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Mara Hvistendahl Profile picture
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25 May, 9 tweets, 4 min read
NEW: Chicago police used CIA-backed Oracle software to surveil protesters and mine their Twitter feeds.

Oracle then peddled that same software for police work in China.

I bring you a tale of global surveillance. 1/ theintercept.com/2021/05/25/ora…
CPD used Oracle's software, which was funded by CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, to surveil protesters during the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago.

The software purportedly mined thousands of tweets an hour, flagged "negative" tweets, and kept them even if deleted. 2/
Oracle documents boast that the CIA-backed software, Endeca, could help police sift through data in search of unknown threats (what Donald Rumsfeld famously called "unknown unknowns").

Civil liberties advocates have something to say about that. 3/ theintercept.com/2021/05/25/ora…
People have compared Endeca to Palantir Gotham. Like Palantir, it's used extensively by government agencies - including at Guantánamo. A full list of GTMO awards is here, thanks to @tech_inquiry. techinquiry.org/explorer/searc… 4/
After marketing the software to US police, Oracle took it overseas and promoted it for invasive surveillance work in China. 5/ theintercept.com/2021/05/25/ora…
Oracle documents marked "CONFIDENTIAL" peddle Endeca and other software for use by Chinese public security entities - for behavioral and language analysis, for example. 6/ theintercept.com/2021/05/25/ora…
Oracle later rolled Endeca functionality into Big Data Discovery. A slide deck given at a 2018 conference in California says police in Liaoning province used Big Data Discovery to do crime analysis and create heat maps. 7/ theintercept.com/2021/05/25/ora…
Please read the story! And if you missed our earlier coverage of Oracle's policing tech, it is collected here. 8/ theintercept.com/collections/or…
If you have worked with Oracle or have details about how its products are used by police, ping me on Signal at +1 651-400-7987 or write me securely at marahv at protonmail. You can remain anonymous. ⌨️ 9/

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More from @MaraHvistendahl

Mara Hvistendahl Profile picture
22 Apr
NEW: An Oracle spokesperson claimed the company's surveillance tech documents were "theoretical" and that Oracle does not sell such tech directly to Chinese police. But she left open the possibility that a broker could do so.

I looked into that. 1/
theintercept.com/2021/04/22/ora…
Turns out Oracle has worked with several unsavory partners in China, including:
- a reseller active in the PRC 'war industry'
- a subsidiary of state-owned CEC, which is listed by DoD
- a Xinjiang broker tied up with the bingtuan, which runs internment and labor camps 2/
Oracle has a special relationship with Beijing-based broker Digital China, which it recently named a "Partner of the Year."

Digital China is involved in some major surveillance efforts in China, including a Beijing police project that uses "localized" Oracle technology. 3/
Read 10 tweets
Mara Hvistendahl Profile picture
18 Feb
SCOOP: The Oracle TikTok deal was supposed to prevent TikTok from passing data to Chinese police. Turns out Oracle has been marketing its own data analytics software to...Chinese police.

a.k.a. the weirdest China tech story I’ve ever written 1/1
theintercept.com/2021/02/18/ora…
I found dozens of Oracle documents detailing how Chinese police can use the company's analytics software to mine databases containing DNA, vehicle records, facial recognition images, hotel registrations, and lists of drug users. 2/2
Oracle documents give detailed "use cases" that include screenshots of the software interface, suggesting that two provincial police departments (Liaoning and Shanxi) actually used Oracle tech to mine social and other data. One such case was presented at Oracle’s HQ in 2018. 3/3 Image
Read 14 tweets
Mara Hvistendahl Profile picture
17 Jul 20
I did a deep dive on the far-right brothers behind the national reopen & anti-mask protests. Turns out one of them lives in my hometown in Minnesota theintercept.com/2020/07/17/dor…
The Dorr brothers have been denounced as scammers by the right and as astroturfers by the left. But the reopen movement now counts 2.7 million members, according to @IREHR. It's a toxic mixture of public health denialism & blatant hate
The Dorrs are, in short, the perfect people to stoke hate in a Trump presidency during a global pandemic theintercept.com/2020/07/17/dor…
Read 4 tweets
Mara Hvistendahl Profile picture
26 Jun 20
After the killing of George Floyd, #BlueLeaks documents show, law enforcement agencies told police in Minneapolis that they were under attack. The culprits: antifa, “black separatists,” and social media users. By me & @AlleenBrown theintercept.com/2020/06/26/blu…
Even before the Third Precinct burned, law enforcement agencies began emphasizing to Minneapolis police that they were in danger. The evidence given: the doxxing of two of the officers involved in Floyd's killing, a few examples of vandalism, and a threatening tweet to MPD.
In an effort to rein in this purported assault, a fusion center set up in the wake of 9/11 monitored the Facebook RSVP counts for peaceful protest events, including a suburban candlelight vigil. Agencies also collected intelligence from private messaging and Slack groups.
Read 7 tweets
Mara Hvistendahl Profile picture
18 May 20
I did a deep dive on iFlytek, the Chinese AI company with a bunch of neat consumer products that is helping the authorities identify people by the sound of their voice.
iFlytek was once a darling of the western tech press. Until February, @MIT_CSAIL had a major partnership with the company. This continued even after @hrw published a critical report detailing iFlytek's work building a national voiceprint database -- & its work in Xinjiang.
Back in the 1990s, tech companies were focused on finding a better Chinese input method. Liu Qingfeng, iFlytek's co-founder and CEO, was inspired by the success of this IBM product. It stung that a foreign company had made strides toward conquering the Chinese language.
Read 13 tweets
Mara Hvistendahl Profile picture
11 Feb 20
In 2011, a man named Robert Mo was found near a Monsanto cornfield in Iowa. His appearance there set off a two-year FBI investigation involving car chases, surveillance planes, and airport busts.
Robert worked for a Beijing company named DBN (大北农)。DBN had hatched a shortcut to obtaining genetically modified seeds: steal them from Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer by digging them out of the ground, then smuggle them back to China in microwave popcorn bags.
The investigation of DBN was one of dozens brought by the FBI over the past decade. Because the court proceedings dragged on for years, and because I spent as long trudging through cornfields, recreating the case scene by scene, we now have unusual insight into what happened.
Read 9 tweets

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