pictures of the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai wearing a “Make Wall Great Again” baseball cap, referencing China’s internet censorship system, known as the Great Firewall. The artist also organized a protest at Google’s headquarters in California, where he distributed some of the red baseball caps to Google employees before being moved on by security.

Google has claimed that it is no longer developing the search engine, known as Dragonfly, but has refused to rule out launching it in future. Badiucao said he was angered by Google’s plan, describing it as “totally unacceptable” and symbolic of a greater battle between free speech and censorship in China. “Developing a new search engine that would help the Chinese government hunt down dissidents and tighten control over free speech — this is just disgraceful,” he said.

Left/top: A Badiucao portrait of Joshua Wong, a jailed leader of the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong, which rallied against China's interference in the region's electoral system. Right/bottom: Badiucao created an image of Google CEO Sundar Pichai after the latter defended the company's decision to build a censored search engine in China. Images: Courtesy of Badiucao

In recent weeks, Badiucao has turned his attention to Twitter’s business dealings with China. The artist pitched a project to the social media company, offering to create a special emoji “hashflag” to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Every time a person used the #Tiananmen30 hashtag, one of Badiucao’s emojis — such as an image of the man who famously blocked a tank during the protests — would appear beside it. Twitter wrote back to him claiming that it could only use “a limited number of emojis” on the platform and said it wasn’t interested in the collaboration.

On May 23, around the same time as its correspondence with Badiucao, Twitter hosted a “Twitter for Marketers” conference in Beijing. For Badiucao, this highlighted that while the company does not operate its platform in China because it is banned there, it still rakes in a huge amount of advertising revenue from the country — and therefore has a vested interest in staying on the Communist Party regime’s good side.

“I’m expecting a vendetta from the Chinese government. However, sometimes ideas require sacrifice and we need people standing up for them.”

“If they collaborate with me, it would agitate the Chinese businesses putting adverts on Twitter,” he said, pointing out that Twitter accepts advertising money from Chinese government propaganda outlets, such as Xinhua News, promoting their articles to millions of users across the world.

Badiucao is planning to launch a protest campaign over Twitter’s position on China — one of several new projects he is developing after the threats forced his break from public life. In refusing to keep quiet, he faces the risk that police will return to harass members of his family who remain on the Chinese mainland. That is a common tactic, he said. “They think maybe you are close to that person, so they can hurt that person in order to get you.”

Badiucao believes that he may never be able to return to China or its surrounding territories, unless the political situation in the country changes dramatically, which appears highly unlikely in the foreseeable future. Even thousands of miles away in Australia, where he has obtained citizenship, he says he does not feel safe and fears that his computer, phones, and internet connection have been subjected to repeated hacking attempts. As a consequence, he regularly changes his electronic devices and phone numbers. He is still unsure of how the Chinese government discovered his identity, leading him to question whether someone he knows may have exposed him. “Maybe somebody accidentally leaked,” he said, “or someone I contacted was compromised by the Chinese government and is spying for them.”

However it happened, Badiucao has now come to terms with the fact that his anonymity is gone, and he is ready to confront the consequences. “If finding my family does not work, they will try to find me personally, even if I am in Australia,” he said, referencing accusations that China has in the past kidnapped dissidents living overseas. “I’m not naive about it. I’m expecting a vendetta from the Chinese government. However, sometimes ideas require sacrifice and we need people standing up for them. I feel that I have to do this. If I don’t speak up and defend my own freedom of speech, I can no longer be an artist.”

The post This Chinese Artist Criticized Google and Xi Jinping. Now He’s Facing Government Harassment. appeared first on The Intercept.

Earlier this week, a reporter from Radio France and the co-founders of Paris-based investigative news organization Disclose were called in for questioning at the offices of the General Directorate for Internal Security, known as the DGSI. The agency is tasked with fighting terrorism, espionage, and other domestic threats, similar in function to the FBI in the United States.

The two news organizations published stories in April — together with The Intercept, Mediapart, ARTE Info, and Konbini News — that revealed the vast amount of French, British, and American military equipment sold to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and subsequently used by those nations to wage war in Yemen.

The stories — based on a secret document authored by France’s Directorate of Military Intelligence and obtained by the journalists at Disclose — highlighted that top officials in the French government had seemingly lied to the public about the role of French weapons in the war. They demonstrated the extent of Western nations’ complicity in the devastating conflict, which has killed or injured more than 17,900 civilians and triggered a famine that has taken the lives of an estimated 85,000 children.

The French government did not want the document to be made public, and officials were furious when its release made headlines around the world. Not long after it was published, Disclose’s co-founders Geoffrey Livolsi and Mathias Destal, along with Radio France reporter Benoît Collombat, were asked to attend a hearing at the DGSI’s headquarters in Levallois-Perret, a suburb northwest of Paris.

In rooms located four floors below ground level inside the heavily fortified, beige-colored DGSI building on Rue de Villiers, for an hour the journalists were asked about their work, their sources, and their posts on Facebook and Twitter. They declined to answer questions, citing their right to silence, and instead presented a statement about their journalism and their belief that publishing the document had served the public interest.

“They want to scare journalists and their sources away from revealing state secrets.”

Press freedom has been strongly protected in France for more than 130 years under the Press Law of 1881, which gives journalists a right to protect the confidentiality of their sources. The law also defines certain “press offenses” of which journalists may be accused — such as defamation — and outlines procedures for how these should be handled, through tribunals that can issue punishments, including fines and, in extreme cases, imprisonment.

But matters of state security are not included in the Press Law as a “press offense,” and the DGSI appears to have seized that loophole to accuse the Disclose and Radio France journalists of “compromising the secrecy of national defense” from the moment the classified document came into their possession. Under a 2009 French law that prohibits “attacks on national defense secrets,” a person commits a crime if they handle a classified document without authorization. There are no exceptions to this law for journalists, and there is no public-interest defense.

“They want to make an example of us because it’s the first time in France that there have been leaks like this,” Disclose co-founder Livolsi told The Intercept on Thursday, referring to the sensitivity of the document, which was prepared by French military analysts last September for a high-level briefing of President Emmanuel Macron at the Élysée Palace. “They want to scare journalists and their sources away from revealing state secrets.”

In a worst-case scenario, the reporters could face five years in prison and a €75,000 (around $83,900) penalty. The next stage of the case is still unclear. The DGSI could close it and let the journalists off with a warning. The case could also be handed off to a judge, who could conduct further investigations and possibly decide to take the case to a trial.

Virginie Marquet, a lawyer and board member of Disclose, represented Destal at one of the hearings at the DGSI on Tuesday. She is hopeful that the journalists will not face jail time. But she notes that the government appears to be pushing for a harsh punishment. Last week, Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly suggested in a public statement that Disclose had violated “all the rules and laws of our country,” adding: “When you disclose classified documents, you are exposed to penalties.”

Whatever the outcome, the DGSI’s treatment of the case has already sent a message. “There is a chilling effect,” said Marquet. “It’s a warning for every journalist: Don’t go into that kind of subject, don’t investigate this information.”

Paul Coppin, head of the legal desk at Reporters Without Borders, told The Intercept that he could not predict the outcome of the case because there has never been one like it. That journalists could be punished for handling classified documents — regardless of their public interest — was concerning, he added, especially given the ease with which the government can categorize any information as secret.

“It is very problematic,” Coppin said. “This reveals the weakening of procedural guarantees that journalists should benefit from in the exercise of their work. There should be a stronger framework [in France] to protect journalists in the course of their activities.”

France’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the DGSI, did not respond to a request for comment.

The post France Takes Unprecedented Action Against Reporters Who Published Secret Government Document appeared first on The Intercept.

In an interview with the BBC on Monday, Schmidt said that he wasn’t involved in decisions to build the censored search platform, code-named Dragonfly. But he insisted that there were “many benefits” to working with China and said he was an advocate of operating in the country because he believed that it could “help change China to be more open.”

As The Intercept first revealed in August, Google developed a prototype of the censored search engine that was designed to remove content that China’s ruling Communist Party regime deems sensitive. The search engine would have blacklisted thousands of words and phrases, including terms such as “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize” in Mandarin.

The revelations prompted a wave of protests inside and outside of Google, with employees, activists, and prominent lawmakers demanding an end to the project. Google subsequently stated that it had ceased work on Dragonfly and moved employees to new projects.

Prior to its public exposure, Google executives had worked hard to keep Dragonfly secret within the company. Only a few hundred of the company’s 88,000 workforce knew about it.

In his BBC interview, Schmidt was questioned on the level of secrecy around the plan and how it squared with Google’s commitments to transparency. The former CEO claimed in response that “certainly the people who were building all these products knew about it.”

A Google employee with knowledge of Dragonfly was angered by Schmidt’s remarks, characterizing them as “bullshit.” The source said that “probably 90 percent of engineers [in Google’s search department] had no idea [about Dragonfly] and were very upset when they learned that their work was contributing to this.”

