How U.S. Tech Giant Are Helping To Build China's Surveillance State
HOW U.S. TECH GIANTS ARE HELPING TO
BUILD CHINA’S SURVEILLANCE STATE
AN AMERICAN
ORGANIZATION founded by tech giants Google and IBM
is working with a company that is helping China’s authoritarian government
conduct mass surveillance against its citizens, The Intercept can reveal.
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 SEPT. 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.
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