Some say there are no new ideas. When it comes to the iPhone Air, maybe they are right.
Announced today, the iPhone Air will debut on September 19 for $999. Its selling point? The iPhone Air is 5.6mm thick. Except for the camerathat part still sticks out.
Truly amazing and unlike anything you experienced before, according to CEO Tim Cook, the iPhone Air is Apples attempt to reignite excitement in the iPhone business, which hit a 6-year low in new activations last year as people decide to stick with their perfectly adequate phones for longer.
On one hand, a thinner iPhone seems to be a page right out of the playbook of Steve Jobs and Jony Ive. This is classic Apple! you might think. Thinness was a gimmick during Apples golden age, but it was a beloved one. Apple might have advertised thinness as a feature, but it didnt define the design unto itself. Thinness was but one advancement that enabled it to rethink entire product categories.
[Image: Apple]
Apple was always about more than thin
Apple’s obsession with thinness started in 2001 with the iPod. The first iPod was remarkable compared to anything we’d seen. It squeezed a thousands songs into something the size of a deck of cards. But it was still a hefty thinga modified laptop hard drive that was still a third of a pound in your hand.
[Photo: Apple/Getty Images]
Over several generations, the iPod thinned out significantly, to the point where its entire effect felt less like a cleverly packaged computer component and more like a product with its own uncompromising design language. (Biased, but the third generation iPod will always be a personal favorite for its almost jewelry feel and glowing orange buttons.)
[Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]
Still, Apple kept going. It introduced the much smaller iPod mini in 2004 (with a unique, 1-inch microdrive hard drive). It was more diminutive, but also more expressive in candy colors. It edged toward some platonic ideal of what music in your pocket should be.
[Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images]
That thought experiment culminated with the first generation iPod Shuffle. The iPod, at the end of the day, could be nothing more than the clickwheel control living on a clip that needed no pocket at all. But that didnt stop the release, in 2005, of a ridiculously enticing object: the thin and tall iPod nano (so much smaller thanks to flash storage). This cadence of releases was parodied by SNL, but at the same time, we couldnt get enough. Smaller, lighter, cheaper iPods democratized the platform and drove its profits to new heights. And critically speaking, you only needed to scope out the latest iPodeach a tantalizing new technological wonderto realize its justification to exist.
The introduction of the Macbook Airthe iPhone Airs namesakein 2008 didnt create as long and branching of a design lineage for Apples laptop line, but it was radical all the same. Its core innovation was a smaller motherboard developed in conjunction with Intel. The new design wasnt just about a third of an inch thinner than earlier Macbooks overall: It featured an elegantly tapered edge that gave it motion and harkened to its own implausibility.
[Photo: Tony Avelar/AFP/Getty Images]
Oh, and it was also a full 2lbs lighter.
Perceptually, the weight was what made it feel like something worthy of that Air namesake; as if we fast forwarded ten years into the future overnight. It was the difference between a 5 lb laptop and a 3 lb laptopthe difference between grabbing it with one hand or two.
Like the iPhone Air, the Macbook Air’sbattery life and processing power didnt keep up with Apples bigger models. But the gulf between its standard laptop and the Air was wide. It was so wide that it wiped out the budget mini laptop market at the time (a wave of tiny-screened laptops introduced by the Asus Eee), and prompted the entire PC industry to launch a wave of ultraportable thin laptops based upon much of the same core architecture.
Yes, incremental thinness drives the entire portable electronics industry. But in Apple’s hands, it’s often meant more. It’s been a tool for immediate and long term categorical disruption.
[Image: Apple]
The iPhone Air is engineering, not design
Apple, at its best, used thinness to redefine what a product was and where it could go next. But the iPhone Air isnt defining a new category of thin phones. (Incidentally, Samsungs S25 phone already offered an ultra-thin approach to disappointing sales.) Apples most loyal fanbase is concluding that, if nothing else, the Air is a peek at the future of thinner phones, or even a preview for a folding iPhone to come.
I dont mind that Apple introduced a thinner iPhone. They do so every year. This one just happens to be thinner than usual. But I do mind that it failed to release a smaller iPhone before prioritizing other ideasand that the iPhone Air does nothing to push forward the greater experience of using an iPhone.
Why didnt Apple resurrect the beloved iPhone Minia phone that fits into pockets and has a smaller screen that can be easier on a thumb? I also cant help but wonder: If Apple is re-entering its gadget era, why arent we seeing explorations into the Mini/Nano/Shuffle versions of what the iPhone can be?
Maybe those explorations would be silly and misguided. But at least theyd be different. And at least theyd be interesting.
To me, the most notable hardware announcement of the day is that the Airpod Pro is getting a heart rate monitor, negating a major advantage of an Apple Watch, and pointing to Apples greater ambitions in what an AI-infused headphone will be in just a few more years. The second is that the iPhone’s camera has a new sensor so that you can take a landscape photo in portrait mode, so media is just media, no matter how youre holding the iPhone.
With the iPhone Air, Apple did not present a concept car of the future, which challenges the status quo or ushers in a new design language for the company. It didnt imagine how AI and industrial design could merge into a radical, or even notable, new idea. Instead, it’s selling three iPhone models that are all ostensibly the same thing in different thicknesses.
Even if Apple purely wanted to focus on aestheticsif it saw this as a moment to truly merge its industrial design with the UX of Liquid Glassthat could be interesting! Maybe functionally unimportant, but at least its a product with a point of view.
But the iPhone Air is like so much of what we see coming out of Apple these days: not made from the heart of innovation, but responding to the demands of shareholders curious when theyll offer the same lineup of hardware we see from Samsung, Google, and Meta.
With the iPhone Air, Apple feels like its cosplaying Apple.
Math and reading scores for U.S. high school seniors are plummeting, according to new federal data released on Tuesday. Reading skills in particular have suffered, with test results dropping to their lowest scores since the assessments first began in 1992.
According to the new data, 32% of 12th grade students performed below the assessments basic reading achievement level, which measures whether students can find relevant details within text and come away with a literal understanding of what they read. In 1992, the portion of 12th grade students falling below that basic measure of reading comprehension was 20%.
Only 35% of 12th graders demonstrated a proficient level of reading skill, meaning that they could connect key points across reading samples and make more sophisticated inferences about tone, word choice, and themes. In 2024, the portion of students who demonstrated proficient reading skills dropped by 2% compared with 2019, and 5% compared with the tests 1992 baseline scores.
The new test data on high school seniors was collected in 2024, making it the first set of scores to be published after the educational disruptions that students experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The data is part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a federal testing program also known as the Nations Report Card. Fourth grade and eighth grade students are given the assessments every two years, while 12th grade students are evaluated every four years.
High school seniors also performed worse in math, achieving the lowest scores since the math assessment began in 2005. Only a third of seniors performed at a level that showed they were academically ready for college, down from 37% in 2019.
These results are sobering, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) acting commissioner Matthew Soldner said. The drop in overall scores coincides with significant declines in achievement among our lowest-performing students, continuing a downward trend that began even before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unprecedented setbacks
The latest scores for high school seniors show that all is not well in the American educational system. Test scores have been sliding for more than a decade, a trend made worse by disruptions to schooling during the pandemic.
