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The Lawfare Podcast
Lawfare Daily: Investigating the Investigators: Sophia Yan on Journalism in the PRC
00:47:45
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- [00:01]
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- [01:10]
Sophia Yen
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- [02:02]
Michael Feinberg
Hello, this is Mia Richardson, operations manager here at lawfair. I'm usually busy working behind the scenes, keeping our office running smoothly so that your favorite lawfare contributors can focus on creating the content that you love. At lawfare, our team is dedicated to tackling the hard national security questions, the ones without easy answers. We provide in depth, nonpartisan analysis on issues that impact not just policymakers and legal experts, but anyone who cares about democracy, cybersecurity, foreign policy, or the rule of law. If you're trying to understand what's happening and what it really means, this kind of analysis is more important than ever. Welfare is a 501c3 nonprofit, and everything we produce is accessible to anyone who wants it. That only works if readers and listeners like you. Step up. Head to lawfordmedia.org support and become a material supporter. Today, just $10 a month or more if you're able, really makes a difference. Plus, you'll help us continue to offer all of our content for free to everyone. Thanks for listening and for caring about the things that.
- [03:14]
Sophia Yen
The platform itself was really fascinating because it was a back end. Look at how the government is seeking to bring all these data points together that they have from this closed Internet, from the millions of security cameras that they've installed over the years, how they're trying to bring it all together and make it usable in real life for the police, for China's security apparatus.
- [03:34]
Michael Feinberg
It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Lawfair senior editor Michael Feinberg, sitting down today with Daily Telegraph journalist Sophia Yen.
- [03:44]
Sophia Yen
I was always so careful because I didn't want to first give a sense of exactly where I was going or who I was meeting, because that could mean risk to myself and potentially my sources. I was just always so careful. And even with those kinds of precautions, if they're able to track you like this, then that means that at best, maybe you're fortunate to. To stay a couple of steps ahead.
- [04:07]
Michael Feinberg
Today we talk about her time trying to expose the Chinese government's efforts against ethnic minorities and political dissidents, and in turn, what the Chinese government was trying to discover about her and how she came into possession of this information. Many of our listeners and viewers already know who you are for the somewhat surprising fact to the rest of people that you are also a classical musician who has played the introductory music for many Lawfare podcasts. But in the part of your life that I suspect takes up many more hours of your day, you're an investigative journalist whose career has taken you to several different parts of the world, usually engulfed in some sort of oppression or conflict. And I first became aware of you not through Lawfare circles, but because of your reporting on the ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs going on in the Xinjiang region of the People's Republic of China.
- [05:12]
Sophia Yen
That's really nice to hear, actually, Mike, that you came into some of my work. I mean, it was really tough to work in China, of course, even tougher to be covering human rights abuses, something that the Chinese state never wants to have out there, something they never cop to. And being based in Beijing, as I was at the time, trying to plan these trips, to prepare for these reporting trips to Xinjiang, or East Turkestan, as the Uyghurs like to call it, their homeland, you know, it was really tough. I had to make sure what I was doing was not going to be spotted or noted by the authorities before I could actually go and execute the reporting. So everything I did was under as much as I could, lock and key, from a cyber aspect to a physical realm aspect.
- [05:55]
Michael Feinberg
So I want to talk about that, but I want to delve into your background a tiny bit first and explain to the audience how you got to that position where you were reporting on Chinese human rights abuses, particularly with respect to the Uyghur population. Then you also have done work on Xi Jinping's rise to power in a very good podcast series, but you didn't start out as a reporter on the China beat. So I was wondering if you could take us very briefly through your earlier career. And that's not so. We could create a hagiography of Sophia Yen, but sort of to give us a counterpoint to what you would encounter both in terms of what journalistic methodology you had to use in China and how the government responded to it.
