A US nonprofit org founded by Google and IBM is working with a company helping China's government secretly monitor phone and internet activity of 200M people
An American organization founded by tech giants Google and IBM is working with a company that is helping China's authoritarian … Tweets: @paulmozur , @dakekang , @petecirwin , @baldingsworld , @niubi , @rj_gallagher , @rj_gallagher , @rj_gallagher , @rj_gallagher , and @rj_gallagher Tweets: Paul Mozur / @paulmozur : Great story that shows the levels of information harvesting happening everyday in China as Beijing targets it's own people with surveillance tech. As Ryan notes, system probably not as smooth as the marketing claims. On the ground much more fragmented. https://twitter.com/... @dakekang : Wow. This story is truly astonishing. A Chinese company cooperating with American tech executives is selling mass surveillance systems to governments at amazingly low prices. Just ~$5 million USD to monitor 5 million people's texts, calls, phone locations and internet activity https://twitter.com/... Pete Irwin / @petecirwin : Really @Google? Here we go again. A non-profit led by @Google & @IBM are collaborating w/ Chinese company, Semptian, developing microprocessors used to support surveillance & censorship technology provided to Chinese security agencies @rj_gallagher https://theintercept.com/... Huawei HR Director Balding / @baldingsworld : Just astounding how likes of Google and IBM are helping China create a surveillance state like we have never seen https://theintercept.com/... Bill Bishop / @niubi : The tech can also allow government users 2 run searches 4 a particular IM name, email address, social media account, forum user, blog commenter, or other identifier, like IMSI code or MAC address...In many cases, it appears the system can collect full content of a communication https://twitter.com/... Ryan Gallagher / @rj_gallagher : It has built a system called Aegis, which it says can allow governments to see “the connections of everyone,” including “location information for everyone in the country” & also “block certain information [on the] internet from being visited.” Ryan Gallagher / @rj_gallagher : A Semptian employee told an undercover reporter that Aegis is being used to covertly monitor 200 million people in China, which amounts to a quarter of the country's total online population. Ryan Gallagher / @rj_gallagher : Read a document that we obtained about the Aegis system here. Its catchline is, “find one, find all; control one, control all.” https://www.documentcloud.org/ ... https://twitter.com/... Ryan Gallagher / @rj_gallagher : NEW: An American organization founded by Google & IBM is working with a company that is helping China's authoritarian government secretly monitor the phone & internet activity of 200 million people, documents & sources reveal: https://theintercept.com/... Ryan Gallagher / @rj_gallagher : Shenzen-based Semptian has been working with the OpenPower Foundation, a nonprofit led by Google & IBM execs with the aim of trying to “drive innovation.” The foundation has enabled the Chinese company to collaborate with IBM, US chip manufacturer Xilinx & other US corporations.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Intercept's reporting lands in a documented arc of Western tech entanglement with Chinese state surveillance. Google had already been caught building its censored Dragonfly search engine for China, and BuzzFeed's interviews showed how private firms supply the AI and biometric tooling behind Xinjiang surveillance. The new wrinkle is governance rather than product: OpenPower Foundation, a standards body founded by Google and IBM, lent its imprimatur to Semptian, whose Aegis system covertly monitors the phone and internet activity of roughly 200 million people.
First-order effects
- Google and IBM face direct reputational exposure through an organization they founded, since OpenPower membership gives Semptian — a vendor selling mass-interception capability to Chinese authorities — legitimacy inside the open-hardware ecosystem.
Second-order effects
- Other US-founded technical consortia and vendors come under scrutiny for their China ties, following the same pattern as Oracle's data-analytics sales to Chinese police that mined DNA, vehicle, and facial-recognition databases.
Third-order effects
- Beijing's parallel push to certify local suppliers in cloud and semiconductors points toward decoupling: collaborations like this one become simultaneously more politically toxic for US founders and less necessary for China as it indigenizes the stack.
The trend: Western-founded standards bodies and enterprise vendors keep getting pulled into China's surveillance-industrial supply chain, and each exposure accelerates the political case for technological decoupling.