Our tech companies are aiding in surveillance worldwide.
Mass surveillance and censorship are a complicated reality across major international markets. In confronting that reality, American tech companies have often struggled to balance the need for business development with American values and principles.
For instance, an Associated Press investigation, published in September, revealed that American technology companies have played a far greater role in designing and building China’s surveillance state than previously known. According to the AP, household names including Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft have sold technology or services to Chinese police or surveillance companies. While companies may believe they aren’t responsible for how their products are used, several of them have marketed their products using Chinese Communist Party euphemisms for controlling citizens, like “abnormal gatherings.”
The variety of products and services American tech companies have sold to the Chinese government and police over the last 25 years is astounding. Beginning in 2009, IBM worked with Chinese defense contractor Huadi to build national intelligence systems. Until sanctions were recently imposed, Nvidia and Intel were working with Chinese surveillance companies to add AI capabilities to cameras used for video surveillance. The fingerprints of American tech companies are all over China’s regime of surveillance and repression.
Even worse, the U.S. government has been complicit in this moral failure: across both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations over the past two decades, the U.S. government has allowed and even actively helped American companies sell technology to Chinese police, government agencies, and surveillance companies. Some of this is, no doubt, a desire to advance American economic interests. But it is also the case that American tech and telecom companies as well as their trade associations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbyists who listed China-related trade bills on their disclosure reports.
In addition to raw surveillance, tech companies that do business in other countries often have to comply with censorship demands from the customer country’s regime. In 2023, The Washington Post reported that Meta had been making “repeated concessions” to the Vietnamese government on Facebook, censoring political dissent and forcing certain dissidents off the platform. At the time, the company said, “Our focus is ensuring as many Vietnamese people as possible are able to use our platform to build community and express themselves.” In other words: We’ll censor the speech of some Vietnamese so we can monetize our access to a larger group of cowed citizens.
And last year, Bloomberg uncovered the extent of Microsoft Bing’s censorship in China, which included blacklisting thousands of search results of phrases ranging from “human rights” to “climate change China.” In response, Microsoft said, “We only censor a result in response to a narrow legal order that we conclude obligates us to do so, and we regularly push back when we believe an order doesn’t comply with proper interpretation of Chinese rules.”
But where is the line? Abandoning major markets for reasons of principle—which some tech companies have opted to do—would be a significant revenue loss. And, on the question of censorship, some companies argue that complying with the censorship laws of an authoritarian country is better than abandoning that country entirely, which would leave their citizens more disconnected from the world.
Yet, it becomes all too easy for tech companies to make sweeping claims about how their technology is or is not used without addressing the realities of operating in authoritarian countries, and without accountability. Just a short while ago, Microsoft President Brad Smith said that Microsoft “[does] not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians.” But he made this statement in response to an investigative report by The Guardian demonstrating precisely the contrary. The report found the Israel Defense Forces had actually used Microsoft’s cloud to build a mass surveillance tool to collect and store recordings of millions of phone calls made each day by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The contradiction was so great that, in the end, public exposure and pressure caused Microsoft to restrict Israeli access to and usage of its products.
Smith’s statement was a laudable, aspirational proclamation in the midst of the conflict in the Middle East. The challenge of living up to that commitment is, however, daunting for any company. The recent AP investigation, for example, also found that China’s police and police DNA labs have bought Microsoft software and equipment to stockpile genetic data on police databases. So, is Microsoft going to stop selling its products to China as well? Do different standards apply to China than to Israel? And, more speculatively, what will Microsoft or Amazon do when it becomes clear that their products are being used by the US government for surveillance of citizens?
Transparency is the key here. American tech companies should be held accountable for their actions. Lawmakers need to know what those actions are and why tech companies are making the distinctions they do. The American tech industry is one of the most powerful social forces in the world — it needs to act like it.