- [06:49]
Sophia Yen
Yeah. Well, I started working as a reporter in Washington, D.C. i gone to Oberlin College. I studied piano performance. I was in the double degree program. So I also had a degree, B.A. in English, and. And I was the Obama generation. I turned 18 in 2004. I voted twice in Ohio because the double degree program's five years. And it was very formative. It was very influential in my formative years for pushing me to think critically about the world. I was involved in the school paper. I graduated, moved to dc, worked for a couple of years for Bloomberg, and I always knew I wanted to be abroad. And at the time, I remember thinking to myself, gosh, I really wish I'd studied some Arabic in college. That would have been useful for working as a foreign reporter. But then one day I woke up, and I kid you not, I realized I could speak Mandarin. Of course I could speak Mandarin. My. My parents are from Taiwan. I was born and raised in the US But I grew up speaking this language at home. But because it had been so much of my personal family life, I had never occurred to me that it could be useful in a professional setting. Which I know that sounds almost a little silly when I recount it, but that's really what I felt. I just woke up one day and I was like, oh, this could be very useful. So I told my boss at the time, of course, and the next thing he says is like, how. How soon can you be on a plane? And I was originally actually considering moving to Beijing or Shanghai. I was working for Bloomberg News at the time. But in the end, I ended up moving to Hong Kong because Bloomberg, that year in 2012, had published a very big expose into Xi Jinping and his wealth, his family's wealth, and how they had gotten so rich. Obviously, it had allegations of corruption of Wrongdoing that, again, is not something that China ever wants to see out in the public. And so Bloomberg was effectively put on the blacklist. They weren't able to get visas anymore for journalists. So I ended up going to Hong Kong, which is where I started. So from mid-2012 onward, for about five years, I was in Hong Kong, where I covered the uprisings that occurred, the mass protests that were taking place in Hong Kong from the civilian population against stronger and more draconian Beijing rule.
- [08:55]
Michael Feinberg
From there. How eventually did you make it? I think it's splitting hairs to talk about whether at this point, Hong Kong is a separate political and geographic entity from the prc. I know we both have opinions on that that the Chinese government would probably rush to take issue with. But how did you move from what they would consider Hong Kong to the Mainland People's Republic of China?
- [09:24]
Sophia Yen
So after I worked for Bloomberg, I joined cnn, and from there I continued to cover Hong Kong. It really struck me at the time because Hong Kong has always been this bridge between east and west and this commercial success story. It was. It was an international city with very interesting people from all over the world and a gateway for China, which had a very closed economy for so long, to be able to access Western capital, Western minds, Western talent, in a way. And the fact that China was willing to crack down so heavily and so strongly on Hong Kong said a lot about where Beijing was headed under Xi Jinping. I moved to Beijing in 2017. I was then working for CNBC, and always top of mind for me was the human rights issue when it came to China. Obviously, the story of Tibet and of how Tibetans have been suppressed for so many years was something that was more well known by the time I got to China. This was really the beginning, early stages, I would say, the early glimmers of their digital surveillance state, much of which was first attuned to the Uyghurs, at first to control that population and to track what they were doing. Eventually, that spread across the country. And we can speak about that in more depth later. During COVID they were using this for contact tracing, front instance. And all of that digital surveillance infrastructure has stayed and it was used to track people like me, foreign journalists, anybody that the state deemed to be of interest or problematic. That could be a dissident, that could be somebody who had tried to protest at a local government office for back wages that were unpaid. It could be, again, someone like me or a foreign diplomat.
- [10:59]
Michael Feinberg
Okay, so I want to delve into your specific experience, but let's do Just the slightest bit of throat clearing. First, for our listeners who are not amateur Sinologists, can you give the briefest of sketches as to who the Uyghurs are and why the Chinese government views them as such a threat? Yeah.
- [11:24]
Sophia Yen
The Uyghurs are a mostly Muslim ethnic group. They live primarily in the west part of China. This is what they would consider their homeland. And they're considered a risk to the Communist Party Party for lots of different reasons. First, they're a separate ethnic group. They have a religion, so they are practicing, or they were practicing more regularly in China, which is governed by the officially atheist Communist Party. And any group that is bound by some sort of interest or shared ideals or customs, anything like this, the Communist Party deems to be a threat because it might mean that that group could take precedence over precedent, over the party. When the party has to, of course, from their view, stay in power, they have to be able to control the hearts and minds of the entire country at all times. And at any moment, if that changes, that means the power and the strength of the Party to continue as number one in Beijing then falls into question. And that's something that the CCP would never want to see. So from their perspective, they are concerned about really any group that might be problematic. For that reason. There have been big incidents, major incidents in the past, where the suppression of the Uyghurs did lead to serious uprisings. A lot of people will remember, for instance, in 2009, these riots in Urumqi that were quelled with severe violence, with a heavy hand from the Chinese side. There were deaths still to this day, much as it was in Tiananmen. We don't know exactly how many people may have been injured or killed at the time. There are various accounts, eyewitness accounts from that period of time, but that is just one of several such instances that have occurred in the past that just exemplify how much pressure the Uyghurs were under, how much they were hoping for some semblance of freedom or ability to practice their religion, for instance, or to speak their own language, which is called Uyghur, it's a Turkic language. And to really be themselves, to have space, to be themselves. And that was space that the CCP never allowed.
- [13:26]
Michael Feinberg
So at the risk of making a vast oversimplification, because the groups themselves are quite different, and it's fair to say that China probably views the Uyghur population the same way it views, in terms of threats, Falun Gong or perhaps the pro democracy movement.
