US companies enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China

The expansion of government surveillance efforts in China — and the role that U.S. tech firms played in it — was the foundation of investigative stories from The Associated Press that won a Pulitzer Prize Monday for international reporting.

The AP's investigation spanned three years, thousands of pages of documents and numerous interviews. It found that the foundations of the system used by the Chinese government to monitor and police its citizens over recent decades was laid down with the help of American companies. Some of the companies went so far as to use their tech's surveillance capabilities as a selling point.