Takeaways from AP’s investigation into how US tech companies enabled China’s digital police state

BEIJING (AP) — Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers are trapped in a digital cage, barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus. Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide: the United States.

Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known, an Associated Press investigation found . They sold billions of dollars of technology to the Chinese police, government and surveillance companies, despite repeated warnings from the U.S. Congress and in the media that such tools