- [13:45]
Sophia Yen
Yeah, exactly. It's any group that could potentially splinter or threaten the power of the ruling party, any group that might pull people in one direction or another away from the party, because the party is the absolute truth. This is how the, the government will view it from Beijing. They have to have full buy in from people, or at least the specter of full buy in from people. And that's why they want to control everything, everything that's happening, because they don't want people, for instance, if they are part of another group, to be able to organize some sort of uprising or protest against the government, because that itself is embarrassing. I mean, appearances matter a lot to Beijing. And so any sort of move in that direction is something that China is always watching out for to ensure does not.
- [14:32]
Michael Feinberg
So one of the nice things about, in your case being a journalist, in my case being a sort of commentator and analyst is that we can dispense with diplomatic language and niceties. So let's call out what was going on. You were reporting on a disfavored group in an authoritarian totalitarian regime with Pantopicon, like surveillance. Did you have any training, formal or informal, to govern how you conducted and comported yourself in investigating and writing about these stories?
- [15:10]
Sophia Yen
I had some training. I mean, within the Telegraph, we all undergo some sort of hostile environment training that is required. But the scenario that I faced in China was unlike anything else, because China is absolutely ahead of the pack when it comes to these kinds of surveillance technologies. The security cameras, the facial recognition, for instance. I mean, I was, I remember for the very, very first time in my life entering in 2017, the Liang Hui meetings, the annual parliamentary meetings, rubber stamp parliamentary meetings in Beijing in the spring. And I entered the Great hall of the People via facial recognition scan. I just walked through something clocked to my face, and then on a screen there was my picture, my name, and I was allowed to pass. So this was going into a major government building in Beijing, in Tiananmen Square, and I didn't have to undergo any other check except for this face scan. So that just gives you a sense of how, how far ahead China really is when it comes to this kind of tech. And so because it hadn't been rolled out significantly yet in the world and certainly wasn't being used to target journalists yet, I was really at the forefront of trying to figure out how to protect myself, how to conduct my work, how to communicate with sources who might be at risk, and then also to think about how we publish in such a way that we can get the story out without putting people who have been willing to share their experience, experience this with me, without putting them at any greater risk. And that's really tough to do, as you can imagine, when you've got this dragnet that is China. And as the years went on, the. The kind of surveillance technology that was being rolled out, the. The way that they can track you became more and more intense. And a lot of this is partly because China has a very closed Internet system. We all talk about the great firewall, which I think is one of the most amusing terms out there to describe censorship. Brick by brick, they were building the great firewall. But, you know, this. This idea that they were doing this at a time when the rest of the world was actually coming, in some respects, more open and more connected, was really interesting. And China could manage because they had a closed system within. They had like a intranet, like a China Internet. So they have their own version of everything. Right. They've got their own version of Facebook, of Google, of Yahoo, they have their own Amazon. Even so you don't need to ever be over the great firewall. You don't ever have to jump over it if you're within that closed Internet ecosystem that is in China.
- [17:39]
Michael Feinberg
And your reporting on the Uyghurs turns out to be quite effective in at least that you are now at an undisclosed location outside of the PRC because you left the country not entirely of your own volition or on your own timeline, as I understand it.
- [18:02]
Sophia Yen
Yeah, in the very end, I left China. In the lead up to the third, unprecedented third term of Xi Jinping, things were extremely tight in terms of the restrictions in place. The COVID measures were still around. I mean, we were getting. Everyone had to be tested some once every 48 to 72 hours, this kind of thing. So there were still extreme Covid measures as the rest of the world had started to relax them. China was going into an extreme political period where stability was important because Xi was trying to stay for a third term, which hadn't been done before. He was doing something that perhaps even raised eyebrows within the political establishment in Beijing. And as a result, there was a major lockdown to make sure that this transition of power from one person to the same person would stay, that they could manage the situation. And so the. The pressure that I felt at the time was extremely high. There were lots of weird things happening. I talk about this in depth in the. The podcast you mentioned how to become a dictator. Just things getting moved around, like disappearing from my. From my office, showing up at my house, or this kind of low Level messing with you activity, which happened a lot while I was in China, but was definitely increasing during this period. I was also, because of my personal profile, I have Taiwanese parents, I'm an American citizen born and raised, and I'm a foreign journalist. So from the Chinese state's perspective, I tick all the boxes. Right? I am absolutely somebody that they need to watch from their view, because to them, I am 100% a troublemaker. Not only that, I was covering human rights stories. So to them, I was very much an unsavory element, shall we say. So the pressure was really high. I mean, they really, they. They spent a lot of time, I think, targeting me. And I know this because it was very difficult to report. It got more and more difficult to report the kind of surveillance I was under, the way I was being watched or followed. Of course, I was always careful with my phone. With this closed Chinese Internet experience I was explaining before, that means essentially everything you do could be grabbed by the authorities. I always assumed that, for instance, anything I put on this, this chat app, the social media app, WeChat, was something that the police had access to. I mean, I know for sure that they had access to, in fact. But I was always very careful about what I was saying on those platforms because that might give away what I'm doing or even give away too much my own personal life, who I'm friends with or where I'm going, what I like to eat. I mean, I didn't want to give too much away about who I am as a human being, even, let alone give them any insight into the stories I was working on or who I was interviewing, because even speaking to me could put that person in China at extreme, very serious risk.