A major complaint from Google employees about the plan for the censored search engine was that they felt the end uses of their work had been withheld from them. For instance, some employees discovered that they had been working on code or improvements to aspects of Google main search platform, which was then being implemented without their knowledge or approval into the censored version of search for China.

In a protest letter published last year, Google employees said that they did “not have the information required to make ethically-informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment.” They called for “more transparency, a seat at the table, and a commitment to clear and open processes,” adding, “Google employees need to know what we’re building.”

Schmidt served as Google CEO for a decade between 2001 and 2011. He still serves on parent company Alphabet’s board of directors, alongside co-founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and current CEO Sundar Pichai. Schmidt is expected to leave the board in June while remaining a technical adviser to the company.

A Google employee was angered by Schmidt’s remarks, characterizing them as “bullshit.”

During Schmidt’s tenure as CEO, in 2006, Google launched a search engine in China but pulled out of the country in 2010, due to concerns about Chinese government interference. At that time, Brin said the decision to stop operating search in the country was mainly about “opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent.”

Schmidt revealed in his BBC interview that he had argued against Brin — believing that the company should remain in China, despite the censorship requirements. He said he felt that it was better “to stay in China and help change China to be more open.”

Brin has previously said that he felt the same way for a period of time — that Google could help China embrace greater internet freedom. But he watched as the company, over a number of years, faced increasing censorship requests from the Chinese government. “Things started going downhill, especially after the Olympics [in Beijing in 2008],” Brin said in a 2010 interview. “And there’s been a lot more blocking going on since then. … [S]o the situation really took a turn for the worse.”

Today, according to analysts, the level of internet freedom in China has continued to degrade. The country’s government has ramped up constraints on the flow of information into the country. In 2016, the Communist Party regime passed a new cybersecurity law, which Human Rights Watch said “strengthens censorship, surveillance, and other controls over the internet.” The group noted that “internet control has reached new heights since President Xi Jinping assumed power in March 2013.”

Schmidt told the BBC that Google was no longer pursuing Dragonfly but couldn’t rule out that changing in the future. “I am no longer involved in the management of the company so I shouldn’t comment,” he said.

The post Google’s Censored Search Would Help China “Be More Open,” Said Ex-CEO Eric Schmidt appeared first on The Intercept.

Hikvision, whose technology the U.S. government recently banned federal agencies from purchasing, is generating millions of dollars in annual revenue selling its technology to British companies and organizations. At the same time, it has been helping to establish an oppressive surveillance state in the Xinjiang region of China, where the Uighur ethnic minorities have been held in secret internment camps.

British politicians are raising concerns about the technology — and are calling for an embargo on further purchases of it — on the grounds that Hikvision is complicit in human rights abuses and also represents a national security risk, as it is feared that Chinese intelligence agencies could potentially tap into camera feeds in sensitive locations. Some of the company’s cameras record audio and are connected to the internet, meaning that they can be monitored from anywhere in the world.

In January, the cameras were scheduled to be installed inside London’s Portcullis House, according to Adm. Lord Alan West, a member of the U.K. Parliament’s second chamber, the House of Lords. Portcullis House is an office building in Westminster used by more than 200 members of Parliament and 400 of their staff to carry out their daily work, which routinely involves discussion of confidential national security, economic, and foreign policy issues.

West told The Intercept that someone who was “concerned that this was happening” tipped him off about a contract that would equip the building with Hikvision surveillance equipment. He said he subsequently complained about the matter to authorities within the parliamentary estate.

“It seems to me to be extremely worrying — it’s rather like being able to get a Mata Hari into each office,” he said, referring to the Dutch exotic dancer who was accused of spying for Germany during World War I. “Are we sure we are happy with Chinese CCTV in members of Parliament’s offices, listening to what they say to their constituents, listening to what ministers say, filming the documents on their desks?”

A Parliament spokesperson denied the existence of a contract involving Hikvision and said that there was no plan to “install any additional cameras at Portcullis House this year.”

A source familiar with security on parts of the parliamentary estate, which, in addition to Portcullis House, consists of the Palace of Westminster, the Norman Shaw buildings, and Big Ben, told The Intercept that Hikvision’s equipment had “absolutely” been used there in the past. The source said they could not confirm whether any Hikvision cameras were currently active, as there are hundreds of cameras fitted both in and around all parliamentary and government buildings in the area.

“It’s rather like being able to get a Mata Hari into each office.”

It has previously been estimated that, throughout the U.K., there are more than 1.2 million Hikvision cameras. Procurement records and government contracts reviewed by The Intercept show that the company — which was 40% owned by China’s authoritarian Communist Party regime, as of June 2018 — has supplied its surveillance systems to a wide range of organizations and companies across the country.

The cameras have been installed widely in London, in boroughs including Hackney, Kensington, Chelsea, and Hammersmith and Fulham. They have been purchased by local government authorities in Guildford, South Kesteven, Thurrock, Stockton, North Tyneside, Aberdeenshire, Falkirk, West Suffolk, and Kent.

In Wales last year, police began placing the Chinese cameras in 17 towns. In Northern Ireland, Hikvision’s surveillance equipment has been installed inside more than 300 buses. The cameras have been fitted inside hospitals in Hampshire, Lancashire, Kent, Northampton, Cornwall, Cumbria, and Yorkshire. They have been set up at schools in Surrey, Devon, Birmingham, and at a university in Plymouth. The cameras have also been deployed commercially: in the Southgate shopping center in Bath, the Gallions Reach shopping park in London, and at Tesco supermarkets and Burger King fast food restaurants.

Hikvision’s marketing materials say that its cameras can be used with facial recognition software and linked to a centralized database of photographs. The technology can distinguish between known faces and strangers, and trigger alerts when an unknown person enters a building or office, the company claims. It says its corporate mission is to “work together to enhance safety and advance sustainable development around the world.”

In China, Hikvision has been helping the government implement a nationwide surveillance network named Skynet. In recent years, the effort has aggressively focused on the Xinjiang region, where the Communist Party is implementing a crackdown on ethnic Uighurs, a Muslim minority, under the pretext of countering terrorism.

In Xinjiang, an estimated 1 million Uighurs — including children, pregnant women, the elderly, and disabled people — have been held in internment camps. Within these secretive facilities, Uighurs are forced to undergo a “re-education” process that includes mandatory recitals of Communist Party political songs and speeches. Those who resist are said to face punishments, such as beatings and solitary confinement.

According to Human Rights Watch, Chinese authorities are “committing human rights abuses in Xinjiang on a scale unseen in the country in decades.” The group said in a 2018 report that one of the most disturbing aspects of the repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang involves mass surveillance systems.

“Xinjiang authorities conduct compulsory mass collection of biometric data, such as voice samples and DNA, and use artificial intelligence and big data to identify, profile, and track everyone in Xinjiang,” the report said. “The authorities have envisioned these systems as a series of ‘filters,’ picking out people with certain behavior or characteristics that they believe indicate a threat to the Communist Party’s rule.”

Since at least 2010, Hikvision has been helping to establish a massive network of cameras in Xinjiang that police are using to spy on ethnic minorities. In 2013, Hikvision’s public security manager, Qian Hao, boasted that the company’s technology had enabled security forces to track and profile people. “We can help preserve stability by seeing which family someone comes from, then persuading their relatives to stop them from harmful behavior, like with Falun Gong,” a banned spiritual group, Qian said.

“We must be vigilant of any risk that Hikvision or any company may pose to U.K. national security.”

As China has ramped up its crackdown in Xinjiang, Hikvision has reaped the financial rewards.

The company is reported to have have a stake in more than $1 billion in business in the region, including five contracts in 2017 alone that were worth about $277 million. Among those contracts were deals to provide surveillance systems to state agencies for use in the internment camps, as well as on Xinjiang’s streets and inside its mosques, schools, and offices.

Hikvision declined to comment for this story. The company has in the past tried to downplay its connection to the Chinese regime, portraying itself as an independent corporation. However, the company’s own financial records disclose that its controlling shareholder is a Chinese government-owned entity called the China Electronics Technology HIK Group.

In September 2018, Chinese government official Weng Jieming declared that Communist Party leadership “is integrated into the corporate governance structure” at Hikvision, according to a government press release translated by IPVM, a video surveillance trade publication. Weng praised the company, saying that it had “resolutely implemented the spirit of the important instructions” from the country’s president, Xi Jinping.

In the U.K., Hikvision does not supply its cameras directly to its customers; instead, it sells the equipment through a network of wholesalers and subcontractors. The company’s latest U.K. accounts, from 2017, show a gross annual profit of $2.62 million and a turnover of $6.55 million. Its total global sales revenue for the same year totaled $6.65 billion, according to its promotional materials.

Hikvision has three offices across the U.K. and last year announced a plan to launch a new research and development hub within its British headquarters, near London’s Heathrow airport. The research and development division is headed by Pu Shiliang, who is based in China, where he has also reportedly worked for the government’s Ministry of Public Security, a feared agency known for targeting activists and political opponents.

