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China's Tech Giants Have a Side Job: Helpirg Beijing Spy j o Nov' 1ol1

Alibaba and its peers assist authorities in policing crime, silencing dissent

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HANGZHOU, China-Alibaba Group,s sprawling camprr has collegial workspaces, laid-back coffee bars and, on the landscaped 1;rounds, a police outpost.

Employees use t}re office to report sus- 1rccted crimes to the police, according to peo- llle familiar with the operation. police also use it to request data from Alibaba for their own investigations, these people said, tapping into the trove ofinformation the tech giant col- lects through its e-commerce and financial- payrnent networks.

In one case, the police wanted to find out who had posted content related to terrorisnl said a former Alibaba employee. "They came to me and asked me for t}te user ID and infor- mation " he recalled, He turned it over.

The Chinese government is buildiag one of the world's most sophisticated, high-tech sys- tems to keep watch over its citizens, including surveillance cameras, facial-recognition tech- nology and vast computers systems that comb through terabytes of data. Central to its ef- forts are the country's biggest technology companies, which are openly acting as the government's eye5 and ears in cyberspace.

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Companies induding Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc., are required to help China's government hunt down crimi- nal suspects and silence politi- cal dissent. Their technology is also being used to create cities wired for surveillance.

This assistance is far more extensive than the help West- ern companies extend to their governments, and the requests are almost impossible to chal- lenge, a WaIl Street Journal ex- amination of Chinese practices shows.

Unlike American companies, which often resist U.S. govern- ment requests for information, Chinese ones talk operily about working with authorities. Ten- cent Chief Executive Ma Huateng, also known as Pony Ma, and Alibaba founder Jack Ma both have voiced support for private companies working with t}te goverrrment on law enforcement and secwity is- sues.

"The political and legal sys- tem of the future is in:sepalable from the internet, inseparable from big data," Alibaba's Mr. Ma told a Communist Party commission overseeing law en- forcement last year. He said technology will soon mal<e it possible to predict security theats. 'tsad guys won't even be able to walk into the square," he said.

Lr'ttle choice In practice, China's internet

giants, which have benefited from trade polieies shielding them ftom foreign competitio4 have little choice but to cooper- ate in a country where the Communist Party controls both the legal system and the right to function as a business.

Tencent, the world's largest online videogame company, dominates Chinese cyberspace with newg video-steaming op erations and its WeChat apg used by nearly one billion peo- ple to communicate and for mobile payments.

Beijing activist Hu Jia said he bought a slingshot online af- ter a friend recommended it for relieving stress. He paid with WeChat's mobile-payment fea- ture. Mr. Hu said he was Iater interrogated by a state security agent, who asked if he was

planning to shoot out surveil- lance cameras near his apart_ ment.

A few years earlier, Mr. Hu said, he had messaged a friend headed to Taiwan with the names of activists he might want to see while traveling there. Iater, he said, state secu_ lty agents showed up at the fnend's house and warned him against meeting Mr. Hu,s ac_ quaintances.

'Experience has proven that W.eClat is completely compro_ mrseq,, espec.iauy for people on the government,s watcli list, Mr. Hu said. .,Everyone has a spy.watching them. That spy is their smarfphone.,,

Neither Tencent nor Chinese security officials responded to requests for comment.

When discussing their coop_ eration with the government, Chinese companies point to dis_

closures by former National Se- curity Agency contractor Ed- ward Snowden, which detailed how U.S. tech and telecommu- nications companies granted U.S. government agencies ac- cess to user data, Earlier, many American phone companies had complied with a secret National Security fuency program to in- tercept the communications of some U.S. citizens without a court warrant.

U.S. govemment reguests for information about U.S. citizeru or legal residents now have to be approved by a court. Chi- nese police, by contrast, can rely on a search warrant issued by the police themselves.

"I would disagree with the premise that the central gov- ernment has access to all this corporate data. Thatt just not true," said Joseph Tsai, Ati- babab executive vice chairman, at the Journal's D.Live confer- ence in October. 'If they want data,from you, just like in the U.S., they have to have a rea- son."

Alibaba and other tech com- panies push back if they believe a Chinese government request for data isn't warranted, said a Chinese police official familiar with the operations of the country's cyberpolice. He said law enforcement must follow set procedures to gain access to private information.

China's government, how- eve4 has the last word there is no independentjudiciary to ap prove or review government re- quests-or for companies to appeal to if they disagree with a demand.

It is unlikely any Chinese company could mount the sort of challenge Apple Inc. did when it refused to comply with a request by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to un- lock the iPhone of a suspect in the San Bernardino mass shoot- ing in 2015.

Over the past year, Chinese regulators have ordered three popular internet platforms to stop streaming videos with po- litical content not in line with government policy, and they more recently warned that companies that didn't comply with new social-media ru.les wou,ld be shut down. Facebook Inc. was banned in China in 2009, without a stated reason.

On June I a new cybersecu- rity law went into effect that requires companies ruufng in- ternet piadorms in China to help authorities fenet out con- tent &at "endangers national

security, national honor and in- terests."