- [20:50]
Michael Feinberg
And so not to put too fine a point on it, they end up kicking you out of the country.
- [20:56]
Sophia Yen
Yeah, essentially. I mean, my visa was still on paper valid, but by then, China had moved to this more sophisticated way. They did in the past revoke visas, they canceled visas and press cards for foreign journalists. But then they started to move to this more sinister method, which is to make life so difficult for you that you chose to leave. So they can say, well, you know, you were welcome to be here, but you're the one who packed your bags to go. And so that's really what happened with me. It had gotten so unpleasant to be there, and there were very few journalists left of a profile like mine of ethnic Asian, specifically ethnic Chinese heritage, working as foreign journalists in China. And so it became really tough to operate. I remember even at one Point. I'd gone to a public tourist site that extolled Xi Jinping's early days as a youth during the Cultural Revolution. This is part of the Xi Jinping myth about how he came to be. Yes, these are the caves. So this is like part of the lore, this is part of the propaganda. And they always welcome both Communist Party cadres to come there to study Xi Jinping thought, and they also welcome the public to come learn about their own leader. So this is something that is open to everyone. But. But even there, when I sought to go and just to get a sense of what this historic turned tourist site had become, even there I was being surveilled and followed and harassed. I mean, this was something that became very constant. And I used to wonder, you know, I mean, what did they think about my life? You know, I used to joke with some friends, like, if I go on another first date, are they like, oh, I wonder if it's going to work out this time? You know, like, what do they really think? For these guys who were assigned to follow my every move, what did they actually think about who I was and why did they think they were assigned to me? I had all these questions about how it worked. I knew it worked because I was at times obstructed in my reporting, and there were all these strange things happening all the time as I described. So I knew it was happening. But I did wonder, well, who is on the other end? And what do they think about what they're doing about why they've been assigned to someone like me?
- [22:56]
Michael Feinberg
So let's start pulling at that thread because it is the reason you are here on the show today. You leave China, you continue your career in other locales, and if that were the end of it, there wouldn't really be a story to tell. What happened to you in terms of covering things embarrassing to the Chinese regime, being surveilled yourself, ultimately being pressured to leave, it's interesting to your friends and family, but let's face it, it would be sort of a quotidian story story, because you would not be the only one getting that sort of treatment. But after a few years, you came into possession of something, and I was wondering if you could give us a brief overview of what that was, and then let's sort of pick at what that tells you that you didn't know previously about Chinese surveillance and whether you now have to view any of your past interactions and experience through a refracted lens that you didn't even know existed at the time.