The U.K. is an attractive prospect for any company working in the security industry. It is one of the most surveilled countries in the world, with up to an estimated 6 million cameras, one for every 11 people, throughout its towns and cities. Hikvision has managed to tap into the lucrative British market by undercutting its European competitors by a substantial margin. According to government procurement documents, a basic Hikvision surveillance system could be purchased for £1,000 ($1,310). In contrast, the cost was £3,000 ($3,930) for a system of similar specification made by Germany’s Bosch.

The British government has expressed concerns about the Chinese government’s involvement in the country’s critical infrastructure. In December, defense secretary Gavin Williamson said he would be looking “very closely” at the role of Chinese firm Huawei in upgrading the U.K.’s mobile networks from 4G to 5G. “We’ve got to recognize the fact … that the Chinese state does sometimes act in a malign way,” he said. However, Hikvision’s growing presence in the U.K. has not attracted the same level of scrutiny.

In the U.S., Hikvision has not had such an easy ride. In August of last year, an amendment was added to the National Defense Authorization Act that banned the U.S. military and government from purchasing Hikvision technology. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., who authored the amendment, stated that the Chinese government was trying to “target the United States” by expanding the role of Chinese companies in the U.S. domestic communications and public safety sectors. “Video surveillance and security equipment sold by Chinese companies exposes the U.S. government to significant vulnerabilities,” she said, “and my amendment will ensure that China cannot create a video surveillance network within federal agencies.” The ban was eventually signed into U.S. law.

Karen Lee, a member of Parliament for the U.K.’s Labour Party, told The Intercept that she was urging the British government to consider boycotting Hikvision products, especially for use in publicly owned buildings. “At a time when digital interference in foreign political processes is increasingly being used to destabilize other countries, we must be vigilant of any risk that Hikvision or any company may pose to U.K. national security,” Lee said.

More evidence is needed to prove that Hikvision is implicated in Chinese government espionage, Lee added. “Regardless, it is unacceptable that a company which has been instrumental in human rights abuses is providing equipment to publicly owned U.K. agencies,” she said. “Divestment has a proud history at the center of civil rights campaigns, from apartheid South Africa to the American civil rights movement. The U.K. must send a clear message that we will do no business with any company that facilitates mass human rights abuse and ethnic repression.”

The post Cameras Linked to Chinese Government Stir Alarm in U.K. Parliament appeared first on The Intercept.

A small group of top managers at the internet giant are conducting a “performance review” of the controversial effort to build the search platform, known as Dragonfly, which was designed to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest.

Performance reviews at Google are undertaken annually to evaluate employees’ output and development. They are usually carried out in an open, peer review-style process: Workers grade each other’s projects and the results are then assessed by management, who can reward employees with promotion if they are deemed ready to progress at the company.

In the case of Dragonfly, however, the peer review aspect has been removed, subverting the normal procedure. In a move described as highly unusual by two Google sources, executives set up a separate group of closed “review committees,” comprised of senior managers who had all previously been briefed about the China search engine.

The existence of the Dragonfly review committees has not been disclosed to rank-and-file Google employees, except for the few who have been evaluated by the committees because they worked on China search. Fewer than a dozen top managers at the company are said to be looped in on the review, which has involved studying documents and technical work related to Dragonfly.

“Management has decided to commit to keeping this stuff secret,” said a source with knowledge of the review. They are “holding any Dragonfly-specific documents out of [employees’] review tools, so that promotion is decided only by a committee that is read in on Dragonfly.”

“Management has decided to commit to keeping this stuff secret.”

Executives likely feared that following the normal, more open performance review process with Dragonfly would have allowed workers across the company to closely scrutinize it, according to two Google sources.

If some of the documents about Dragonfly had been made more widely accessible inside the company, according to the two sources, it would probably have led to further controversy about the project, which ignited furious protests and resignations after it was first exposed by The Intercept in August last year.

The decision to carry out the review in secret, however, is itself likely to stoke anger inside the company. During the protests over Dragonfly last year, a key complaint from employees was that the China plan lacked transparency and went against the company’s traditionally open workplace culture. Until it was publicly exposed, knowledge about Dragonfly had been restricted to a few hundred of Google’s 88,000 employees — around 0.35 percent of the total workforce.

Facing pressure from both inside and outside the company, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told his staff during an August crisis meeting that he would “definitely be transparent [about Dragonfly] as we get closer to actually having a plan of record. We definitely do plan to engage more and talk more.”

But Google employees told The Intercept this week that company bosses have consistently refused to provide them with information about Dragonfly — leaving them in the dark about the status of the project and the company’s broader plans for China. 

Late last year, amid a firestorm of criticism, Google executives moved engineers away from working on the censored search engine and said publicly that there were no current plans to launch it. Earlier this month, however, The Intercept revealed that some Google employees were concerned that work on the censored search engine remained ongoing, as parts of the platform still appeared to be under development. Google subsequently denied that Dragonfly remained in progress, insisting in a statement that there was “no work being undertaken on such a project. Team members have moved to new projects.”

Google previously launched a search engine in China in 2006, but pulled out of the country in 2010, citing concerns about Chinese government interference. At that time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the decision to stop operating search in the country was principally about “opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent.”

Dragonfly represented a dramatic reversal of that position. The search engine, which Google planned to launch as an app for Android and iOS devices, was designed to comply with strict censorship rules imposed by China’s ruling Communist Party regime, enabling surveillance of people’s searches while also blocking thousands of terms, such as “Nobel prize,” “human rights,” and “student protest.”

More than 60 human rights groups and 22 U.S. lawmakers wrote to Google criticizing the project. In February, Amnesty International met with Google to reiterate its concerns about the China plan. “The lack of transparency around the development of Dragonfly is very disturbing,” Anna Bacciarelli, an Amnesty researcher, told The Intercept earlier this month. “We continue to call on Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai to publicly confirm that it has dropped Dragonfly for good, not just ‘for now.’”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Google Is Conducting a Secret “Performance Review” of Its Censored China Search Project appeared first on The Intercept.

Late last year, bosses moved engineers away from working on the controversial project, known as Dragonfly, and said that there were no current plans to launch it. However, a group of employees at the company was unsatisfied with the lack of information from leadership on the issue — and took matters into their own hands.

The group has identified ongoing work on a batch of code that is associated with the China search engine, according to three Google sources. The development has stoked anger inside Google offices, where many of the company’s 88,000 workforce previously protested against plans to launch the search engine, which was designed to censor broad categories of information associated with human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest.

In December, The Intercept reported that an internal dispute and political pressure on Google had stopped development of Dragonfly. Google bosses had originally planned to launch it between January and April of this year. But they changed course after the outcry over the plan and indicated to employees who were working on the project that it was being shelved.

Google’s Caesar Sengupta, an executive with a leadership role on Dragonfly, told engineers and others who were working on the censored search engine in mid-December that they would be allocated new projects funded by different “cost centers” of the company’s budget. In a message marked “confidential – do not forward,” which has been newly obtained by The Intercept, Sengupta told the Dragonfly workers:

Over the past few quarters, we have tackled different aspects of what search would look like in China. While we’ve made progress in our understanding of the market and user needs, many unknowns remain and currently we have no plans to launch.

Back in July we said at our all hands that we did not feel we could make much progress right now. Since then, many people have effectively rolled off the project while others have been working on adjacent areas such as improving our Chinese language capabilities that also benefit users globally. Thank you for all of your hard work here.

As we finalize business planning for 2019, our priority is for you to be productive and have clear objectives, so we have started to align cost centers to better reflect what people are actually working on.

Thanks again — and your leads will follow up with you on next steps.

Sources with knowledge of Dragonfly said staff who were working on the project were not told to immediately cease their efforts. Rather, they were instructed to finish up the jobs they were doing and then they would be allocated new work on other teams. Some of those who were working on Dragonfly were moved into different areas, focusing on projects related to Google’s search services in India, Indonesia, Russia, the Middle East, and Brazil.

“I just don’t know where the leadership is coming from anymore.”

But Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, refused both publicly and privately to completely rule out launching the censored search engine in the future. This led a group of concerned employees — who were themselves not directly involved with Dragonfly — to closely monitor the company’s internal systems for information about the project and circulate their findings on an internal messaging list.

The employees have been keeping tabs on repositories of code that are stored on Google’s computers, which they say is linked to Dragonfly. The code was created for two smartphone search apps — named Maotai and Longfei — that Google planned to roll out in China for users of Android and iOS mobile devices.

The employees identified about 500 changes to the code in December, and more than 400 changes to the code between January and February of this year, which they believe indicates continued development of aspects of Dragonfly. (Since August 2017, the number of code changes has varied between about 150 to 500 each month, one source said.) The employees say there are still some 100 workers allocated to the “cost center” associated with Dragonfly, meaning that the company is maintaining a budget for potential ongoing work on the plan.

