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NEW YORK (AP) — 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 Pulitzer board recognized AP journalists Dake Kang, Garance Burke, Byron Tau and Aniruddha Ghosal, along with contributor and independent journalist Yael Grauer, for what it called “an astonishing global investigation into state-of-the-art tools of mass surveillance” that also included a story about the expansion of license plate surveillance of drivers in United States by the U.S. Border Patrol.
AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Julie Pace said “this complex and difficult reporting, done by journalists across several continents, embodies the true spirit of the AP: leveraging our global footprint and deep expertise to tell important, impactful stories. It comes at a critical time when the immense and growing power of U.S. tech companies — and their increasingly complex relationship with governments — is in the spotlight and of immense public interest.”
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.
“This was sweeping and deeply impactful reporting, the kind of work that highlights the unique strengths of AP’s global, multiformat newsroom,” Pace said in an email to staffers. She is among the Pulitzer Board’s new members.
Other stories included a look at how across presidential administrations, the U.S. government allowed tech companies and China to skirt regulations intended to bar that country from access to certain materials like advanced computer chips.
A piece looking at surveillance in the United States found that the Border Patrol was secretively using an intelligence program that used license plate information to track drivers’ travel patterns, and not just for border crossings. Drivers whose patterns were deemed suspicious by an algorithm could then find themselves stopped and even arrested.
The AP highlighted the difficulty of undertaking the project, and said in its statement that journalists dealt with harassment and off-the-record pushes to keep the project from publishing.
The visually compelling project included multiple photographic and video elements, with notable contributions from AP photographer David Goldman and visual journalists Marshall Ritzel and Serginho Roosblad.