- [24:04]
Sophia Yen
Yeah, very Recently I was passed a Trent to document screenshots, screen recordings from an online platform that was devoted to tracking data linked to foreigners. So it's translated on the login page itself, the dynamic control platform for overseas personnel, which is better translated into English as foreigners actually, but that's how they chose to translate on this program. Dynamic control platform for overseas personnel. And I was contacted by this independent cyber security researcher, Ned Askari, because I was in these files. I was, you know, there I was, it was, it was interesting and chilling, albeit not entirely surprising that I was in there. So it was an old visa picture from 2021. It's a picture that you have to go take at the entry actor bureau in Beijing to get your new journalist visa. So you submit documents, you eventually will get approved, you pick up press card, etc, but at one point you have to go to the police and they take this picture and that's what goes into your visa and that's the piece of paper that goes in, that's the sticker that goes in your passport. So I remember very well that picture being taken because it was one of my very last visas. By that point the Chinese government had put me on these six month visa. So I was sort of continuously renewing, I was always submitting paperwork, going in, waiting. You have to give it your passport for a while while they continue to review your application. And in there you see all my personal details, stuff that would have been held at the national level. So things like my birth date, the organization I worked for, the Telegraph, the country of origin of the organization, the UK that I was American, had, my passport number, my phone number. I mean these are details I expected that the Chinese would have on file. But then they also had the information like this, these personally identifying details of a whole bunch of my other colleagues, other journalists who were in China at that time. Judging on the kinds of records I saw, it was those around in the 2020, 2021, 2022 period. And it was the same for them, these pictures, their personal details, who they worked for, this kind of information. There were other categories too that were interesting. Foreign spouses, for instance of Chinese citizens they pulled out, foreign students who were studying in China. There was also a category deemed fugitives. Of course, fugitive is in a way loosely defined in China because you could be a serial killer who's been convicted or you could be a political distant and you might fall into that category of fugitive because they define that quite broadly. But it was fascinating to see this because of course I knew all this time that There was something like this tracking me, that they had the ability to do this, that they would know when I booked, for instance, a plane ticket or a train ticket, because it was all tied to my visa, my passport number. So of course, the authorities knew. And I know because sometimes they'd be waiting for me. For instance, once I landed at the airport, sometimes they'd have a plane closed guy sitting next to me on the flight. I remember one time I was transiting through one of the airports in Xinjiang, and there were some guys following me through, and one of them had this map. It was upside down, but he was just watching me over the top of the map. It was sometimes almost comical how. How they were sort of blunt force trying to track what I was doing. But the platform itself was really fascinating because it was a back end. Look at how the government is seeking to bring all these data points together that they have from this closed Internet, from the millions of security cameras that they've installed over the years, how they're trying to bring it all together and make it usable in real life for the police, for China's security apparatus.
- [27:45]
Lawfare Host
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- [29:46]
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- [30:55]
Sophia Yen
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- [31:19]
Michael Feinberg
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- [31:32]
Sophia Yen
go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm
- [31:35]
Michael Feinberg
here to talk about my downtown. Some things you'd rather type than say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon
- [31:44]
Sophia Yen
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- [31:48]
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- [31:55]
Michael Feinberg
So I want to. I want to follow up on that question, as you probably suspected. I would China's national security state and its law enforcement apparatus is a pretty widespread labyrinthine beast. Do you know which particular organ of the national security apparatus was behind this? Was it it? The Ministry of Public Security? The Ministry of State Security, Provincial Bureau?
- [32:21]
Sophia Yen
Who.
- [32:21]
Michael Feinberg
Who do you think was sort of, you know, if we imagine this is a Chinese version of Homeland, like who's in their headquarters connecting the pictures of Sophia with red pieces of string?
- [32:34]
Sophia Yen
Yeah. So this platform seems to have been developed by the Public Security Bureau in Hebei, which is a province just north of Beijing. This is where, for instance, A lot of Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics events were held. They were held in Beijing and the surrounding area. So it is an area that gets a Lot of foreigners. And it had a lot of interest with foreigners, especially journalists, in the lead up to the Olympics, because they were, for instance, just forcibly removing people off their land to build facilities for the Olympics that were upcoming in the years prior to China hosting the Games. This is interesting in particular because this tells us that obviously the local provincial public security bureaus have access to national level data, and they were combining that with local level data. So when you look into individual records, you start to see a lot more data points tracking the movement of people. Because I'd left by the end of 2022, I had some information, but not a whole ton compared to some of the others that were in the database. And it's down to, for instance, the number of times or percentage. You could, could, you could analyze the data either way, how many times you were seen at certain intersections or spotted on this camera. There were serial numbers, I assume those corresponded with specific cameras in specific locations. But it was like, you know, X number of times spotted at the west entrance of this housing compound, you know, X number of times at this entrance of the store. It was very specific in terms of the kind of information that was being pulled in. And it's all attached to your individual record. And on top of that, there was a relational mapping tool so you could click in and see the connections between different people if you were colleagues with somebody, if you were colleagues with somebody and lived in the same housing compound, if you lived in the same neighborhood, if you were spotted on camera together. And so all these little ways of looking at the data tells us a lot about how China's seeking to use such information. They want to be able to essentially behaviorally map what people are doing, where they're going, who they know, how often they see each other, what their routes are. I mean, looking at some of those records, just looking at some of those individual movement records of where people have been spotted, even if you didn't know who it was, you could pretty much guess where somebody lived because they'd be spotted most often at the entrances and exits of housing compounds. Right? So you could really track and get a sense of a person's pattern of movement. I mean, this is really scary stuff because you then you have to wonder, how are they going to use it in the future? A lot of, a lot of police forces, a lot of security services out there would be interested in some sort of predictive policing platform. This is something that China has also tried to move towards. We've seen this happen, for instance, with the Uyghurs, where If you do something that's deemed suspicious behavior or activity in, in those cases, it'd be something like praying at home, reading the Quran, which China would deem subversive in the Uyghur pop. I mean, something like that was enough to land you in, in jail or prison or one of these re education camps where we know a lot of human rights. Some really horrific human rights abuse has occurred. But there's a move toward this and this particular platform really kind of lays out how they're seeking to combine all that data for themselves. From what I understand, the Ministry of State Security has these kinds of capabilities, but even more so, and again, this is a program with data from a few years back, so you would think that the present day programming capabilities are much stronger.