The new score data, published for the first time since 2020, shows that pandemic-linked performance losses for students arent fading away as time passes, like many had hoped. That trend is backed by this years assessment of 8th graders, whose reading scores fell even further in 2024, deepening a steep drop-off in scores observed from 2019 to 2022.
Reading scores began dropping prior to the pandemic, but researchers and educators are still trying to make sense of why. How time spent on screens influences children is a complex issue and can trend positive or negative, depending on how much time they spend and what theyre doing.
Some research has shown that deeper reading comprehension is worse when kids read on screens, but rolling back the digital revolution in the classroom isnt likely to emerge as a one-size-fits-all solution. In the U.S., adults are consuming digital media more and reading for pleasure less than ever. The way adults consume information has changed radically in recent decades, with the emergence of algorithm-driven social media, the rise of information disseminated via short-form video, and the continued deterioration of news sources.
Beyond the classroom, all of those changes will continue to influence young learnerswho are plunged into a fast-paced, unpredictable digital information ecosystem, often as early as age 8. With AI now in the mix, students are doing their best to navigate a complex world filled with potent new tools that are already upending life for many adults.
Linda Yaccarinos departure as CEO of X on July 9 caught many by surprise. While reportedly in the works for weeks, the absence of leaks and the timing of her announcementone day after Xs AI chatbot Grok made antisemitic comments referencing Hitler during a prompt about Texas floodingsparked heavy online chatter.
Two months later, that chatter has faded, but the executive office remains vacant, with no signs of being filled soon. (Yaccarino, meanwhile, has since taken over as chief executive of eMed Population Health, a digital health company developing a platform for GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.)
X declined to comment on the CEO search, and Elon Musk has only weighed in once, thanking Yaccarino for her contributions on the day she stepped down. If his past remarks are any guide, hes in no hurry.
CEO is fake title. You need a president, a controller and a secretary for a C Corp, but all the chief [whatever] officer stuff is superfluous, Musk wrote on X two years ago. That echoed comments from 2021 at The Wall Street Journals CEO Council Summit, when he said president, secretary and treasurer were the only meaningful corporate titles. (To underline the point, his title at Tesla is technoking.)
On prediction market Polymarket, bettors arent expecting an announcement anytime soon: 51% dont think a decision will come this year, up from 22% the day after Yaccarino left. The current frontrunner is serial entrepreneur Nikita Bier, with 19% betting hell get the job. Bier, who joined Xs product team as Yaccarino departed, has pushed for useful content and a crackdown on AI slop, which he says have boosted App Store downloads.
Musk himself is second on Polymarket with 10% odds, likely reflecting the assumption hell remain the final decision maker regardless of who holds the CEO title. Other names have low odds, including White House AI policy advisor Sriram Krishnan, X CFO Mahmoud Reza Banki, and Grok itself, each at 4%. Longshot candidates include MrBeast, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, and Sheryl Sandberg.
Time will tell if the next CEO makes it past Yaccarinos two-year run.
Ford is recalling almost 1.5 million vehicles in the United States because the rear view camera may show a blank or distorted image on the center display screen while the vehicle is in reverse, which can reduce or distort the driver’s view of what’s behind the car and increase the risk of a crash.
The recall includes certain vehicles from model years 2015 to 2019 of the Lincoln Navigator, Lincoln MKC, Mustang, Ranger, Transit, Transit Connect, Econoline, Edge, Expedition, F-250 SD, F-350 SD, F-450 SD and F-550 SD.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Monday in its safety recall report that Ford is aware of 18 accidents and no injuries related to the camera issue.
The agency said that vehicle owners will be notified by mail and instructed to take their vehicles to a Ford or Lincoln dealer to have the rear view camera inspected and replaced, if necessary. There will be no charge for the service.
When Pandora launched its music service in late summer 2005, it came with a straightforward pitch: ten free hours of music a month before users had to subscribe. We didnt have much money in the bank, recalls former CEO Joe Kennedy. The paywall was meant to keep costs in check while laying the groundwork for a subscription business.
Except, people didnt want to pay. The free trial drew huge interest, while conversions to paid were abysmal. Even worse, the most devoted fans found ways to bypass restrictions. People were getting to the end of their trial, and hacking around [to keep] listening, says an early employee who spoke to Fast Company on the condition of anonymity. It was very clear that we were onto something.
Within months, Pandora pivoted to a free, ad-supported model, and growth exploded. Over the next decade, Pandora became North Americas most popular music streaming service, peaking at more than 81 million monthly listeners.
But the past 10 years have been defined by steady decline. Last year alone, Pandora lost close to three million monthly users. This spring, its audience averaged around 43 million.
In hindsight, the culprit seems obvious: Spotify. But Pandoras two-decade journey is not simply a story of losing to a superior rival. Its a case study in the innovators dilemmariddled with missed opportunities, flawed pivots, and a toxic relationship with major labels that undercut the company long before Spotify entered the market.
They were never going to give us deals that were going to allow us to succeed, says the early employee about the major labels. They just hated us.
This two-part history of Pandora draws on numerous interviews with former employees and executives, many of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidlyeither out of fear of retaliation or because their current employers bar them from speaking to the media. (Part two of this story will be published later this week.)
Finding the core of every song
Pandoras paywalled launch in 2005 wasnt the only sign it was running on a shoestring budget. Another was its headquarters: instead of leasing space among San Franciscos trendy startups, the company moved into a nondescript office building in downtown Oakland. It had previously been a parking garage, recalls Kennedy. Very unglamorous, not particularly a great space.
If you visited Pandoras office in those days, youd find a bunch of people hunched over their computers, wearing bulky headphones, cardboard boxes full of CDs within reach. Many of them were musicians or musicologists, hired by the company for cheap on a part-time basis. Their job was to meticulously analyze every song the company could get its hands on not just by style and genre, but also mood, instrumentation, vocal timbre, and more. That painstaking work fed into the Music Genome Project, a vast database that powered Pandoras playlist algorithms.
Over the years, human experts hand-categorized 2.2 million tracks. That information not only shaped recommendations but also trained machine-learning models that expanded the catalog further. Even today, the Music Genome Project influences what Pandora streams next. You probably couldnt get funding to do that kind of thing anywhere now, but its a hell of an incredible data source to have, says a former employee who worked on the recommendation engine.
The Music Genome Project was the brainchild of cofounder Tim Westergren, who started Pandoras predecessor, Savage Beast Technologies, in 2000 as a way to boost CD sales for B2B partners. Monetization proved elusive, forcing the company to reinvent itself with a direct-to-consumer model focused on streaming, and seek new capital. Westergren had to pitch Pandora hundreds of times until he was finally able to raise $9 million from Walden Venture Capital, $2 million of which immediately went to paying back employees who had worked for months without a steady paycheck. It had been a rough road, Kennedy says. Picture a group that had spent the last five years crossing the desert, running out of water. (Westergren did not respond to Fast Companys request for comment.)