Google sources with knowledge of Dragonfly said that the code changes could possibly be attributed to employees who have continued this year to wrap up aspects of the work they were doing to develop the Chinese search platform.

“I still believe the project is dead, but we’re still waiting for a declaration from Google that censorship is unacceptable and that they will not collaborate with governments in the oppression of their people,” said one source familiar with Dragonfly.

The lack of clarity from management has resulted in Google losing skilled engineers and developers. In recent months, several Google employees have resigned in part due to Dragonfly and leadership’s handling of the project. The Intercept knows of six staff at the company, including two in senior positions, who have quit since December, and three others who are planning to follow them out the door.

Colin McMillen, who worked as a software engineer at Google for nine years, quit the company in early February. He told The Intercept that he had been concerned about Dragonfly and other “ethically dubious” decisions, such as Google’s multimillion-dollar severance packages for executives accused of sexual harassment.

“I think they are going to try it again in a year or two.”

Prior to leaving the company, McMillen said he and his colleagues had “strong indications that something is still happening” with Google search in China. But they were left confused about the status of the China plan because upper management would not discuss it.

“I just don’t know where the leadership is coming from anymore,” he said. “They have really closed down communication and become significantly less transparent.”

In 2006, Google launched a censored search engine in China, but stopped operating the service in the country in 2010, taking a clear anti-censorship position. At the time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin declared that he wanted to show that the company was “opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent.”

Pichai, Google’s CEO since 2015, has taken a different position. He has a strong desire to launch search again in China — viewing the censorship as a worthwhile trade-off to gain access to the country’s more than 800 million internet users — and he may now be waiting for the controversy around Dragonfly to die down before quietly resurrecting the plan.

“Right now it feels unlaunchable, but I don’t think they are canceling outright,” McMillen said. “I think they are putting it on the back burner and are going to try it again in a year or two with a different code name or approach.”

Anna Bacciarelli, a technology researcher at Amnesty International, called on Google “to publicly confirm that it has dropped Dragonfly for good, not just ‘for now.’” Bacciarelli told The Intercept that Amnesty’s Secretary General Kumi Naidoo had visited Google’s Mountain View headquarters in California last week to reiterate concerns over Dragonfly and “the apparent disregard for transparency and accountability around the project.”

If Google is still developing the censored search engine, Bacciarelli said, “it’s not only failing on its human rights responsibilities but ignoring the hundreds of Google employees, more than 70 human rights organizations, and hundreds of thousands of campaign supporters around the world who have all called on the company to respect human rights and drop Dragonfly.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Google Employees Uncover Ongoing Work on Censored China Search appeared first on The Intercept.

But the group need not have packed their bags. Twelve of the defendants received community orders of 12 months with 100 hours of unpaid work and a 12-month exclusion from Stansted Airport, the London airport where their protest took place. Due to health reasons, one of the 12 received a sentence with 20 days of rehabilitation in place of unpaid work. The other three defendants, who had previous convictions of aggravated trespass, received nine-month prison sentences with suspensions of 18 months, meaning they will not be imprisoned unless they commit another offense within that time. They also received 100-250 hours of unpaid work, varying due to personal circumstances, and the same exclusion as their fellow defendants.

As the sentencing hearing ended, the defendants rose to hug. Relief spread through the public gallery, which was so small that it failed to accommodate the family and friends of all 15 defendants (parents were given priority). Outside, hundreds of supporters gathered. People danced in the street; camerapersons trained their lenses on the doors, anxious to capture the activists’ exit.

The Stansted 15 addressed the crowd with a prepared statement: “These terror convictions and the 10-week trial that led to them are an injustice that has profound implications for our lives. The convictions will drastically limit our ability to work, travel, and take part in everyday life. Yet people seeking asylum in this country face worse than this: They are placed in destitution, and their lives in limbo, by the Home Office’s brutal system every single day.”

The Crown Prosecution Service released a statement saying it never suggested that the defendants were terrorists.

The activists aimed to prevent the deportees from being sent back to places where they faced threats of harm and death.

On March 28, 2017, the 15 defendants — members of the anti-deportation groups End Deportations and Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, whose ages ranged from 27 to 44 years old — cut a hole through a fence at Stansted Airport and approached a Titan Airways Boeing 767. Splitting into two groups, some locked themselves around the plane’s front wheel, while others constructed a pyramid structure out of scaffolding poles under the plane’s left wing and then locked themselves around it.

The flight had been chartered by the Home Office — the government department responsible for immigration, security, and law and order — and was scheduled to deport migrants and asylum-seekers back to Nigeria and Ghana. Instead, the plane remained immobile until the next morning. In grounding the flight, the activists aimed to prevent the deportees from being sent back to places where they faced threats of harm and death. They also wanted to draw attention to the government’s practice of deporting people using private charter flights, where security personnel often outnumber deportees, there is little notice given to asylum-seekers in advance of their deportation, and reports tell of excessive restraint used on passengers.

Originally accused of aggravated trespass, the charges against the activists were later upgraded to intentional disruption of services at an aerodrome, which falls under the “endangering safety at aerodromes” section of the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990. Created to fight terrorism, the law comes with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment and had never before been used against peaceful protesters. Amnesty International, concerned about the use of a terrorism-related charge against nonviolent activists, observed the 10-week trial. In December, the Stansted 15 were found guilty, the verdict interpreted by many as a sign of the government criminalizing protest.

The hearing made clear the high cost of both the long trial and the conviction. The courtroom heard of loss of job and educational opportunities and of depression suffered by numerous defendants, including Emma Hughes, who had given birth five weeks earlier; of Nathan Clack’s fear of no longer being able to visit his American partner if the conviction were to cause U.S. authorities to refuse him entry; of how Melanie Strickland, in court against medical advice, was hospitalized for a sepsis-related emergency a week prior and was scheduled to have abdominal surgery the next day.

Given the gravity of the charge, a prison-free sentence hardly means a punishment-free future. In fact, their anxieties were well-founded, according to Raj Chada, a partner from Hodge Jones & Allen, who represented all 15 activists. “They may find it difficult to go into the United States or to other countries,” Chada said. “Some of them have very responsible jobs that will require notification to the authorities.”

They are now appealing, although it may be months before the case reaches the Court of Appeals. Their arguments are manifold: that the case should not have proceeded because it was an inappropriate charge; that Judge Christopher Morgan should have permitted the necessity defense, which states that the action was justified because it was done to prevent harm; that Morgan misinterpreted the law; and that he may have been biased in his summing up of the case to the jury.

How this case, and its use of a terrorism-related law against nonviolent activists, will impact the charges brought against activists in the future remains unclear. And yet, as the courtroom’s packed press section and the mass of supporters in the street showed, many are taking note.

“When a country uses draconian terror legislation against people for peaceful protest, snatches others from their homes in dawn raids, incarcerates them without time limit, and forces them onto planes in the middle of the night, due to take them to places where their lives might be at risk, something is very seriously wrong,” said the Stansted 15 in a statement issued on Wednesday. “Every single one of us should be very worried about our democracy and our future.”

The post Activists Avoid Jail in U.K. After Blocking Plane From Deporting Migrants appeared first on The Intercept.

The new site, AppleCensorship.com, allows users to check which apps are not accessible to people in China through Apple’s app store, indicating those that have been banned. It was created by researchers at GreatFire.org, an organization that monitors Chinese government internet censorship.

In late 2017, Apple admitted to U.S. senators that it had removed from its app store in China more than 600 “virtual private network” apps that allow users to evade censorship and online spying. But the company never disclosed which specific apps it removed — nor did it reveal other services it had pulled from its app store at the behest of China’s authoritarian government.

In addition to the hundreds of VPN apps, Apple is currently preventing its users in China from downloading apps from news organizations, including the New York Times, Radio Free Asia, Tibetan News, and Voice of Tibet. It is also blocking censorship circumvention tools like Tor and Psiphon; Google’s search app and Google Earth; an app called Bitter Winter, which provides information about human rights and religious freedoms in China; and an app operated by the Central Tibetan Authority, which provides information about Tibetan human rights and social issues.

Some bans – such as those of certain VPN apps and the Times – have received media coverage in the past, but many never generate news headlines. Charlie Smith, a co-founder of GreatFire.org, told The Intercept that the group was motivated to launch the website because “Apple provides little transparency into what it censors in its app store. Most developers find out their app has been censored after they see a drop in China traffic and try to figure out if there is a problem. We wanted to bring transparency to what they are censoring.”

“We wanted to bring transparency to what they are censoring.”

Smith, who said that the website was still in a beta phase of early development, added that until now, it was not easy to check exactly which apps Apple had removed from its app stores in different parts of the world. For example, he said, “now we can see that the top 100 VPN apps in the U.S. app store are all not available in the China app store.”