That goes far beyond U.S. government demands on inter- net service providers or plat- forms, which are required by law to report suspected in- stances of child pornography when they discover it and take down material that has been found to infringe on copyrights.

Chinese govenrment author- ities didn't respond to requests for comment for this article.

In one of fte first significant actions under the new law, China's Cybersmce Adminisba- tion this fall slapped maximum fines on Tencent, internet com- pany Baidu and others for aI- lowing users to spread banned content, induding "false ru- mors" and pornography.

Tencent said it "sincerely ac- cepted" the punishment and vowed to do a better job. Baidu

outlined a plan to use big data and arrificial inteDigence to better identify and dispel ru- mors. A Baidu spokeswoman said the new pladorm was de- veloped in collaboration with police and other public and pri- vate agencies, and was de- signed to ensure users get ac- curate information.

Alibaba has data on hun- dreds of millions of Chinese cit- izens who use t}te company and its affiliated services to shop online, stream videos, pay rent, send text messages, make com- ments on social media and more.

The job of monitoring traffic on these platforms falls to its Alibaba Secwity Team, whose Chinese name-Shendun-can be translated as'Magic Shield-"

At the company's Hangzhou campus, computer prograrns sweep Alibaba's internet com- merce sites and flag anything that might be prohibited, such as guns and pornography, ac- cording to curent and former Magic Shield agents.

The securiW team scans the websites for suspicious sales, one former staffer said, such as tea being sold for an exorbitant price, an indication it might re- ally be illegal drugs. Agents then review and remove objec- tionabie content, and in cases of scams such as monetary fraud will alert the police, the current and former agents said

ln a video published on the team's TWitter-like Weibo site, the Magic Shield team is shown working at computer screens. "Guns, rubber bu-Ilets, drugs,,, the narrator says. ,,As long as itt illegal, it will not escape our control."

The team has assisted police in "several thousand cases,,, the video sa1,s. The team also is called in to help police with criminal investigations, people familiar with the operations say.

Plans to set up police out- posts at tech companies were disclosed in 2015 on China,s Ministry of Public Secwity website, which said the intent was to "find out about criminal activity at its fust instance.,,

An Alibaba spokeswoman

said the companyt campus in- cludes "a designated meeting space where law-enforcement staff visit occasionally to com- municate the latest updates on regulation. If there are estab- lished criminal cases, ow team will also use this space to dis- cuss the extent of our assis- tance il those investigations as required by law. There are no police ofEcers stationed on our campus."

Unlike their Chinese coun- terparts, U.S. tech companies, including Apple, Facebook and Alphabet Inc.'s Google, rou- tinely disclose their govern- ment cooperation in transpar- ency reports.

Google, whose services are mostly blocked in China, said there were 23 Chinese govern- ment requests for Google to re- move content in the second half of 20lQ mostly for national security reasons.

Apple disclosed that more than 35,000 user accounts were affected by 24 Chinese law-en- forcement requests in the frst half of this year, many in con- nection with fraud investiga- tions. It said it provided infor- mation on about 9O% of them.

Chinese companies don,t re- lease any information on the number of requests from the government, t}le nature of the requests or the compliance rate.

Online monitoring Tencentt online monitoring

operations use computers to filter its streamed videos, news feeds and other online plat- forms for obscene and politi- cally sensitive content, accord- ing to people familiar with the operation.

Censors at Chinese compa- nies are responsible for biock- ing unfavorable references to the Commr.rnist Party and se- nior leaders, as well as foreign news stories casting China in a negative light. Computers are programed to spot thousands of words and phrases and de- lete most of the offensive con- tent, according to the people familiar with the censorship operations.

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THE WALL STREET JOUtr-AL.

Users of Tencent,s WeChat camems, smarlphoneq govern- app who run large group chats ment databases and other say tley have received auto- sources to create so-called mated warnings about politi- smart cities and safe cities. cally sensitive content. Some Alibaba,s computers and ar_ qgliJlcal activists say their fficial-intelligeniealgorithms WeChat accounts have been power a ,tity brain" in ftang_ suspended or closed for posts zhou that improves traffic floi,r, critical of the government. and clears tlie path for ambu-

During.important politicat lances by using mobile map- events, Chinat internet regula- plng and data ftom traffc carn_ tor sets up shop at Chinese eras to time traffic signals, content providers to catch any- Maya Wang, a Hong Kong- thing that might slip through based researiher for Human t}te cracks, people familiar with Rights Watch, contends the t]te operations said. Ihe regrrla- proclaimed benefits of such to6 the Cyberspace Adminisba- wired cities mask their true tion of China, didn't respond to purpose. ,This whole safe city a request for comment. idea is a massive surveillance

Along with access to online project,, she said. dataChinabgovernmentwants The.government-sponsored something else from tech com- Smart Cities Work Committee panies-the cloud computing didn,t respond to a request for prowess to sort and ana]yze in- comment. formation. China wants to -Xiao Xiao and Lingling Weicrunch data from suweillance contributed to tiis articte.