What Pandora lacked in money, it made up for in grit and determination. It was a super resilient group, Kennedy says. That resilience showed when staff hacked an early iPhone to start building an app before Apple had even opened the device to third-party developers. The gamble paid off: Pandora became a prominent App Store launch partner in 2008, and usage skyrocketed.
That was a serious inflection point, Kennedy says. We would have a hundred thousand new listeners every day.
A clash with the major labels
Listeners flocked to Pandora in part because of its simplicity. Type in the name of a favorite band, and Pandora would generate an endless stream of similar music. Users could refine those streams with thumbs up or thumbs down ratings, until eventually they could just let Pandora run for hours, interrupted only by the occasional ad break.
That stood in contrast to other services of the time. Apples iTunes store, launched two years earlier, charged $0.99 per download. And in 2001, Listen.com introduced Rhapsody, a $10-a-month all-you-can-stream subscription, pioneering a model that was later perfected by Spotify.
Nice idea, but there’s just not a business there, Kennedy remembers thinking when he first heard of Rhapsody. Pandora chose a proven model instead. Eighty percent of music listening historically, pre-internet, was to radio, Kennedy says. Pandora wanted to evolve that radio model, and supercharge it with the capabilities of the internet.
There was also a practical reason behind Pandoras radio-like approach. Services such as Rhapsody had to secure expensive licensing agreements for every song in their catalogs. Pandora instead relied on a copyright law provision that let it bypass individual deals and pay into collective licensing pools, just as traditional radio did.
That strategy infuriated many in the music industry, still reeling from the MP3 piracy wave. Unlike Napster, Pandora did pay royalties for every song it streamed, but major labels believed those payments were far too low. It got pretty tenuous pretty quickly, recalls an early employee.
A year after Pandoras founding, the major labels pushed to triple its royalty rates. [Those rates] would have put us out of business, Kennedy says. Pandora started lobbying lawmakers, and even got listeners to contact their representatives en masse. It took two bills being passed by Congress, signed by the president, that enabled us to survive, Kennedy says, referring to the 2008 Webcaster Settlement Act and a subsequent 2009 settlement agreement that set lower royalty rates..
The resulting more moderate rate increase was welcome news not only to Pandora and its users, but also to a growing number of independent musicians. Smaller bands discovered that Pandoras algorithms offered visibility they could never get on mainstream radio. Pandora ended up playing over 30% independent music, Kennedy says. It wasnt because we tried to. Its because we actually were so good at the needle in the haystack probem.
Still, the fight cemented the major labels hostility toward Pandora. They were just so adversarial, the early employee says. They really thought we were pure evil.
A competitor with some powerful backers
With royalty rates under control and smartphone ownership accelerating, Pandoras business was booming. When the company filed to go public in early 2011, it reported $55 million in revenue from the prior fiscal year. By the end of 2015, annual revenue had soared past $1.2 billion, with 81 million people tuning in every month.
But a new rival was gaining ground. Spotify had launched in parts of Europe in 2008 and expanded to the U.S. in 2011. Pandoras leadership dismissed the threat. Here comes another try, Kennedy recalls thinking. This takes billions of dollars to do. Good luck!
[We] believed that the majority of people werent going to pay for a monthly subscription, or make playlists, and actively interact with their music, says the early employee, adding: That was obviously wrong.
Spotify had been able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding, and was putting that money to good use. Spotify offered student programs, family programs, and free listening for six months, says a former Pandora employee.
In addition to deeply discounted rates and generous free trials, Spotify had another ace up its sleeve: Free on-demand listening, which allowed desktop and tablet users to pick and choose individual songs without having to sign up for a paid subscription. By comparison, Pandoras modelpersonalized streams with a cap on skipssuddenly felt antiquated.
Because of our adversarial history, the labels refused to give us free on demand, says the early employee. But they were very willing to give that right to Spotify.
These discrepancies werent just based on past animosities: Spotify had given Warner Music, Sony Music, and the Universal Music Group significant equity stakes in exchange for access to their catalogs. The labels had chosen their horse, and Spotify sprinted ahead. By the end of 2015, Spotify counted 91 million monthly users10 million more than Pandora. A year later, Spotify reached 123 million users per month, while Pandoras growth flatlined.
Spotifys rapid ascent quickly became too hard to ignore for Pandora. A board meeting couldn’t go by without some discussion of Spotify, recalls Kennedy. But with more than 80 million users who loved Pandoras existing service, executives were wary of drastic changes. And without Spotifys labels connections, they felt they were at a significant disadvantage.
It was a little bit like fighting Spotify with one arm tie behind your back, says the former employee. We had no response.
Part two of this story will publish next week.
The U.S. job market was much weaker in 2024 and early this year than originally reported, adding to concerns about the health of the nation’s economy.
Employers added 911,000 fewer jobs than originally reported in the year that ended in March 2025, the Labor Department reported Tuesday.
The department issues the so-called benchmark revisions every year. They are intended to better account for new businesses and ones that had gone out of business. The numbers issued Tuesday are preliminary. Final revisions will come out in February 2026.
The revision showed that leisure and hospitality firms including hotels and restaurants added 176,000 fewer jobs than originally reported, professional and business services companies 158,000 fewer and retailers 126,000 fewer.
The report comes after the department reported Friday that the economy generated just 22,000 jobs in August, adding to fears that President Donald Trump’s erratic economic policies, including massive and unpredictable taxes on imports, have created so much uncertainty that businesses are reluctant to hire.
Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets said the revisions painted a much weaker portrait of the job market than initially thought. While the revision doesnt say much about what has happened since March, it suggests the labor market had less momentum heading into the trade war. And, recent data suggest the market has downshifted further. Since March, monthly job creation has decelerated to an average 53,000.
When the benchmark revisions last year showed 818,000 fewer jobs in the year ended March 2024, then-presidential candidate Trump declared the numbers had been rigged to conceal economic weakness and help Democrats in the 2024 election. However, he did not explain why the government would release the revised numbers two and a half months before voters went to the polls.
The revisions will likely increase pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates at its meeting later this month to give the economy a boost.
After the Labor Department issued a disappointing jobs report for July, Trump fired the economist in charge of compiling numbers and nominated a loyalist to replace her. He was especially enraged by revisions that took 258,000 jobs off May and June payrolls.
Government economists have been struggling with a dramatic drop in the number of employers that respond to their surveys. Still, most economists and financial analysts consider the official jobs numbers reliable.
Paul Wiseman, AP economics writer
In May 2024, seafood restaurant chain Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy. While there were many factors that contributed to Red Lobsters Chapter 11, one in particularits endless shrimp offeringtook much of the blame.
But now the company, having emerged from bankruptcy, is leaning into that financially disastrous offering by launching a new promotion that plays on peoples familiarity with its endless shrimp history. Heres what you need to know about Red Lobsters new SpendLESS Shrimp campaign.
Endless shrimp helped send Red Lobster into bankruptcy
In May 2024, Red Lobster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Many of the headlines surrounding the companys bankruptcy concentrated on how its then-endless shrimp offering, where customers could eat as much shrimp as they wanted for a fixed price, led the company to an $11 million loss and, ultimately, insolvency.