The site is not able to distinguish between apps taken down due to requests from the Chinese government because they violate legal limits on free expression versus those removed because they violate other laws, such as those regulating gambling. However, it is possible to determine from the content of each app – and whether it continues to be available in the U.S. or elsewhere – the likely reason for its removal.

Radio Free Asia, for instance, has been subject to censorship for decades in China. The Washington, D.C.-based organization, which is funded by the U.S. government, regularly reports on human rights abuses in China and has had its broadcasts jammed and blocked in the country since the late 1990s. That censorship has also extended to the internet – now with the support of Apple.

Rohit Mahajan, a spokesman for Radio Free Asia, told The Intercept that Apple had informed the organization in December last year that one of its apps was removed from the app store in China because it did not meet “legal requirements” there. “There was no option to appeal, as far as we could discern,” said Mahajan.

Libby Liu, Radio Free Asia’s president, added that “shutting down avenues for credible, outside news organizations is a loss – not just for us, but for the millions who rely on our reports and updates for a different picture than what’s presented in state-controlled media. I would hope that Western companies would be committed to Western values when it comes to making decisions that could impact that access.”

An Apple spokesperson declined to address removals of specific apps from China, but pointed to the company’s app store review guidelines, which state: “Apps must comply with all legal requirements in any location where you make them available.” The spokesperson said that Apple, in its next transparency report, is planning to release information on government requests to remove apps from its app store.

The Chinese government expects Western companies to make concessions before it permits them to gain access to the country’s lucrative market of more than 800 million internet users. The concessions include compliance with the ruling Communist Party’s sweeping censorship and surveillance regime. In recent years, the Chinese state has beefed up its repressive powers. It has introduced a new “data localization” law, for instance, which forces all internet and communication companies to store Chinese users’ data on the country’s mainland — making it more accessible to Chinese authorities.

In accordance with the data localization law, Apple agreed to a deal with state-owned China Telecom to control and store Chinese users’ iCloud data. Apple claims that it retains control of the encryption keys to the data, ensuring that people’s photographs and other private information cannot be accessed by the Chinese state. However, human rights groups remain concerned. Amnesty International has previously stated, “By handing over its China iCloud service to a local company without sufficient safeguards, the Chinese authorities now have potentially unfettered access to all Apple’s Chinese customers’ iCloud data. Apple knows it, yet has not warned its customers in China of the risks.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook has presented himself as a defender of users’ privacy. During a speech in October last year, Cook declared, “We at Apple believe that privacy is a fundamental human right.” It is unclear how Cook reconciles that sentiment with Apple’s removal of privacy-enhancing software from its app store in China, which helps ensure that the country’s government can continue to monitor its citizens and crack down on opponents. Cook appears to have viewed compliance with Chinese censorship and surveillance as worthwhile compromises. “We would obviously rather not remove the apps,” he said in 2017, “but like we do in other countries we follow the law wherever we do business. … We’re hopeful that over time the restrictions we’re seeing are lessened, because innovation really requires freedom to collaborate and communicate.”

The post New Site Exposes How Apple Censors Apps in China appeared first on The Intercept.

On Friday, a coalition of Chinese, Tibetan, Uighur, and human rights groups organized demonstrations outside Google’s offices in the U.S., U.K., Canada, India, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Sweden, Switzerland, and Denmark.

Google designed the Chinese search engine, code-named Dragonfly, to blacklist information about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government.

In December, The Intercept revealed that an internal dispute had forced Google to shut down a data analysis system that it was using to develop the search engine. This had “effectively ended” the project, sources said, because the company’s engineers no longer had the tools they needed to build it.

But Google bosses have not publicly stated that they will cease development of Dragonfly. And the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai has refused to rule out potentially launching the search engine some time in the future, though he has insisted that there are no current plans to do so. The organizers of Friday’s protests — which were timed to coincide with Internet Freedom Day — said that they would continue to demonstrate “until Google executives confirm that Project Dragonfly has been canceled, once and for all.”

Google “should be connecting the world through the sharing of information, not facilitating human rights abuses by a repressive government determined to crush all forms of peaceful online dissent,” said Gloria Montgomery, director at Tibet Society UK. “Google’s directors must urgently take heed of calls from employees and tens of thousands of global citizens demanding that they immediately halt project Dragonfly. If they don’t, Google risks irreversible damage to its reputation.”

“Google risks irreversible damage to its reputation.”

In August last year, 170 Tibet groups sent a letter to Pichai, stating that the human rights situation in China had worsened in recent years and that Dragonfly would “legitimize the repressive regime of the Chinese government and support the limiting of civil and political freedoms and promoting [of] distorted information.” Pichai did not issue any response, which the groups said has only heightened their concerns. (Tibet is governed as an autonomous region of China; activists have said that the Chinese government routinely violates human rights there, engaging in political and religious repression.)

Google has faced protests over Dragonfly from all corners. Human rights groups, U.S. senators from both major political parties, Vice President Mike Pence, and the company’s own employees and shareholders have formed an unlikely alliance in opposition to the plan.

In recent weeks, pressure on Google has continued to mount. On January 3, prominent Google engineer Liz Fong-Jones announced she would be resigning from the internet giant after 11 years. Fong-Jones was a vocal critic of Dragonfly and other controversial Google initiatives, such as Project Maven, the company’s contract to develop artificial intelligence for U.S. military drones. She said she had decided that she could no longer work for Google because she was dissatisfied with its direction and “lack of accountability and oversight.”

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Google was blasted by a group of 49 investors said to represent some $700 billion in assets. Citing Dragonfly and other recent scandals in Silicon Valley, the investors called on Google, Apple, Facebook, and other tech giants to “respect users’ right to privacy and freedom of expression.”

Without the necessary oversight and due diligence in these areas, the investors said, companies “may cause or contribute to a wide range of human rights abuses affecting billions of people worldwide.” The investors called on the companies to adhere to internationally recognized human rights laws and standards, and said the tech giants should implement the principles set out by the Global Network Initiative, a digital rights organization.

Google employees who worked on Dragonfly previously told The Intercept that company executives brushed aside human rights concerns during development of the search engine and related smartphone apps. In December, the internet giant sought to address some of these criticisms by making changes to its internal review processes. The company’s global affairs chief, Kent Walker, wrote in a blog post that the company had introduced a new ethics training course for employees and would establish a new group of “user researchers, social scientists, ethicists, human rights specialists, policy and privacy advisers, and legal experts” to assess new projects, products, and deals.

Three Google employees told The Intercept that they were skeptical about the new process, however. They each pointed out that, according to Walker’s blog post, “the most complex and difficult issues” would be left to a “council of senior executives” — meaning that the balance of power on controversial projects would remain with a small handful of company bosses, with rank-and-file employees still largely sidelined.

“It’s superficial,” one current Google engineer told The Intercept. “We still need more accountability, more transparency, and a seat at the table when it comes to the big decisions — otherwise there will be nothing to stop projects like Dragonfly from being railroaded through again in the future.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Google Faces Renewed Protests and Criticism Over China Search Project appeared first on The Intercept.

The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

The dispute began in mid-August, when the The Intercept revealed that Google employees working on Dragonfly had been using a Beijing-based website to help develop blacklists for the censored search engine, which was designed to block out broad categories of information related to democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest, in accordance with strict rules on censorship in China that are enforced by the country’s authoritarian Communist Party government.

The Beijing-based website, 265.com, is a Chinese-language web directory service that claims to be “China’s most used homepage.” Google purchased the site in 2008 from Cai Wensheng, a billionaire Chinese entrepreneur. 265.com provides its Chinese visitors with news updates, information about financial markets, horoscopes, and advertisements for cheap flights and hotels. It also has a function that allows people to search for websites, images, and videos. However, search queries entered on 265.com are redirected to Baidu, the most popular search engine in China and Google’s main competitor in the country. As The Intercept reported in August, it appears that Google has used 265.com as a honeypot for market research, storing information about Chinese users’ searches before sending them along to Baidu.

According to two Google sources, engineers working on Dragonfly obtained large datasets showing queries that Chinese people were entering into the 265.com search engine. At least one of the engineers obtained a key needed to access an “application programming interface,” or API, associated with 265.com, and used it to harvest search data from the site. Members of Google’s privacy team, however, were kept in the dark about the use of 265.com — a serious breach of company protocol.

Several groups of engineers have now been moved off of Dragonfly completely and told to shift their attention away from China.

The engineers used the data they pulled from 265.com to learn about the kinds of things that people located in mainland China routinely search for in Mandarin. This helped them to build a prototype of Dragonfly. The engineers used the sample queries from 265.com, for instance, to review lists of websites Chinese people would see if they typed the same word or phrase into Google. They then used a tool they called “BeaconTower” to check whether any websites in the Google search results would be blocked by China’s internet censorship system, known as the Great Firewall. Through this process, the engineers compiled a list of thousands of banned websites, which they integrated into the Dragonfly search platform so that it would purge links to websites prohibited in China, such as those of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and British news broadcaster BBC.