- [36:10]
Michael Feinberg
So is there a worry among your former colleagues in the prc, not just from your paper, but just in the journalist class in general, that this could potentially be used almost as a predictive tool? In other words, they might be able to eventually identify people with whom you might be meeting for stories, not because they've got you on record as meeting with them, but because they just have a similar lifestyle and data points to other people you've met with.
- [36:46]
Sophia Yen
Yeah, this is something I always worried about when I was reporting in China and still something I think about now because the Internet was closed and we had to use only the Chinese version of all apps. Every time, for instance, I hailed a taxi, if I we even got into a taxi, the taxis all had security cameras inside them. Of course, there are cameras all over on the streets. Your phone itself could turn into a tracking device for you or even a microphone. I was always so careful because I didn't want to first give a sense of exactly where I was going or who I was meeting, because that could mean risk to myself and potentially my sources. I was just always so careful. And even. And with those kinds of precautions, if they're able to track you like this, then that means that at best maybe you're fortunate just to stay a couple of steps ahead. And in a way, that was always the best I could push for. Just to have a couple of hours before the minders caught up to me and told me I couldn't work anymore, put me in their car or took my passport or, you know, this kind of thing.
- [37:45]
Michael Feinberg
A lot of what you've described about the data the Chinese government collected on you, while they may have used intrusive means, it's not that different from the sort of information that the United States or Great Britain's government could potentially have on one of its citizens. A lot of it's just personally identifiable information and geolocation data that democracy's law enforcement service could get from a cell phone tower dump. Was there anything in the file that really set your teeth on edge and you don't have to get into it what it was if you don't want to, but was there anything in the file that really struck you as this is not something I want a government to know about my personal life?
- [38:38]
Sophia Yen
The relational mapping tool I think was really. It's pretty jarring to see because that means that there's all sorts of ways to try to figure out what you're doing. And then you have to think, well, what if, what if you just happen to pass somebody on the street? You don't actually know them, but they're of note. Does that mean you're at risk too? I mean, we saw this come into play during COVID actually, just having brief exposure anywhere. If your cell phone pinged in a place where there had been cases could mean that you were hauled in for a quarantine. It was very, very broad strokes. It was a very broad strokes way to handle the pandemic. So then you start to think about your movement and what that means and what that might tell somebody watching you. The other thing that was interesting is the data analysis side and the groupings that the program had put in place. So as I mentioned, there were big broad strokes. Categories of fugitives, foreign journalists, foreign students, foreign spouses of Chinese citizens, for example, like these. But then there were other ways to drill down. They were interested, for instance, in a grouping of citizens of five eyes countries. There was another grouping that caught my eye of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians. I mean, then you have to think, well, why is China interested in these kinds of people? Why this specific group that they will have the data capability to drill down into? That tells you a lot about where China and how China is thinking. Yeah.
- [40:05]
Michael Feinberg
Now one of the interesting things to me is the Chinese government didn't build, in the literal sense of the word, the apparatus by which all this data was collected. There are quasi private tech companies in China that make video cameras, that make wireless routers, that make telecommunications backbones, and under see cables and drones. You know, the Shenzhen region of China has as many, if not more tech companies than Silicon Valley does in Northern California. With the difference being that China is where its own products are built, but also where many of Silicon Valley's products are built. Is it fair to say that the ecosystem you've Referenced a couple times in as much as it has. Physical hardware is not something contained to the prc.
- [41:09]
Sophia Yen
You mean if it's something that could be used elsewhere? Yeah.
- [41:12]
Michael Feinberg
I mean, do we, do you think, based on your experience and your knowledge now of how the Chinese government operated with you, that if the company that makes the video cameras that might line Beijing's ring roads, say, also sells those video cameras to municipalities and other parts like the world, like, is that problematic?
