There’s a whole range of them. There are 1,400 tech firms that are working in Xinjiang — almost all Chinese firms, but many of them are connected to other spaces, either through investment or partnerships. The primary firms are firms like Hikvision, Dahua…CloudWalk was a major one. SenseNets has definitely been implicated in this, and SenseNets was part of SenseTime until very recently. SenseTime is now trying to back off and say that they’re not doing anything in Xinjiang, but in the past they had joint ventures with security in Xinjiang with a firm called Leon Technology, which is a Xinjiang-based firm that does a lot of similar work to SenseTime and also to Face++ and Megvii. Both Face++ and SenseTime are now saying that they’re not involved Xinjiang, but in the past they certainly were.

And it’s very likely that their software and some of their technology is still being used in Xinjiang, even if they’re not servicing it directly. Hikvision is connected to a larger firm called the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC). CETC is the firm that services the integrated joint operations platform, which is actually the major interface that compiles all this data that’s coming from these different places. It’s going from face surveillance to voice surveillance to surveillance of digital histories. That’s actually one of the main ways that people have been caught, is by [police] going through their WeChat history — so in that sense, Tencent is implicated in this as well. The police have a plugin device and they also have a WiFi-enabled device that can scan through people’s phones and recover data that’s been deleted.

They say they can do this in the space of two minutes. And in a given police district, probably 3,000 phones are scanned each week through random checkpoints. Usually through that scanning, they’ll come up with a couple of people that they’ll find, you know, had been part of a Quran study group, back in 2015 or 2016, back when that wasn’t considered illegal — or maybe it was illegal technically, but people didn’t think that it was because everyone was doing it. One of the firms doing that scanning stuff is a firm called Meiya Pico. There are several others, too.

Here are some of the connections. It’s a messy, messy system, and it’s hard to trace all the parts.

SenseTime has a partnership with MIT. So there’s that connection. Another firm that’s doing voice signature stuff is iFlytek. They also have a partnership with MIT. CloudWalk has partnerships with the University of Illinois. The CEO of CloudWalk was trained at the University of Illinois, and his advisor, at least until 2018, was still working in collaborative ways with CloudWalk. University of Illinois is connected to IBM, so there’s IBM people involved in that project, too. They even had funding from the U.S. military — kind of bizarre. Microsoft has some connections, although they’re not very close. Microsoft Research Asia, which is based in Beijing, has trained a lot of the people that are doing face surveillance in Xinjiang, but it’s not necessarily a direct connection. Some of the researchers at Microsoft though are directly connected to things that have happened in Xinjiang. They’ve gone to Xinjiang for conferences and stuff like that. Although, again, it’s still hard to prove that they’re directly involved. But they’re collaborating with people that are directly involved, so that’s still there. The biggest collaboration actually is with the chips that are being used — the Intel chips — a lot of the equipment is still run on American-made chips. And of course Microsoft has corporate clients in Xinjiang that are using Microsoft products. The Chinese state is using Microsoft products, and so Microsoft is quite connected as well. They’re not with the surveillance technology directly, but with the sort of infrastructure that people involved in surveillance are using.

In terms of investment, there’s lots of funding that’s going into these spaces. That’s also hard to trace, too, because it’s often through mutual funds like Silver Lake, which takes money from lots of different people, including a lot of public funds. The pension fund of Washington state workers is invested in Silver Lake, which in turn is invested in SenseTime — that’s investment that’s like two or three steps removed from U.S. sources. All of this is a really complex chain, which means that there are lots of parts you could push on, which in that sense is good, but it also makes it hard to really convince people that what they’re doing is wrong because it feels a few steps removed from the actual end product.