Under normal company procedure, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source. Members of the privacy team confronted the executives responsible for managing Dragonfly. Following a series of discussions, two sources said, Google engineers were told that they were no longer permitted to continue using the 265.com data to help develop Dragonfly, which has since had severe consequences for the project.

“The 265 data was integral to Dragonfly,” said one source. “Access to the data has been suspended now, which has stopped progress.”

In recent weeks, teams working on Dragonfly have been told to use different datasets for their work. They are no longer gathering search queries from mainland China and are instead now studying “global Chinese” queries that are entered into Google from people living in countries such as the United States and Malaysia; those queries are qualitatively different from searches originating from within China itself, making it virtually impossible for the Dragonfly team to hone the accuracy of results. Significantly, several groups of engineers have now been moved off of Dragonfly completely, and told to shift their attention away from China to instead work on projects related to India, Indonesia, Russia, the Middle East and Brazil.

Records show that 265.com is still hosted on Google servers, but its physical address is listed under the name of the “Beijing Guxiang Information and Technology Co.,” which has an office space on the third floor of a tower building in northwest Beijing’s Haidian district. 265.com is operated as a Google subsidiary, but unlike most Google-owned websites — such as YouTube and Google.com — it is not blocked in China and can be freely accessed by people in the country using any standard internet browser.

The internal dispute at Google over the 265.com data access is not the first time important information related to Dragonfly has been withheld from the company’s privacy team. The Intercept reported in November that privacy and security employees working on the project had been shut out of key meetings and felt that senior executives had sidelined them. Yonatan Zunger, formerly a 14-year veteran of Google and one of the leading engineers at the company, worked on Dragonfly for several months last year and said the project was shrouded in extreme secrecy and handled in a “highly unusual” way from the outset. Scott Beaumont, Google’s leader in China and a key architect of the Dragonfly project, “did not feel that the security, privacy, and legal teams should be able to question his product decisions,” according to Zunger, “and maintained an openly adversarial relationship with them — quite outside the Google norm.”

Last week, Pichai, Google’s CEO, appeared before Congress, where he faced questions on Dragonfly. Pichai stated that “right now” there were no plans to launch the search engine, though refused to rule it out in the future. Google had originally aimed to launch Dragonfly between January and April 2019. Leaks about the plan and the extraordinary backlash that ensued both internally and externally appear to have forced company executives to shelve it at least in the short term, two sources familiar with the project said.

Google did not respond to requests for comment.

The post Google’s Secret China Project “Effectively Ended” After Internal Confrontation appeared first on The Intercept.

During a hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee, Pichai faced sustained questions over the China plan, known as Dragonfly, which would blacklist broad categories of information about democracy, human rights, and peaceful protest.

The hearing began with an opening statement from Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who said launching a censored search engine in China would “strengthen China’s system of surveillance and repression.” McCarthy questioned whether it was the role of American companies to be “instruments of freedom or instruments of control.”

Pichai read prepared remarks, stating “even as we expand into new markets, we never forget our American roots.” He added: “I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way. To do otherwise would go against our core principles and our business interests.”

The lawmakers questioned Pichai on a broad variety of subjects. Several Republicans on the committee complained that Google displayed too many negative stories about them in its search results, and claimed that there was “bias against conservatives” on the platform. They also asked about recent revelations of data leaks affecting millions of Google users, Android location tracking, and Google’s work to combat white supremacist content on YouTube.

It was not until Pichai began to face questions on China that he began to look at times uncomfortable.

Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., told Pichai that the Dragonfly plan seemed to be “completely inconsistent” with Google’s recently launched artificial intelligence principles, which state that the company will not “design or deploy” technologies whose purpose “contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

“It’s hard to imagine you could operate in the Chinese market under the current government framework and maintain a commitment to universal values, such as freedom of expression and personal privacy,” Cicilline said.

McCarthy questioned whether it was the role of American companies to be “instruments of freedom or instruments of control.”

Pichai repeatedly insisted that Dragonfly was an “internal effort” and that Google currently had “no plans to launch a search service in China.” Asked to confirm that the company would not launch “a tool for surveillance and censorship in China,” Pichai declined to answer, instead saying that he was committed to “providing users with information, and so we always — we think it’s ideal to explore possibilities. … We’ll be very thoughtful, and we will engage widely as we make progress.”

Pichai’s claim that the company does not have a plan to launch the search engine in China contradicted a leaked transcript from a private meeting inside the company. In the transcript, the company’s search chief Ben Gomes discussed an aim to roll out the service between January and April 2019. For Pichai’s statement to Congress to be truthful, there is only one possibility: that the company has put the brakes on Dragonfly since The Intercept first exposed the project in August.

During a separate exchange, Rep. Keith Rothfus, R-Pa., probed Pichai further on China. Rothfus asked Pichai how many months the company had been working to develop the censored search engine and how many employees were involved. Pichai seemed caught off guard and stumbled with his response. “We have had the project underway for a while,” he said, admitting that “at one point, we had over 100 people on it.” (According to sources who worked on Dragonfly, there have been closer to 300 people developing the plan.)

Rep. Tom Marino, R-Pa., quizzed Pichai on what user information the company would share with Chinese authorities. Pichai did not directly answer, stating, “We would look at what the conditions are to operate … [and we would] explore a wide range of possibilities.” Pichai said that he would be “transparent” with lawmakers on the company’s China plan going forward. He did not acknowledge that Dragonfly would still be secret — and he would not have been discussing it in Congress — had it not been for the whistleblowers inside the company who decided to leak information about the project.

At one point during the hearing, the proceedings were interrupted by a protester who entered the room carrying a placard that showed the Google logo altered to look like a China flag. The man was swiftly removed by Capitol Police. A handful of Tibetan and Uighur activists gathered in the hall outside the hearing, where they held a banner that stated “stop Google censorship.”

“We are protesting Google CEO Sundar Pichai to express our grave concern over Google’s plan to launch Project Dragonfly, a censored search app in China which will help Chinese government’s brutal human right abuses,” said Dorjee Tseten, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet. “We strongly urge Google to immediately drop Project Dragonfly. With this project, Google is serving to legitimize the repressive regime of the Chinese government and authorities to engage in censorship and surveillance.”

Earlier on Tuesday, more than 60 leading human rights groups sent a letter to Pichai calling on him to cancel the Dragonfly project. If the plan proceeds, the groups wrote, “there is a real risk that Google would directly assist the Chinese government in arresting or imprisoning people simply for expressing their views online, making the company complicit in human rights violations.”

The post Google CEO Hammered by Members of Congress on China Censorship Plan appeared first on The Intercept.

Known as the Stansted 15, the defendants had all pleaded not guilty to the charge, which falls under the United Kingdom’s Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990, an obscure law intended to fight terrorism. The activists were originally charged with aggravated trespass, but that charge was later upgraded to intentional disruption of services at an aerodrome — under the “endangering safety at an aerodrome” section of the act — and seen by many as a disproportionate response to peaceful protest. Now, the guilty verdict has sent a chilling message to those who may wish to follow in the Stansted 15’s footsteps. Amnesty International, which had been observing the trial, tweeted, “The rights and freedoms of all of us are being eroded. The UK should not be targeting human rights defenders in this way.”

In a statement released minutes after the verdict was announced, the defendants wrote, “We are guilty of nothing more than intervening to prevent harm. The real crime is the government’s cowardly, inhumane and barely legal deportation flights and the unprecedented use of terror law to crack down on peaceful protest. We must challenge this shocking use of draconian legislation, and continue to demand an immediate end to these secretive deportation charter flights and a full independent public inquiry into the government’s ‘hostile environment’.”

The Crown Prosecution Service published a press release about the verdict, outlining the disruption to airport operations, such as delayed and rerouted flights, caused by the Stansted 15’s action. Judith Reed, a deputy chief crown prosecutor, stated, “The [Crown Prosecution Service] worked with the police to build a strong case which reflected the criminality of the defendant’s actions, regardless of their motivation.” Tony Badenoch, who represented the prosecution in court, declined to comment.

“We are guilty of nothing more than intervening to prevent harm.”

On March 28, 2017, the 15 activists, members of anti-deportation groups End Deportations and Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, cut a hole through Stansted Airport’s perimeter fence and climbed through. Once inside airport grounds, they headed toward a Titan Airways Boeing 767 and broke into two groups. One intended to lock themselves around the plane’s front wheel with double-layered pipes; the other, to construct a two-meter pyramid structure out of scaffolding poles under the plane’s left wing and then lock themselves around it.

The plane had been chartered by the Home Office, the government department responsible for immigration, security, and law and order, and was set to fly migrants and asylum-seekers back to Nigeria and Ghana later that night. Instead, it remained in place until the next morning, when police officers managed to remove all of the activists. In grounding the flight, the activists aimed to prevent the deportees from being sent back to places where they faced threats of harm and even death; they also wanted to draw attention to the government’s practice of deporting people via private charter flights, where security personnel often outnumber deportees, there is little notice given to asylum-seekers in advance, and reports tell of excessive restraint used on passengers.

