NEW: Emails we obtained in a FOIA lawsuit reveal a previously undisclosed FBI inquiry involving EcoHealth Alliance, along with lapses in biosafety oversight at NIH
theintercept.com/2022/01/20/cor… With @fastlerner This piece is like five scoops in one and the emails we obtained through FOIA are embedded in the story theintercept.com/2022/01/20/cor…

NEW: Renowned Columbia University economist and UN power broker Jeffrey Sachs accepted $3 million from the UAE to research happiness. “It’s whitewashing,” says one critic.

I've been working on this profile of Sachs for months.🧵theintercept.com/2021/12/29/jef… The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, gave $3 million to Jeffrey Sachs’s nonprofit for research on global happiness.

Sheikh Mohammed is famous for his decidedly unhappy daughters and wives, including three who attempted escape. 2/
theintercept.com/2021/12/29/jef…

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/

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/

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

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/WIRED/status/1262367741257879559

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.

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.

NEW: A few years, a woman came to me with the story of a family friend, Chinese-American engineer Harry Sheng, who lost his job after a 1970s run-in with the FBI. He never found work in his field again.

We FOIAed documents that might explain why. (1/12) theintercept.com/2020/02/02/fbi… In 1967, following China's detonation of a hydrogen bomb, J. Edgar Hoover's office ordered agents around the country to compile lists of ethnic Chinese scientists. The goal was to identify all 4,000 such researchers (FBI's estimate) then in the U.S. (2/12)