The Open Technology Fund published a report earlier this month highlighting the rise of censorship-related jobs in China between 2015 and 2022. But growing evidence also shows that human-powered censorship is being increasingly...
The release last month of DeepSeek’s AI chatbot has supercharged the global AI race and amplified concerns over the use of AI in online censorship, surveillance, and propaganda. American company OpenAI published a report on...
A series of violent “revenge on society” attacks by disgruntled individuals—most recently, targeting innocent bystanders in Changde, Wuxi, Zhuhai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Shenzhen, Suzhou, and Shanghai—has prompted an array of...
On WeChat last weekend, "Fatty Zhao, scholar of Song Dynasty history" reflected on a recent fire at a Shandong university. The students’ escape route was blocked by facial recognition turnstiles through which...
A predictive policing tool described as a “Crowd Mood Monitoring and Early Warning System,” on display at the recent Zhuhai Air Show in Guangdong province, has attracted considerable backlash online. After photos and...
The Municipal Bureau of Justice in Karamay, Xinjiang posted—and later deleted—a skit to Douyin (Chinese TikTok) boasting that WeChat automatically records user activity and shares it with law enforcement. The short video skit...
Around 5:00 p.m. local time on Friday, an explosion damaged an office building of the Chinese consulate in Mandalay, the second-largest city in Myanmar. No casualties were reported, but the Chinese government condemned the...
Two years after Peng Lifa’s courageous one-man protest on Beijing’s Sitong Bridge against Xi Jinping and the CCP’s autocratic rule, his whereabouts are still unknown, although it is widely presumed that he remains under...
The political atmosphere in Venezuela remains fraught in the weeks after its presidential election. While President Nicolás Maduro’s loyalist-packed supreme court backed his claim of victory on Thursday, the opposition produced...
Chinese internet regulators are purportedly considering new methods to safeguard users’ personal information online. Their solution, however, involves giving the government greater control over user data. The proposal has...
The suspicious death of a Beijing tech company manager in Inner Mongolia and recent reporting about the many other deaths of people held in RSDL (“residential surveillance at a designated location”) pending trial has revived...
Citizen-journalist Zhang Zhan finally reappeared on Tuesday, over a week after she was scheduled to be released from prison. Zhang was among the first and most prominent individuals to report from the ground in Wuhan at the...
Last week, Weibo censors took down a post by a popular food blogger describing how all her bank accounts were frozen due to a local police department’s arbitrary and unprofessional “anti-fraud” case work. Her Kafka-esque account...
Government surveillance is a ubiquitous and growing phenomenon in China. New documents issued by the Ministry of State Security last month will empower Chinese law enforcement to search electronic devices without either a...
Transnational repression by Chinese state-affiliated actors has long targeted Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hongkongers, and members of the Chinese diaspora. One subset of these groups is Chinese overseas students, who are now the focus of...
In its annual report on the state of media freedom in China last year, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC) described how authorities used COVID prevention measures to “strangle” foreign news bureaus’ China coverage....
As part of a larger interview series about Tibet, CDT recently published two interviews specifically about digital surveillance in Tibet: “Lhadon Tethong on Tibetans’ ‘Spirit of Resistance and Desire for Freedom,’” and “Tenzin...
These are CDT editors’ selections of their favorite posts from CDT and elsewhere around the web over the course of 2023: Sophie Beach CDT Pick: Translation: The Women of “Salt Town,” by Cindy Carter I found this...
Click on the image to download Firefly for circumvention
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