Most of the people scheduled to be on that flight were eventually placed on other flights and deported back to their countries of origin. However, the Stansted 15’s action also allowed additional time for some of the deportees’ asylum applications to be reviewed or for decisions to be appealed. As of this past July, 11 people scheduled for that flight remained in the U.K. According to the activists, two have been found to be victims of human trafficking and at least one has since been granted indefinite leave to remain in the country.

In an anonymous piece written by one of the deportees scheduled for that March 28 flight and published by The Guardian right after the verdict came down, a man explains how the Stansted 15 changed his life, giving him “a chance to appeal to the authorities over my deportation — a case that I won on two separate occasions, following a Home Office counter-appeal.” More importantly, he wrote, it also allowed him to be in the U.K. for the birth of his daughter.

This was precisely what the activists had hoped for when they cut a hole in Stansted’s fence and laid down on the tarmac below the Titan plane. And it was this goal of preventing harm that, they argue, justified their actions, regardless of any laws they may have broken in the process — a defense that Judge Christopher Morgan discarded when instructing the jury on what to consider during his summation on December 4. Instead, he told the jury, the decision hinged solely on whether the defendants had acted “in such a way as to be likely to endanger the safe operation of the aerodrome or the safety of persons at the aerodrome.” Jurors’ personal feelings about the Home Office, immigration policy, and the use of this charge, as well as any sympathy they may have for the defendants, were not to be factors.

Now, the 15 defendants — one of whom is eight months pregnant — remain in a state of limbo until their sentencing hearing, scheduled for February. “It’s disappointing to get this ruling, but I feel it’s not the end for us because we will appeal it,” explained Jyotsna Ram, one of the defendants, speaking to The Intercept a few hours after the verdict was announced. Ram, 33, works for a small organization in London that does research and campaigns around climate change and energy, although, she laughed, “It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten what my life outside of this is like.” She said that, at least in some ways, the verdict did not come as a shock. “This was the wrong charge in the wrong court. So we’re not surprised because everything about this process has been wrong, and we have to fight a bit more.”

The post Activists Found Guilty of Terrorism-Related Offense for Stopping U.K. Migrant Deportations appeared first on The Intercept.

A coalition of more than 60 leading groups from countries across the world have joined forces to blast the internet giant for failing to address concerns about the secretive China project, known as Dragonfly. They come from countries including China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, France, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Norway, Pakistan, Palestine, Romania, Syria, Tibet, and Vietnam.

A prototype for the censored search engine was designed to blacklist broad categories of information about human rights, democracy, and peaceful protest. It would link Chinese users’ searches to their personal cellphone number and store people’s search records inside the data centers of a Chinese company in Beijing or Shanghai, which would be accessible to China’s authoritarian Communist Party government.

If the plan proceeds, “there is a real risk that Google would directly assist the Chinese government in arresting or imprisoning people simply for expressing their views online, making the company complicit in human rights violations,” the human rights groups wrote in a letter that will be sent to Google’s leadership on Tuesday.

The letter highlights mounting anger and frustration within the human rights community that Google has rebuffed concerns about Dragonfly, concerns that have been widely raised both inside and outside the company since The Intercept first revealed the plan in August. The groups say in their 900-word missive that Google’s China strategy is “reckless,” piling pressure on CEO Sundar Pichai, who is due to appear Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee, where he will likely face questions on Dragonfly.

The groups behind the letter include Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access Now, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Human Rights in China, the International Campaign for Tibet, and the World Uyghur Congress. They have been joined in their campaign by several high-profile individual signatories, such as former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and Google’s former head of free expression in Asia, Lokman Tsui.

In late August, some of the same human rights groups had contacted Google demanding answers about the censored search plan. In October, the groups revealed on Monday, Google’s policy chief Kent Walker responded to them. In a two-page reply, Walker appeared to make the case for launching the search engine, saying that “providing access to information to people around the world is central to our mission.”

Walker did not address specific human rights questions on Dragonfly and instead claimed that the company is “still not close to launching such a product and whether we would or could do so remains unclear,” contradicting a leaked transcript from Google search chief Ben Gomes, who stated that the company aimed to launch the search engine between January and April 2019 and instructed employees to have it ready to be “brought off the shelf and quickly deployed.”

Walker agreed in his letter that Google would “confer” with human rights groups ahead of launching any search product in China, and said that the company would “carefully consider” feedback received. “While recognizing our obligations under the law in each jurisdiction in which we operate, we also remain committed to promoting access to information as well as protecting the rights to freedom of expression and privacy for our users globally,” Walker wrote.

“The company may knowingly compromise its commitments to human rights and freedom of expression.”

The human rights groups were left unsatisfied with Walker’s comments. They wrote in their new letter, to be sent Tuesday, that he “failed to address the serious concerns” they had raised. “Instead of addressing the substantive issues,” they wrote, Walker’s response “only heightens our fear that the company may knowingly compromise its commitments to human rights and freedom of expression, in exchange for access to the Chinese search market.”

The groups added: “We welcome that Google has confirmed the company ‘takes seriously’ its responsibility to respect human rights. However, the company has so far failed to explain how it reconciles that responsibility with the company’s decision to design a product purpose-built to undermine the rights to freedom of expression and privacy.”

Separately, former Google research scientist Jack Poulson, who quit the company in protest over Dragonfly, has teamed up with Chinese, Tibetan, and Uighur rights groups to launch an anti-Dragonfly campaign. In a press conference on Monday, Poulson said it was “time for Google to uphold its own principles and publicly end this regressive experiment.”

Teng Biao, a Chinese human rights lawyer who said he had been previously detained and tortured by the country’s authorities for his work, recalled how he had celebrated in 2010 when Google decided to pull its search services out of China, with the company citing concerns about the Communist Party’s censorship and targeting of activists. Teng said he had visited Google headquarters in Beijing and laid flowers outside the company’s doors to thank the internet giant for its decision. He was dismayed by the company’s apparent reversal on its anti-censorship stance, he said, and called on “every one of us to stop Google from being an accomplice in China’s digital totalitarianism.”

Lhadon Tethong, director of the Tibet Action Institute, said there is currently a “crisis of repression unfolding across China and territories it controls.” Considering this, “it is shocking to know that Google is planning to return to China and has been building a tool that will help the Chinese authorities engage in censorship and surveillance,” she said. “Google should be using its incredible wealth, talent, and resources to work with us to find solutions to lift people up and help ease their suffering — not assisting the Chinese government to keep people in chains.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Rights Groups Turn Up Pressure on Google Over China Censorship Ahead of Congressional Hearing appeared first on The Intercept.

In February 2017, during one of the first group meetings about Dragonfly at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in California, some of those present were left stunned by what they heard. Senior executives disclosed that the search system’s infrastructure would be reliant upon a Chinese partner company with data centers likely in Beijing or Shanghai.

Locating core parts of the search system on the Chinese mainland meant that people’s search records would be easily accessible to China’s authoritarian government, which has broad surveillance powers that it routinely deploys to target activists, journalists, and political opponents.

Yonatan Zunger, then a 14-year veteran of Google and one of the leading engineers at the company, was among a small group who had been asked to work on Dragonfly. He was present at some of the early meetings and said he pointed out to executives managing the project that Chinese people could be at risk of interrogation or detention if they were found to have used Google to seek out information banned by the government.

Scott Beaumont, Google’s head of operations in China and one of the key architects of Dragonfly, did not view Zunger’s concerns as significant enough to merit a change of course, according to four people who worked on the project. Beaumont and other executives then shut out members of the company’s security and privacy team from key meetings about the search engine, the four people said, and tried to sideline a privacy review of the plan that sought to address potential human rights abuses.

Zunger — who left his position at Google last year — is one of the four people who spoke to The Intercept for this story. He is the first person with direct involvement in Dragonfly to go on the record about the project. The other three who spoke to The Intercept are still employed by Google and agreed to share information on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. Their accounts provide extraordinary insight into how Google bosses worked to suppress employee criticism of the censored search engine and reveal deep fractures inside the company over the China plan dating back almost two years.

Google’s leadership considered Dragonfly so sensitive that they would often communicate only verbally about it and would not take written notes during high-level meetings to reduce the paper trail, two sources said. Only a few hundred of Google’s 88,000 workforce were briefed about the censorship plan. Some engineers and other staff who were informed about the project were told that they risked losing their jobs if they dared to discuss it with colleagues who were themselves not working on Dragonfly.

“They [leadership] were determined to prevent leaks about Dragonfly from spreading through the company,” said a current Google employee with knowledge of the project. “Their biggest fear was that internal opposition would slow our operations.”