However, as Fast Company previously reported, while its endless shrimp losses helped contribute to Red Lobsters financial woes, they werent the only source of Red Lobsters troubles. Like many restaurant chains, Red Lobsters bottom line was impacted by declining foot traffic post-pandemic, inflationary pressures, and burdensome rental leases.
But by the fall of 2024, Red Lobster emerged from bankruptcy with new owners, new bosses, and fewer storesand hopes for a return to profitability. Since then, the company has added new menu items and the return of old events to excite diners and boost sales. And now, the company is embracing its endless shrimp fiasco in hopes of clawing back even more customers.
SpendLESS Shrimp is here
Endless shrimp is probably never coming back, but that wont stop Red Lobster from trying to capitalize on its disastrous marketing campaign that helped send the company into bankruptcy.
Red Lobster has announced a new campaign called SpendLESS Shrimp, which is clearly a bit of name play on its former endless shrimp promotion. In a press release announcing the campaign, the company didn’t even shy away from the association, stating, Red Lobster is turning the tide one year after emerging from bankruptcy by introducing a fresh take on a fan-favorite promotion.
But SpendLESS Shimp, as its name suggests, wont allow you to access unlimited shrimp. Instead, the new campaign offers customers a new dish called Ultimate SpendLESS Shrimp, which is three different shrimp offerings for a fixed price of $15.99. Included in the Ultimate SpendLESS Shrimp dish is:
Garlic Shrimp Scampi
Shrimp Linguini Alfredo
Popcorn Shrimp
Announcing the promotion, Damola Adamolekun, Red Lobsters newest CEO, said, “Since stepping into this role, I’ve gotten questions about Endless Shrimp ‘Is it coming back? ‘What really happened with the promotion?’ ‘How much shrimp is too much shrimp?’ And it’s time we officially turn the tides.
Adamolekun said the new Ultimate SpendLESS Shrimp dish is part of a new chapter at Red Lobster. It may not be endless, but you’ll definitely spend less.
Yet it’s a dish that the company clearly hopes makes customers come in and spend more, so it can avoid a repeat of its recent past in the years ahead.
Two former executives for the now-shuttered classified site Backpage.com are scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday in Phoenix for conspiring to facilitate prostitution by selling sex ads.
A prosecutor has recommended five years of probation and restitution payments for former CEO Carl Ferrer and sales director Dan Hyer, both of whom pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2018. The prosecutor said both men acknowledged their crimes and cooperated with authorities by testifying against a company founder during the 2023 trial.
Backpage founder Michael Lacey was convicted of a single count of international concealment money laundering and sentenced to five years in prison and fined $3 million, though he remains free while he pursues an appeal. Chief financial officer John Brunst and executive vice president Scott Spear are each serving 10-year sentences for conspiracy and money laundering convictions.
Prosecutors had argued that Backpages operators ignored warnings to stop running prostitution ads, some involving children. The operators were accused of giving free ads to sex workers and cultivating arrangements with others who worked in the industry to get them to post ads with the company.
Backpages operators said they never allowed ads for sex and made an effort to try to delete such ads by assigning employees to remove them and creating automated tools. Their legal team maintained the content on the site was protected by the First Amendment.
In pleading guilty, Ferrer acknowledged knowing a majority of Backpages revenues came from escort ads, conspiring to sanitize ads by removing photos and words that were indicative of prostitution and publishing a revised version of the notices.
In sentencing memos, both the prosecutor and Ferrers attorneys say he helped shut down the site through his cooperation.
His lawyers say Ferrer provided evidence linking defendants to the criminal enterprise and testified that Backpages increase in revenue stemmed mostly from prostitution.
Hyer has previously participated in a scheme to give free ads to sex workers in a bid to draw them away from competitors and win over their future business.
His attorney said her client is sincerely remorseful for his actions and contributed directly to the convictions of other defendants.
Laceys first trial in 2021 ended in a mistrial when another judge concluded prosecutors had too many references to child sex trafficking in a case where no one faced such a charge.
Before launching Backpage, Lacey founded the Phoenix New Times weekly newspaper with James Larkin, who was charged in the case and died by suicide in 2023 just before the second trial against Backpages operators was scheduled to begin.
Lacey and Larkin held ownership interests in other weeklies such as The Village Voice and ultimately sold their newspapers in 2013. But they held onto Backpage, which authorities say generated $500 million in prostitution-related revenue from its inception in 2004 until 2018, when the government shut it down.
A U.S. Government Accountability Office report released in June 2021 said the FBIs ability to identify victims and sex traffickers had decreased significantly after Backpage was seized by the government, because law enforcement was familiar with the site and Backpage was generally responsive to requests for information.
The body camera hung from the top of the IV drip, recording the slightest twitch made by Yang Guoliang as he lay bloody and paralyzed in a hospital bed after a police beating with bricks.By then, surveillance was nothing new for the Yang family in rural China, snared in an intricate network based on U.S. technology that spies on them and predicts what they’ll do.Their train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, text messages and phone calls are forwarded to the government. Their house is ringed with more than a dozen cameras. They’ve tried to go to Beijing 20 times in the past few years, but masked men show up and grab them, often before they depart. And last year, Yang’s wife and younger daughter were detained and now face trial for disrupting the work of the Chinese state a crime carrying a sentence of up to a decade in prison.Yet the Yangs say they are not criminals. They are simply farmers trying to beg Beijing to stop local officials from seizing their 1 1/2 acres of land in China’s eastern Jiangsu province.“Every move in my own home is monitored,” Yang said, sitting behind black curtains that block him from the glare of police lights trained straight at his house. “Their surveillance makes me feel unsafe all the time, everywhere.”Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers like the Yangs 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 were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities.Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a brutal mass detention campaign in the far west region of Xinjiang targeting, tracking and grading virtually the entire native Uyghur population to forcibly assimilate and subdue them.U.S. companies did this by bringing “predictive policing” to China technology that sucks in and analyzes data to prevent crime, protests, or terror attacks before they happen. Such systems mine a vast array of information texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use to unearth individuals deemed suspicious and predict their behavior. But they also allow Chinese police to threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed.For example, the AP found a Chinese defense contractor, Huadi, worked with IBM to design the main policing system known as the “Golden Shield” for Beijing to censor the internet and crack down on alleged terrorists, the Falun Gong religious sect, and even villagers deemed troublesome, according to thousands of pages of classified government blueprints taken out of China by a whistleblower, verified by AP and revealed here for the first time. IBM and other companies that responded said they fully complied with all laws, sanctions and U.S. export controls governing business in China, past and present.Across China, surveillance systems track blacklisted “key persons,” whose movements are restricted and monitored. In Xinjiang, administrators logged people as high, medium, or low risk, often according to 100-point scores with deductions for factors like growing a beard, being 15 to 55 years old, or just being Uyghur.Some tech companies even specifically addressed race in their marketing. Dell and a Chinese surveillance firm promoted a “military-grade” AI-powered laptop with “all-race recognition” on Dell’s official WeChat account in 2019. And until contacted by AP in August, biotech giant Thermo Fisher Scientific’s website marketed DNA kits to the Chinese police as “designed” for the Chinese population, including “ethnic minorities like Uyghurs and Tibetans.”While the flood of American technology slowed considerably starting in 2019 after outrage and sanctions over atrocities in Xinjiang, it laid the foundation for China’s surveillance apparatus that Chinese companies have since built on and in some cases replaced. To this day, concerns remain over where technology sold to China will end up.For example, 20 former U.S. officials