- [41:35]
Sophia Yen
Yeah, I definitely think that that's problematic. Years ago, before any of this became so much of a debated and controversial issue, already hikvision cameras are being exported out of China to different parts of the world, and they were starting to be bought by a lot of people. I mean, now they're in, in fairly sensitive locations. You know, China doesn't do this themselves. They use their own tech. They don't allow, for instance, Teslas into military installations. China doesn't allow foreign companies into their telecoms networks. They know that it's a vulnerability. They have worked, in fact, and invested significantly in industries of strategic importance, like rare earths, so that other nations are dependent on China, so they know what they're doing. They're playing the long game when it comes to this kind of tech. You can never discount what might actually be in there and what that could mean. I mean, in tech, devices in general, there's always some sort of backdoor. I'm not, not the best technical expert to, to talk about these things, because that's not exactly what I do. But as far as I understand, there are always ways in and out of devices. That's something that's just built in. And it's not a far cry to think that China would do the same and that they might be able to leverage that to their own advantage. China is looking to be number one on the world stage. They see that this is their moment. The fall of the west, the rise of the east, with an unpredictable Trump in the White House. This is, in some respects, playing to Beijing's advantage. I mean, Xi Jinping, you just look at what he's done the last couple of weeks. He hosted both Trump and Putin and he's expected to visit North Korea. He's like the guy who can talk to all the other guys. He's this bastion of global diplomacy and partnership. Even Trump, in a way, needs Xi Jinping to be on side because in some respects, the Washington seems, seems to want to have China to help push Iran in the Iran war. I mean, this is incredible, but just, just honing back into the technological side of things. I have talked about this for a long time and I joke about it in a snarky way. I call it dictatorship in a box. These are technologies that can be exported and are already being exported. In some cases we have. There has been reporting by journalists, for instance, in the case of Myanmar, where censorship technologies for the Internet, China basically gave them the great firewall. And I have friends who do come in and out of Myanmar who are working there who have described to me what it was like to be there with the closed Internet. And that's exactly what China's like. So it is very easy, once these programs and capabilities are developed, to then export it it out. There are more and more countries interested in in this kind of surveillance capability. There has been some chatter, for instance, about whether China and Iran, China had exported some of this to Iran and in what way Chinese know how and tech may have played a role in this Internet shutdown that's gone on in Iran for some months now as the war has continued. I mean, it's very interesting to think about. It's very worrisome. There is a broader global debate about digital privacy and security in general, but China is unlike any other actor. China is, as you said Mike rightly pointed out, very authoritarian. They don't have checks and balances that an otherwise democratic government would have in terms of having some debate on the use of such data. I mean, I remember, I just remember, you know, in the past there was like even a debate with Apple about whether Apple should help the US Government crack into the iPhone of an alleged suspect. You know, where. Where do you draw the line? Because once you start moving in one direction, you perhaps can't pull it back anymore.
- [45:25]
Michael Feinberg
So I want to go back to something you said about the dictatorship in a box because you talked about it largely in terms of being exported to countries that are interested in using that technology for themselves. I want to posit something else. That technology being sold to countries that don't want to use it, but as consumer goods that could still redound to the PRC's benefit. As you put it, if there's a back door, surely the manufacturer is going to know how to use it, regardless of whether the temporary owner wants to lend them a key. Like, I guess what I'm asking is there's been a lot of debate in the United States and Western Europe and the Five Eyes nations over the past few years about whether Chinese information communications technology should form any part of domestic networks here. And I guess what I'm curious about, as somebody who has grown up in the United States, Somebody who has lived for significant amounts of her life in China and other regions and who has found herself victimized personally by a lot of this technology. Is this sort of scare about China tech coming into democracies, into NATO nations, into five eyes nations? Is that something we should be skeptical about because it might be protectionist or based on your experience, do you think now that that's something we should be concerned about and have those viewpoints changed at all since you came into possession of this information?