In 2016, a handful of Google executives — including CEO Sundar Pichai and former search chief John Giannandrea — began discussing a blueprint for the censored search engine. But it was not until early 2017 that engineers were brought on board to begin developing a prototype of the platform. The search engine was designed to comply with the strict censorship regime imposed by China’s ruling Communist Party, blacklisting thousands of words and phrases, including terms such as “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize.” It was developed as an app for Android and iOS devices, and would link people’s search records to their personal cellphone number and track their location. (Giannandrea could not be reached for comment.)

The company managed to keep the plan secret for more than 18 months — until The Intercept disclosed it in August. Subsequently, a coalition of 14 leading human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, condemned the censored search engine, which they said could result in Google “directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations.” Employees who opposed the censorship staged protests inside the company. Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators called Dragonfly “deeply troubling,” and Vice President Mike Pence demanded that Google “immediately end” its development.

Google employees who had worked on Dragonfly watched the furor unfold and were not surprised by the backlash. Many of the concerns raised by the human rights groups, they noted, had already been voiced inside the company prior to the public exposure of the plans, though they had been brushed aside by management.

Every new product or service that Google develops must be reviewed by legal, privacy, and security teams, who try to identify any potential issues or problems ahead of the launch. But with Dragonfly, the normal procedure was not followed: Company executives appeared intent on watering down the privacy review, according to the four people who worked on the project.

In January 2017, Zunger, the 14-year veteran engineer at the company, had been tasked with producing the privacy review. However, it quickly became apparent to him that his job was not going to be easy. His work was opposed from the outset by Beaumont, Google’s top executive for China and Korea.

Many of the concerns raised by human rights groups had already been voiced inside the company and been brushed aside by management.

Beaumont, a British citizen, began his career in 1994 as an analyst for an investment bank in England and later founded his own company called Refresh Mobile, which developed apps for smartphones. He joined Google in 2009, working from London as director of the company’s partnerships in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. In 2013, Beaumont relocated to China to head Google’s operations there. He described himself in his LinkedIn biography as a “technology optimist” who cares about “the value and responsible use of technology in a range of fields.”

According to Zunger, Beaumont “wanted the privacy review [of Dragonfly] to be pro forma and thought it should defer entirely to his views of what the product ought to be. He did not feel that the security, privacy, and legal teams should be able to question his product decisions, and maintained an openly adversarial relationship with them — quite outside the Google norm.”

Three sources independently corroborated Zunger’s account. Beaumont did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and Google declined to answer questions for this story.

During one meeting, Zunger recalled, Beaumont was briefed on aspects of Dragonfly that Google’s privacy and security teams planned to assess. He was told that the teams wanted to check whether the Chinese search system would be secure against state and non-state hackers, whether users in China would have control over their own data, and whether there may have been any aspects of the system that might cause users to unintentionally disclose information about themselves.

“I don’t know if I want you asking those questions,” Beaumont retorted, according to Zunger, who said the comment was “quite surprising to those in the room.”

Beaumont micromanaged the project and ensured that discussions about Dragonfly and access to documents about it were tightly controlled. “Different teams on the Dragonfly project were actively segmented off from one another and discouraged from communicating, except via Scott’s own team, even about technical issues,” said Zunger.

This was “highly unusual,” according to Zunger. Normally, even for extremely confidential work inside the company, he said, there would be “open and regular communication within a project, all the way up to senior leadership.”

“The project, as it was then specified, was not something I could sign off on in good conscience.”

With Dragonfly, the opposite was true. The restrictions around the project limited the ability for discussion and seemed intended “to prevent internal objections,” Zunger said. Some members of the Dragonfly team were told that if they broke the strict confidentiality rules, then their contracts at Google would be terminated, according to three sources.

Despite facing resistance, the privacy and security teams — which together included a total of between six and eight people — proceeded with their work.

Zunger and his colleagues produced a privacy report that highlighted problematic scenarios that could arise once the censored search engine launched in China. The report, which contained more than a dozen pages, concluded that Google would be expected to function in China as part of the ruling Communist Party’s authoritarian system of policing and surveillance. It added that, unlike in Europe or North America, in China it would be difficult, if not impossible, for Google to legally push back against government requests, refuse to build systems specifically for surveillance, or even notify people of how their data may be used.

Zunger had planned to share the privacy report and discuss its findings during a meeting with the company’s senior leadership, including CEO Sundar Pichai. But the meeting was repeatedly postponed. When the meeting did finally take place, in late June 2017, Zunger and members of Google’s security team were not notified, so they missed it and did not attend. Zunger felt that this was a deliberate attempt to exclude them.

By this point, Zunger had already decided to leave Google, due to a job offer he had received from Humu, a startup company co-founded by Laszlo Bock, Google’s former head of human resources, and Wayne Crosby, Google’s former director of engineering. Had Zunger not received the offer to join Humu when he did, he said, he would likely have ended up resigning in protest from Google over Dragonfly.

“The project, as it was then specified, was not something I could sign off on in good conscience,” he told The Intercept.

Zunger does not know what happened to the privacy report after he left Google. He said Google still has time to address the problems he and his colleagues identified, and he hopes that the company will “end up with a Project Dragonfly that does something genuinely positive and valuable for the ordinary people of China.”

Google launched a censored search engine in China in 2006 but stopped operating the service in the country in 2010, saying it could no longer tolerate Chinese government efforts to limit free speech, block websites, and hack activists’ Gmail accounts. At that time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin had advocated inside the company to pull out of China because he was uncomfortable with the level of government censorship and surveillance. The “key issue,” Brin said, was to show that Google was “opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent.”

The Dragonfly revelations prompted questions about whether Brin had dramatically reversed his views on censorship in China. But in a meeting with Google employees in August, Brin claimed that he knew nothing about Dragonfly until The Intercept exposed it.

According to three sources, employees working on Dragonfly were told by Beaumont, the company’s China chief, that Brin had met with senior Chinese government officials and had told them of his desire to re-enter the Chinese market, obeying local laws as necessary.

However, the Dragonfly teams were instructed that they were not permitted to discuss the issue directly with Brin or other members of Google’s senior leadership team, including Pichai, co-founder Larry Page, and legal chief Kent Walker.

Two sources working on Dragonfly believed that Beaumont may have misrepresented Brin’s position in an attempt to reassure the employees working on Dragonfly that the effort was fully supported at the highest levels of the company, when that may not have been the truth.

“How much did Sergey know? I am guessing very little,” said one source, “because I think Scott [Beaumont] went to great lengths to ensure that was the case.”

Inside Google, a deep ideological divide has developed over Dragonfly. On one side are those who view themselves as aligned with Google’s founding values, advocating internet freedom, openness, and democracy. On the other side are those who believe that the company should prioritize growth of the business and expansion into new markets, even if doing so means making compromises on issues like internet censorship and surveillance.

Pichai, who became Google’s CEO in 2015, has made it clear where he stands. He has strongly backed Dragonfly and spoken of his desire for the company to return to China and serve the country’s people.

In October, Pichai publicly defended the plan for the censored search engine for the first time, though he tried to play down the significance of the project, portraying it as an “experiment” and adding that it remained unclear whether the company “would or could” eventually launch it in China.

Staff working on Dragonfly were confused by Pichai’s comments. They had been told to prepare the search engine for launch between January and April 2019, or sooner. The main barrier to launch, the employees were told, was the ongoing U.S. trade war with China, which had slowed down negotiations with government officials in Beijing, whose approval Google required to roll out the platform in the country.

“What Pichai said [about Dragonfly being an experiment] was ultimately horse shit,” said one Google source with knowledge of the project. “This was run with 100 percent intention of launch from day one. He was just trying to walk back a delicate political situation.”

“What Pichai said was ultimately horse shit.”

The launch plan was outlined during a July meeting for employees who were working on Dragonfly. The company’s search chief, Ben Gomes, instructed engineers to get the search engine ready to be “brought off the shelf and quickly deployed.”

Beaumont told employees in the same meeting that he was pleased with how things were developing for the company in the country, according to a previously undisclosed transcript of his comments obtained by The Intercept.

“There has been a really positive change in tone towards Google during [Pichai’s] recent visits” to China, Beaumont said. “Part of our task over the past few years has been to re-establish that Google can be a trusted operator in China. And we’ve really seen a pleasing turnaround, relatively recently in the last couple of years. We are fairly confident that, outside of the trade discussions, there is a positive consensus across government entities to allow Google to re-engage in China.”

A few weeks later, details about Dragonfly were emblazoned across international newspapers and the internet, and the company was scrambling to contain the outpouring of internal and external protest. Beaumont was furious that information about the project had leaked, said two sources familiar with his thinking, and he told colleagues that he feared the disclosures may have scuppered the prospect of Google launching the platform in the short term.

“[Beaumont’s] endgame was very simple — his ideal circumstance was that most people would find out about this project the day it launched,” said one Google source. “He wanted to make sure there would be no opportunity for any internal or external resistance to Dragonfly, but he failed.”

The post Google Shut Out Privacy and Security Teams From Secret China Project appeared first on The Intercept.