and national security experts wrote a letter in late July criticizing a deal for NVIDIA to sell H20 chips used in artificial intelligence to China, with 15% of revenues going to the U.S. government. They said no matter who the chip is sold to, it will fall into the hands of Chinese military and intelligence services.NVIDIA said it does not make surveillance systems or software, does not work with police in China and has not designed the H20 for police surveillance. NVIDIA posted on its WeChat social media account in 2022 that Chinese surveillance firms Watrix and GEOAI used its chips to train AI patrol drones and systems to identify people by their walk, but told the AP those relationships no longer continue. The White House and Department of Commerce did not respond to requests for comment.Thermo Fisher and hard drive maker Seagate promoted their products to Chinese police at conferences and trade shows this year, according to online posts. Officers stroll the streets of Beijing with Motorola walkie talkies. NVIDIA and Intel chips remain critical for Chinese policing systems, procurements show. And contracts to maintain existing IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft software and gear remain ubiquitous, often with third parties.What started in China more than a decade ago could be seen as a cautionary tale for other countries at a time when the use of surveillance technology worldwide is rising sharply, including in the United States. Emboldened by the Trump administration, U.S. tech companies are more powerful than ever, and President Donald Trump has rolled back a Biden-era executive order meant to safeguard civil rights from new surveillance technologies.As the capacity and sophistication of such technologies has grown, so has their reach. Surveillance technologies now include AI systems that help track and detain migrants in the U.S. and identify people to kill in the Israel-Hamas war. China, in the meantime, has used what it learned from the U.S. to turn itself into a surveillance superpower, selling technologies to countries like Iran and Russia.The AP investigation was based on tens of thousands of leaked emails and databases from a Chinese surveillance company; tens of thousands of pages of confidential corporate and government documents; public Chinese language marketing material; and thousands of procurements, many provided by ChinaFile, a digital magazine published by the non-profit Asia Society. The AP also drew from dozens of open record requests and interviews with more than 100 current and former Chinese and American engineers, executives, experts, officials, administrators, and police officers.Though the companies often claim they aren’t responsible for how their products are used, some directly pitched their tech as tools for Chinese police to control citizens, marketing material from IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Seagate show. Their sales pitches made both publicly and privately cited Communist Party catchphrases on crushing protest, including “stability maintenance,” “key persons,” and “abnormal gatherings,” and named programs that stifle dissent, such as “Internet Police,” “Sharp Eyes” and the “Golden Shield.”Other companies, like Intel, NVIDIA, Oracle, Thermo Fisher, Motorola, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Western Digital, creator of mapping software ArcGIS Esri, and what was then Hewlett Packard, or HP, also sold technology or services knowingly to Chinese police or surveillance companies. Four practicing lawyers said sales like those uncovered by AP could potentially go against at least the spirit, if not the letter, of U.S. export laws at the time, which the companies denied.American technology made up nearly every part of China’s surveillance apparatus, AP found:MILITARY AND POLICE: In 2009, Chinese defense contractor Huadi worked with IBM to build national intelligence systems, including a counterterrorism system, used by the Chinese military and China’s secret police, the Ministry of State Security. Chinese agents sold IBM’s i2 police surveillance analysis software to the same ministry and to Chinese police, including in Xinjiang, through the 2010s, leaked emails and marketing posts show. IBM said it has no record of its i2 software ever having been sold to the Public Security Bureau in Xinjiang.SURVEILLANCE: NVIDIA and Intel partnered with China’s three biggest surveillance companies to add AI capabilities to camera systems used for video surveillance across China, including Xinjiang and Tibet, until sanctions were imposed. NVIDIA said in a post dating to 2013 or later that a Chinese police institute used its chips for surveillance technology research.ETHNIC REPRESSION: IBM, Oracle, HP, and ArcGIS developer Esri sold hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of geographic and mapping software to Chinese police that allows officers to detect when blacklisted Uyghurs, Tibetans or dissidents stray out of provinces or villages. As late as 2019, with detentions in Xinjiang well underway, Dell hosted an industry summit in its capital. Dell and then-subsidiary VMWare sold cloud software and storage devices to police and entities providing data to police in Tibet and Xinjiang, even in 2022 after abuses there became widely known.IDENTIFICATION: Huadi worked with IBM to construct China’s national fingerprint database; IBM told AP it never sold “fingerprinting-specific product or technology” to the Chinese government “in violation of US law.” HP and VMWare sold technology used for fingerprint comparison by Chinese police, while Intel partnered with a Chinese fingerprinting company to make their devices more effective. IBM, Dell, and VMWare also promoted facial recognition to Chinese police. China’s police and police DNA labs bought Dell and Microsoft software and equipment to save genetic data on police databases.CENSORSHIP AND CONTROL: In 2016, Dell boasted on its WeChat account that its services assisted the Chinese internet police in “cracking down on rumormongers.” Seagate said on WeChat in 2022 that it sells hard drives “tailor made” for AI video systems in China for use by police to help them “control key persons,” despite facing backlash for selling drives in Xinjiang.For extended findings, click here.“Everything was built on American tech,” said Valentin Weber, a researcher at the German Council on Foreign Relations who studied the use of U.S. tech by Chinese police. “China’s capability was close to zero.”IBM, Dell, Cisco, Intel, Thermo Fisher and Amazon Web Services all said they adhere to export control policies. Seagate and Western Digital said they adhere to all relevant laws and regulations where they operate.Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and tech conglomerate Broadcom, which acquired VMWare and cloud company Pivotal in 2023, did not comment on the record; HP, Motorola and Huadi did not respond, and Esri denied involvement but did not reply to examples. Microsoft told AP it found no evidence that it “knowingly sold technology to the military or police” as part of the “Golden Shield” update.Some U.S. companies ended contracts in China over rights concerns and after sanctions. For example, IBM said it has prohibited sales to Tibet and Xinjiang police since 2015, and suspended business relations with defense contractor Huadi in 2019.However, sanctions experts noted that the laws have significant loopholes and often lag behind new developments. For example, a ban on military and policing gear to China after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre does not take into account newer technologies or general-use products that can be applied in policing.They also noted that the law around export controls is complicated. Raj Bhala, an expert in international trade law at the University of Kansas, said the issues the AP described fell into “the kind of gray area that we put in exams.”“It would raise concerns about possible inconsistencies, possible violations,” said Bhala, who emphasized he was speaking generally and not about any specific company. “But I really stress ‘possible.’ We need to know more facts.”While German, Japanese and Korean firms also played a role, American tech firms were by far the biggest suppliers.The Xinjiang government said in a statement that it uses surveillance technologies to “prevent and combat terrorist and criminal activity,” that it respects citizens’ privacy and legal rights and that it does not target any particular ethnicity. The statement said Western countries also use such technology, calling the U.S. “a true surveillance state.” Other government agencies did not respond to a request for comment, including China’s police and authorities in the Yangs’ province.This technology still powers the police database that controls the Yangs and other ordinary people. An estimate based on Chinese government statistics found at least 55,000 to 110,000 were put under residential surveillance in the past decade, and vast numbers are restricted from travel in Xinjiang and Tibet. China’s cities, roads and villages are now studded with more cameras than the rest of the world combined, analysts say one for every two people.“Because of this technology we have no freedom at all,” said Yang Guoliang’s elder daughter, Yang Caiying, now in exile in Japan. “At the moment, it’s us Chinese that are suffering the consequences, but sooner or later, Americans and others, too, will lose their freedoms.”