- [47:18]
Sophia Yen
I have always thought that this is something to be very concerned about. From the perspective of Western countries. There's always been a question of how much China could do. I mean, do they really have a backdoor into a hikvision camera that, for instance, the Ministry of State Security could access? Does that mean a Hong Kong dissident walking down the streets of Britain could be tracked? I mean, these are questions that we don't always have answers for. We don't necessarily have hard proof. We have the eyewitness experiences of people who have been harassed and surveilled and intimidated and assaulted in countries outside of China for doing things that the state didn't like. That aside, I always just highlight that you have to think about how China behaves. Like I said before, China doesn't allow foreign companies into their own networks because they know it could be a national security liability. It could be a vulnerability that China doesn't allow. It should say a lot in terms of what that means for other countries thinking about whether to adopt this kind of technology or how to use it, or whether to integrate it. If China is not willing to do it, why should any other country? I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm a journalist, not a lobbyist. I'm not a policymaker. But I have, as you said, Mike, I have lived through all this. I spent 10 years between, well, a little more than 10 years actually, between Hong Kong and Beijing. That time was Xi Jinping's first two terms in power. I literally saw freedoms in China fall down a cliff. I mean, I have never experienced anything like that before. I certainly hope I never experience anything like that again. In terms of the tightness and the control and the surveillance, it's like this non stop. It's 24 7. You even think, can I think these thoughts? You know, you think you have. You have to be careful what you say out loud in your own home. You have to be careful what you say out loud in the streets. I of course, knew I was somebody of interest to the state. So I was even more careful. This is not necessarily the experience of the entirety of the country's 1.4 billion people, but it is not by any means pleasant to go through that. And this particular platform, this digital platform, this surveillance program that has come to my attention in some ways, it doesn't surprise me. Of course, I knew they were doing this. What is interesting is how they've sought to integrate all the data into something usable for their purposes. And that's what's really scary, because then can they be using that in a much wider context, text outside of the country if they're exporting this kind of technology? I mean, it's not a far cry to think that this is very much a program that you can just take and install somewhere else if you've got all the bits of kit and hardware to go along with it. Facial recognition cameras, for instance, are just becoming so ubiquitous and even entering, you know, by the time I left in China, things like, you know, construction workers entering the building sites, for instance, were entering via facial recognition at the entry gates of the actual site itself. I mean, this was just normal. I mean, it sounds so sci fi, but this is daily life in China. I will say one, one interesting point about that because facial rec was so. And these kind of face scans and pictures were so prevalent there. There are some records within that database where people entering at ski lifts in Hebei, so tourist sites for amusement on holiday. Their pictures, the ones that were taken there, were in the database to attach to their record. So that just gives you some sense of the reach of the surveillance.
- [50:47]
Michael Feinberg
So knowing what you know now about that reach, is there anything you would have done different during your time in the prc?
- [50:56]
Sophia Yen
You know, I think in the time I was there, I was always, I was probably as careful as I could have been. I was careful with my devices, I was careful with what I said, what I put in email, certainly what I said on the phone. I almost never had a regular phone call. I tried to call over different apps, for instance, VPNs. You know, I think in a situation like that, the best you can hope for is to stay a couple of steps ahead so that you can live your life and get your work done, which is what I was always aiming for. As someone who has seen all of this spring from almost nothing to start, to just about everything in terms of the surveillance dragnet, it is very scary. It is very scary. It's scary that's coming from China, which is not a free country or a benevolent government. I mean, China is building some of the most advanced tech out there for, for instance, transportation bullet trains in Southeast Asia or whatnot. I mean, they are conducting lots of trade deals. What they have to offer is of interest and, and can help a lot of countries. But don't let any of that blind you to what China really is. I mean, this is something that the Chinese state definitely won't want me to say, of course, but it's very easy to be fooled in a way by the bells and whistles that you see coming out of China. They do. They are at the forefront of, in many ways, they have managed to pull loads of people, for instance, out of poverty. They've, they've managed the world's greatest economic miracle. That is a fact, and that should be praised and complimented. And there are learnings from that. I'm not saying that everything about China is terrible, but when it comes to this particular aspect of the control and the surveillance, this is something that's very worrisome and it's something that could be very easily rolled out around the world.
- [52:39]
Michael Feinberg
Well, on that hopeful, optimistic note, I think we will leave things. Sophia Yen, thank you very much for coming on the show and talking about your experiences and, and I hope our audience finds it as elucidating as I did.
- [52:54]
Sophia Yen
Thanks for having me on, Mike.
- [52:58]
Michael Feinberg
The Lawfare Podcast is produced by the Lawfare Institute. If you want to support the show and listen ad free, you can become a Lawfare material supporter@lawfairmedia.org support supporters also get access to special events and other bonus content we don't share anywhere else. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review us wherever you listen. It really does help. And be sure to check out our other shows, including Rational Security, Allies, the Aftermath, and Escalation, our latest Lawfare Presents podcast series about the war in Ukraine. You can also find all of our written work@lawfaremedia.org the podcast is edited by Jen Pacha with audio engineering by Goat Rodeo. Our theme song is from Alibi Music, and as always, thanks for listening.
- [53:55]
Sophia Yen
Do you ever find yourself scrolling through headlines and thinking, possibly screaming, at least on the inside, that can't be true. There's rising rates of vaccine, preventable diseases, and someone on the Internet saying that watermelon juice is a natural alternative to sunscreen. Just no. I'm Chelsea Clinton and that can't be true. It's back for season three. My guests and I cut through a lot of chaos to help all of us understand what is true, what is overblown, and what's false.