China's Tech Giants Have a Second Job: Helping Beijing Spy on Its People

Tencent and Alibaba are among the firms that assist authorities in hunting down criminal suspects, silencing dissent and creating surveillance cities. From a report: Alibaba Group's sprawling campus has collegial workspaces, laid-back coffee bars and, on the landscaped grounds, a police outpost. Employees use the office to report suspected crimes to the police, according to people familiar with the operation. Police also use it to request data from Alibaba for their own investigations, these people said, tapping into the trove of information the tech giant collects through its e-commerce and financial-payment networks. In one case, the police wanted to find out who had posted content related to terrorism, said a former Alibaba employee. "They came to me and asked me for the user ID and information," he recalled. He turned it over. The Chinese government is building one of the world's most sophisticated, high-tech systems to keep watch over its citizens, including surveillance cameras, facial-recognition technology and vast computers systems that comb through terabytes of data. Central to its efforts are the country's biggest technology companies, which are openly acting as the government's eyes and ears in cyberspace. Companies including Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings and Baidu, are required to help China's government hunt down criminal suspects and silence political dissent. Their technology is also being used to create cities wired for surveillance.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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