Selling surveillance superpowers
Back when China was emerging from the chaotic violence of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, three in four Chinese were farmers, including the Yangs. They lived in a three-room home of tiles and pounded earth nestled among the lush, humid fields of the Yangtze River delta.After Chairman Mao Zedong’s death that year, Beijing’s new leaders opened China to the world, and American tech firms like HP and IBM rushed in. But there were hard limits on how much change the government would accept. In 1989, the Tiananmen pro-democray protests rattled Beijing, which sent tanks and troops to shoot students.Soon after, Beijing began planning the “Golden Shield,” aimed at digitizing China’s police force.In 2001, the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks turbocharged interest in surveillance technology. One researcher claimed authorities could have foiled the attack by unearthing connections between hijackers through public information in databases.American companies cashed in, selling the U.S. billions of dollars in surveillance technologies they said could prevent crime and terror attacks.They spotted the same sales opportunity in China. Researchers warned surveillance technologies would be “instruments of repression” in the hands of authoritarian states. Yet IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and other American companies clinched orders to supply Beijing’s “Golden Shield.”“China didn’t have this kind of thing before,” said Wang, a former Chinese police official in Xinjiang who asked to be identified only by last name for fear of retaliation. “These concepts all came from the West.”Soon, disturbing stories emerged. Chinese police blocked sensitive news, pinpointing dissidents with unnerving precision. They stalked adherents of the Falun Gong sect banned by authorities. Congress demanded explanations from tech companies.In 2008, documents leaked to the press showed Cisco saw the “Golden Shield” as a sales opportunity, quoting a Chinese official calling the Falun Gong an “evil cult.” A Cisco presentation reviewed by AP from the same year said its products could identify over 90% of Falun Gong material on the web. Followers sued Cisco, which is now petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the lower court ruling that allowed the lawsuit.At a human rights conference in February, then-Cisco lawyer Katie Shay said companies had a responsibility to understand how customers might misuse their technology for “surveillance and censorship.”“A lot of people have suffered at the hands of their government, and I want to acknowledge that pain,” said Shay, who left Cisco in June. “I also will say that Cisco disputes the allegations of Cisco’s involvement.”Cisco told the AP it is committed to human rights, but the court allegations may “open the floodgates for suits against U.S. corporations merely for legal exports of off-the-shelf goods and services.”As Cisco was summoned before Congress, IBM partnered with a Chinese defense contractor on Phase Two of China’s “Golden Shield.”Classified government blueprints obtained by AP show that in 2009, IBM worked with Huadi, the state-owned subsidiary of China’s biggest missile military contractor spun off from China’s Ministry of Defense, to build out predictive policing.“Consolidate Communist Party rule,” read the Huadi blueprint, which showed the databases would track hundreds of thousands of people online.In response to AP’s questions, IBM referred to any possible relationship it may have had with Chinese government agencies as “old, stale interactions”:” If older systems are being abused today and IBM has no knowledge that they are the misuse is entirely outside of IBM’s control, was not contemplated by IBM decades ago, and in no way reflects on IBM today.”Back in 2009, Beijing needed the technology urgently to quash critics bonding online. Among them were the Yangs.In April that year, local authorities ordered the Yangs and more than 300 other families in their village off their land. Developers coveted their prime lakefront property for “Western-style” apartments and villas, with fountains, football fields and shopping centers.The Yangs had no idea police were installing systems that could target families like theirs. They just knew their land was being seized in return for just a unit in a five-floor walk-up, too many stairs for their elderly mother to climb.The Yangs and other farmers across China filed complaints.“I discovered the way the government took our land was illegal,” Yang Caiying said. “They cheated us.”
Predict and prevent
In July 2009, three months after the Yang land was seized, riots erupted on the other side of the country in Xinjiang. Gory images of a Uyghur lynched at a toy factory spread online, angry Uyghurs took to the streets, and hundreds were killed.Once again, American firms pitched their technology as the solution.The government sent troops and cut Xinjiang’s phone and internet connections. In secret meetings, officials concluded that police had failed to spot the danger signs because they couldn’t identify Uyghurs deemed separatists, terrorists, and religious extremists, three engineers then working for the Xinjiang government told AP.At the time, Xinjiang police and data systems were already running on American technology including IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft, the engineers said, which AP verified by reviewing government contracts. But the databases were unconnected.So Xinjiang launched an ambitious initiative to fuse data from all available sources, including banks, railways, and phone companies, into a central database. Officials demanded complete information on all suspicious individuals and their relatives going back three generations, according to the engineers, who described specific meetings in which they participated. Two asked to remain anonymous, fearing for their family in China; the third, Nureli Abliz, is now in Germany.Soon, lucrative contracts went up for bidding. Among those seeking to profit was IBM.“Prevent problems before they happen,” IBM promised Chinese officials. In an August 2009 pamphlet, IBM cited the Xinjiang riots and said its technology could help the government “ensure urban safety and stability.”IBM executives fanned out across the country to court Chinese officials. In December 2009, they set up a new “IBM Institute for Electronic Governance Innovation” in Beijing. In 2011, IBM acquired i2, a software program designed to prevent “terrorist threats.” IBM touted i2’s ability to analyze Chinese social media and licensed a Shanghai-based firm called Landasoft to sell it to China’s police, corporate records show.Chinese police purchased tens of millions of dollars’ worth of products from companies like IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft to upgrade the “Golden Shield” policing systems, a leaked accounting ledger acquired by AP from a whistleblower shows.In the confrontation between the Chinese state and its critics, American technology tipped the scales of power.In 2011, thieves ransacked the Yangs’ house, hunting for their property deed. They didn’t find it.Two years later, bald men with tattoos and gold chains smashed down their door, shattered windows and flipped furniture to bully them out of their home anyway. Yang’s mother dropped to the floor in terror. Doctors diagnosed a heart attack, but the Yangs didn’t have money for a pacemaker.Furious, the Yangs sued local police. In June 2015, a judge ruled their land had been seized illegally. The Yangs celebrated.But just weeks after the ruling, officers identified human rights lawyers through the “Golden Shield” technology, cuffed hundreds of them and pressed them into police vans across China. One lawyer later recalled how police monitored his messages on human rights in WeChat before they grabbed him, shackled him to a chair, and tortured him.Overnight, China’s budding rights-defense movement was dealt a fatal blow and with it, the Yangs’ case. The Yangs wre called in and curtly told the judgment was being overturned, their lawsuit dismissed without trial.“We really had too much faith in the law, you know?” Yang Guoliang said, his hands clenched in fists. “It turned out to be worthless.”
Technologies of terror
In the meantime, Beijing was transforming Xinjiang into the most heavily surveilled place on earth, sweeping around a million people into camps and prisons.When bombs tore through a train station in Xinjiang’s capital hours after a visit by leader Xi Jinping in 2014, Xi demanded a crackdown.“He was super angry,” said Abliz, one of the engineers with the Xinjiang government. “They concluded they weren’t surveilling Uyghurs closely enough.”The next year, in April 2015, Abliz attended a closed-door exposition in Xinjiang. A booth ran by Landasoft, the former IBM partner, caught his eye.After years as a vendor of IBM’s i2 police surveillance analysis software to Xinjiang police, Landasoft had struck out on its own, touting i2-like software it said could detain extremists before they caused trouble. The similarity was no coincidence: Landasoft’s software was copied from i2, according to leaked emails and records.“The platform is developed based on i2,” a Landasoft project manager wrote in an email.It used a proprietary data visualization system developed by i2. The software powered what was called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP, with the authority to trigger arrests.Abliz went numb.“I thought then that this was the end of humanity,” he said.Landasoft did not respond to repeated requests for comment. IBM said it cut ties with Landasoft in 2014 and was not aware of any interaction between Landasoft and the Public Security Bureau in Xinjiang.In the autumn of 2015, months after the Xinjiang expo, Landasoft signed contracts with Xinjiang police, emails show. Workers installed millions of cameras and wired over 7,000 police outposts, often built just hundreds of meters apart. Nearly 100,000 officers were recruited to pound on doors and collect names, addresses, fingerprints and face-scans.Though Chinese hardware was favored, foreign software was irreplaceable for its performance and compatibility with China’s American-built systems, engineers told AP. That included server and database software from Oracle and Microsoft and cloud software from VMWare, which Dell acquired in 2016.In late 2016, the crackdown began. Internal documents, a leaked copy of the Landasoft software and interviews with 16 former Xinjiang police officers, officials and engineers reveal how the system worked.Landasoft’s software combined data fed into a central police database to compile a dossier on vast swaths of Xinjiang’s population, tagging them with categories like “went on pilgrimage” or “studied abroad.” Administrators then questioned them, computed risk scores and decided who to detain.Hundreds of thousands of people were tagged “untrustworthy”, leaked messages show. Leaked documents show the IJOP flagged 24,412 people as “suspicious” in just one week in 2017, leading to most being detained.“They thought it better to grab thousands of innocents than let a single criminal slip free,” Abliz said.The technology was crude and flawed. Landasoft emails show engineers frantically fixing a software bug to release hundreds of people categorized as high-risk. And surveillance cameras often misidentified people, a former Xinjiang police officer found when he checked their ID cards.Yet officers were told “computers cannot lie” and that the IJOP’s listed targets were “absolutely correct,” Abliz said. The software’s orders were often obeyed fearfully, unquestioningly.“The tech companies told the government their software is perfect,” Abliz said. “It’s all a myth.”
Minority report
The all-encompassing surveillance forced total compliance: Officers arrested colleagues, neighbors informed on each other.In May 2017, Kalbinur Sidik, a teacher now in the Netherlands, was summoned to her district government office in a yellow brick apartment building in Xinjiang’s capital. A young Uyghur woman, fresh from college, rose and introduced herself as a local official. Sidik, the woman explained, was being appointed as the head of her building, responsible for collecting information on neighbors.“What’s this data going to be used for?” Sidik asked.The woman looked at a computer, with a Landasoft program running and lists of names and tags: “Goes out at night,” “Overseas phone,” “unemployed.” One button stood out: “Push Alert.”The woman clicked it, and the screen filled with names. These people, the woman explained, would be detained and interrogated for suspected ties to terrorism. Sidik’s eyes widened.“I hated her for what she was doing,” Sidik said. “I knew those people would disappear.”Xinjiang officials issued arrest quotas, Sidik and five other former officers and administrators said. Sidik watched with horror as the number of people who attended her compound’s weekly mandatory flag-raising ceremony shrank, from 400 to just over 100, as residents were arrested.At the district office, she observed the logos popping up on screens: Oracle, Microsoft, Intel. The AP found evidence of products from all three companies used in Xinjiang’s policing and data systems during the crackdown, along with Esri, Seagate, Western Digital, NVIDIA, Thermo Fisher, and VMWare, then owned by Dell, which advertised cooperation with Xinjiang authorities on its website.Sidik asked her neighborhood official where it all came from.“We’ve spent a lot of money to import foreign technology,” she recalls the official telling her.Among those caught in the digital dragnet was Parida Qabylqai, an ethnic Kazakh pharmacist at a military hospital in Xinjiang.In February 2018, Qabylqai was flagged by the IJOP for visiting her parents in Kazakhstan. At first, her boss thought it was a mistake.“You’re a good person, you shouldn’t be listed,” she recalled him saying. Then he checked the IJOP and spotted her name.“It’s really serious! You’re going to end up in the camps,” he blurted out in shock.An officer pressed a confession into her hands.“What did I do wrong?” Qabylqai asked.“Just sign!” the officer shouted.Qabylqai was cuffed, hooded, and whisked to a camp, where cameras watched her day and night, even peering at her naked body in the toilet. Guards barking over speakers ordered her not to speak or even to move.“They did things to us that no human being should ever have to experience,” she said. “But they said my name was listed by the IJOP, so they didn’t need to explain anything.”Even enforcers of the system weren’t spared.In 2018, Liu Yuliang, a civil servant in Xinjiang, was ordered to the home of a young police officer in his village. He and dozens of others stood, silent, as the officer embraced his sobbing, pregnant wife.The officer had forced many people into the camps. Then he himself was flagged for detention.Too fearful to resist, Liu went along with the arrest, just as the young officer had done before him.Landasoft software alerted police when flagged people did anything labeled suspicious, like going out at night or logging on the internet repeatedly. Liu was sent to knock on doors, questioning residents whose “eyes filled with fear.”As police swept Xinjiang, Landasoft purchased software from Pivotal, a cloud company later acquired by Broadcom, emails show. And Landasoft registered accounts on both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in 2018, seeking to expand cloud offerings to police clients, emails show.AWS said Landasoft “consumed very limited cloud services for a brief period” and not for software in the Xinjiang crackdown. Microsoft said Landasoft used Azure services through a self-service portal retired in 2021, and that any Landasoft data was deleted.The Xinjiang government told the AP: “There is absolutely no such thing as ‘large-scale human rights violations.'”Liu eventually resigned and returned to his hometown in eastern China, trying to forget what he had seen and done. But he noted with unease the new cameras and checkpoints being installed around his home.Four days later, state security called and summoned him for questioning. The all-seeing surveillance apparatus had followed him home.“The Xinjiang model is being copied everywhere, in every city in China,” Liu said.In 2024, Liu left China, ignoring an airport officer who warned that wherever he went, he would be watched.“This technology has no emotions,” Liu said. “But in the hands of a government that doesn’t respect the law, it becomes a tool for evil.”
Automated autocracy
The Yangs are still trapped by U.S. technology. IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, and Seagate servers, switches and drives power police systems targeting them, maintenance contracts dating to this year show. Intel and NVIDIA chips process data. Oracle and VMWare software run the database.But the harder the Yangs push, the harder the system pushes back.In February 2023, they went to the National Public Complaints Administration in Beijing with a letter. Two days later, police grabbed them from their hotel and drove them home.The Yangs persisted, trying to plead their case to Beijing. In the following months, they were seized at bus and train stations, beaten at a hospital and abducted by ambulance.Last July, Yang’s mother tried again. She carried a letter for Chinese leader Xi Jinping:“They’re using violence and kidnapping to bar me from petitioning and seeking medical treatment We beg you, General Secretary, to save us.”Outside Beijing’s leadership compound, burly men in black tackled Yang’s mother to the ground. She was jailed for over a month, questioned, strip-searched, force-fed medication and deprived of food and water. In October, she and Yang’s sister disappeared.The Yangs’ house is now the last left standing. The father lives alone.His relatives have cut contact, unnerved by the flock of police that tail him. Thousands of pages of documents stashed in drawers, stuffed in bags, and piled in boxes in a bathtub chronicle every step of their 16-year quest for justice.In April, Yang was sent criminal charges showing how much police had spent to stop the family’s “abnormal petitioning.”The cost: About $37,000.Yael Grauer is an independent investigative tech reporter. AP journalists Garance Burke in San Francisco, Larry Fenn in New York and Byron Tau in Washington contributed to this report, along with Myf Ma, an independent investigative journalist, researcher and programmer in New York covering China. Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/
Dake Kang and Yael Grauer, Associated Press
At a Home Depot parking lot, a man patrols on a bicycle for federal immigration agents, toting a megaphone on his hip so he can blast a warning to day laborers waiting to land a landscaping or construction job.The workers from Mexico, El Salvador and elsewhere carry whistles to also sound the alarm, while activists swap details over two-way radios about whether cars whizzing by could be unmarked vehicles carrying officers preparing for a raid.Their work is cut out for them. Agents have raided the lot outside the 108,000 square-foot Home Depot store in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles at least five times this summer, rounding up some immigrants and sending others running in search of safety.Home Depot stores in Southern California have long been an informal job-seeking hub for day laborers in the country both legally and illegally. Now the locations have become a prime target for immigration agents.In fact, Home Depot was reportedly mentioned as a target for immigration raids by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and chief architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, earlier this year.At least a dozen Home Depot stores have been targeted, some of them repeatedly, in Southern California since the administration stepped up its immigration crackdown this summer.Immigrant advocates sued over the raids but on Monday the Supreme Court cleared the way for federal agents to continue conducting sweeping immigration operations for now in Los Angeles, the latest victory for the Trump administration at the high court. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called it “a win” for the rule of law, while advocates swiftly criticized the ruling.“When you undermine the civil rights of those who are more vulnerable, you undermine the civil rights of everyone else,” Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said Monday during a press conference held near a Home Depot.Last month, outside a Home Depot in Monrovia, a man ran onto a nearby freeway to flee immigration authorities, and was struck and killed.The Van Nuys location has been hit particularly hard.
Escaping three raids
Javier, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant who has lived in U.S. states spanning from California to Kansas over the past three decades, said he narrowly escaped three raids at the store, avoiding agents by hiding beneath a truck, peeling off in his car and dashing inside among the busy shoppers.“They come in big vans and they all go out to chase people,” he said in Spanish, asking that his last name not be used out of fear of government reprisal.The store sits on property near the Van Nuys Airport that is owned by Los Angeles World Airports, a department in a city whose policies limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement that her office supports the litigation against the sweeps and has trained city workers to prepare for immigration enforcement on city-owned properties.City councilperson Ysabel Jurado has voiced opposition to a plan for a new Home Depot in her district, contending the company hasn’t done enough to fight the raids.Chris Newman, legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said “these locations should be protected by the city to the same degree the public libraries are.”The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
Contractors make up about half its business
Immigrant advocates say the country’s largest big-box home improvement retailer benefits from having an ample labor pool at the ready for contractors and should do more to protect customers, employees and day laborers.The Atlanta-based company, with nearly $160 billion in annual sales through Feb. 2, counts on contractors and professionals for about half its business and that’s a key draw for largely immigrant-day laborers. Its second-ranked competitor, Lowe’s, gets about 30% of its business from contractors, relying more heavily on homeowners and DIY enthusiasts, said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail.“So if you’re going for the volume, if you’re going where people are, and you can enforce things, you go to Home Depot,” Saunders said.The raids haven’t hurt overall sales, but the disruptions could affect specific stores by making some customers afraid to shop there, Saunders said.In the Los Angeles area, the company’s stores saw a 10.7% decline in foot traffic in June from a year ago and a 10% decline in July, according to Placer.ai, an analytics firm that tracks people’s movements based on cellphone usage. That’s a larger drop than the 3.8% and 2.7% declines reported at stores nationwide for the same months.
Home Depot says it is not alerted to raids
Home Depot has repeatedly denied being involved in immigration enforcement operations. The company’s late co-founder Bernie Marcus supported Trump, though a Home Depot political action committee has donated to both Democrats and Republicans.The company said it isn’t told if a raid is going to take place at any of its roughly 2,300 stores.“We tell associates to report any suspected immigration enforcement activity immediately and not engage with the activity for their safety,” said Beth Marlowe, a company spokesperson, adding that if employees feel uneasy after a raid, they can go home for the rest of the day with pay.In Van Nuys, witnesses said federal agents have arrested those in the lot before appearing to ask about their immigration status. Local managers have shut the store’s automated glass doors to keep agents out, they said.“They’re just fishing,” said Luis, a 37-year-old day laborer who is a legal resident and grew up in the United States after arriving from Mexico as a child. He declined to use his last name fearing government reprisal.
‘Home Depot is not an innocent bystander’
The trend of workers gathering outside Home Depot began with the rise of the home improvement retail store that allowed people, including contractors, to price shop and buy materials directly, said Nik Theodore, a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois in Chicago.“The basis of competition began to shift and what distinguishes a contractor from getting the bid or not more and more has to do with labor costs,” Theodore said. “Home Depot is not an innocent bystander in all of this. Their sources of success were instrumental in catalyzing this change.”As the trend grew so did complaints about workers congregating in store parking lots, and in 2008 Los Angeles passed an ordinance requiring similar retailers opening up to adopt plans to provide relief, such as a seating area, bathrooms and trash facilities.In the parking lot in Van Nuys, a non-profit runs a labor center that takes workers’ names and tracks employers who fail to pay as promised. That’s one reason workers said they keep returning even after the repeated raids.Theother is community.Since the raids, Javier said he’s started considering returning to Mexico to wait out the Trump administration. In the meantime, he said he’ll keep coming to Van Nuys to find work.“It’s a place that becomes familiar,” he said. “Here, all of us together, we’ve become friends.”
D’Innocenzio reported from New York. Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.
Amy Taxin and Anne D’Innocenzio, Associated Press
