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Are China’s Surveillance Exports Turning Nations Into Digital Dictatorships?

Is Beijing hoping to turn other authoritarian societies into digital Chinas?

China’s rise as the world’s leading exporter of surveillance technology is yielding some disturbing results. Beijing’s surveillance export packages comprise an entire technological architecture that can give governments an unprecedented ability to see, identify, and track their populations.

Those technologies include cameras, artificial intelligence, telecommunications networks, cloud computing, facial recognition, license-plate recognition, and centralized command systems. Many mid-sized countries are becoming or are already customers.

Turning Other Nations Into ‘Little Chinas’

Turkey is an important case study.

To be clear, Turkey has not yet become a Chinese-style surveillance state. Its political system and institutions remain different from China’s. That said, Chinese technology companies have established a significant presence in Turkey’s digital infrastructure, and they’re not shy about it. In fact, Huawei has explicitly marketed its AI-powered CCTV and “Safe City,” i.e. surveillance technologies, in the Turkish market.

It’s no mystery that China wants to sell as much merchandise to as many trading partners as possible. But is it also possible that China wants as many partners as possible to use and become dependent upon its surveillance technology so that their societies turn into “little Chinas” by deploying Smart City tech?

AI Camera Surveillance

The first building block is the camera.

Chinese companies such as Hikvision and Dahua have become global leaders in video-surveillance equipment. Meanwhile, Huawei has developed AI-powered cameras capable of performing sophisticated image recognition and analysis. CSIS notes that Chinese firms can provide technologies ranging from cameras to AI analytics and centralized deployment.

Huawei’s AI-enabled technology is in Turkey, using cameras with embedded AI chips and deep learning capabilities to perform recognition and identification while feeding information into cloud-based big-data systems. Such systems could operate across enormous numbers of cameras.

That represents a fundamental shift in surveillance capability for nations such as Turkey. A conventional camera records what happened. An AI camera can begin answering who, when, where, and what.

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Exclusive: Palestine Action facing new rigged ‘terrorism’ trials

As the British state seeks to destroy Palestine Action, a new trial is underway in which a judge has threatened defendants with a ‘terrorism connection’ if they explain the motives behind their activism. 

It is one of three such trials in which the government has muzzled defendants, blinded jurors and banned local media coverage to guarantee convictions.

The Grayzone can exclusively reveal that hearings have been underway in the trial of the so-called Teledyne Three. These three defendants damaged the clean room of a UK factory which produces parts for the F-35 aircraft which Israel has used to carry out an array of crimes against civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip, and beyond. They are members of the direction action protest collective, Palestine Action, which the British state has designated as a “terrorist entity” in the face of international condemnation. 

The presiding judge in the Teledyne Three case, Driver, has imposed restrictions on the defense which threatens them with a “terrorism connection” if they attempt to explain the motives behind their actions.

The British media is currently forbidden from reporting on the trial or the draconian measures applied by the judge.   

The Teledyne Three case is one of three ongoing trials in which the British state is intensifying its assault on Palestine Action by muzzling defendants and blinding jurors. Stretching the definition of terrorism to the point of absurdity, and applying it as promiscuously as possible, forms the heart of the government’s strategy.

This February, the government’s relentless attempts to designate Palestine Action as a terrorism entity was found “unlawful”. However, the Home Office’s July 2025 designation of the protest group as a “terrorist entity” remains under final appeal. Meanwhile, separate ongoing court proceedings against PA actionists testify to a systematic campaign of dubious legal tactics to sentence defendants as terrorists, drastically increasing their penalties if found guilty.

As first revealed by The Grayzone, British authorities stacked the legal deck against a group of PA defendants known as the Filton Six. A judge imposed severe restrictions on what the defense could say, what the jury was allowed to hear, and which defenses the jurors were allowed to consider. The jury was not even able to know that the defendants could be sentenced as terrorists if found guilty of lesser criminal convictions. The entire case appeared engineered to guarantee convictions. 

In June, four were convicted, receiving jail sentences as “terrorists” of five to eight years.

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Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Judges?

There is growing interest in whether an “ai” or, artificial intelligence judge can make better rulings than a human one.  

This is understandable as many legal decisions are either wrong or flawed in some critical way.  

Partisan politics and “lawfare” also continue to corrupt the legal system to a degree that has undermined its fundamental credibility, including public trust.

No one knows better than President Trump who was maliciously prosecuted as a civilian. 

Down in the trial courts where legal arguments start, many of the facts of a case get ignored by the court, or never get a fair hearing because they are denied on technical grounds, or from favoritism, or corruption.  

Critical facts are also not discovered or recognized due to human error, or lack of relevant subject competence.

When a case then gets bumped up to an appeal, the appellate courts are even more removed from facts. They may reverse on procedural mistakes, or if a particular statute or law was thought to be seriously misinterpreted, but appellate courts are notorious for affirming lower court rulings because sending a case back to the trial court implicates their judicial colleagues and hurts their record.

In law school, the judges, moreover, were originally trained almost entirely by reference to these abstract appellate cases, and usually don’t get their hands dirty on the nitty gritty of trial court facts.  

This is a mistake, and often produces judges with a sense of the law as a separate, rarified intellectual exercise.  This also lets personal bias creep into their method of thinking because bias can hide behind obscure law language that often appears little more than a legal “magic spell.”  

The term “legal reasoning” is an old concept, but it comes with costs: it rests on interpretations of prior rulings, or precedent — and the majority of those have problems.  The errors therefore keep compounding. Those errors are rarely caught by subsequent judges who assume the facts are settled.   

But another factor that is slowly bringing the use of AI into the legal system, involves the widespread corruption, and human abuse, of the law itself.  Partisan judges can rule based on political party allegiance, and sometimes without recognizing it. That’s how the human mind works.  AI doesn’t. 

The term “lawfare” also didn’t come out of thin air: it is the human manipulation of the normal legal system by lawyers or prosecutors who bring malicious charges, and then rely on judges who are not difficult to persuade.  That is partly because most judges have limited if any experience in business, technology and even work: they came out of law school, went straight into law or worked as law clerks, and their entire frame of reference is the internal culture of the system they are in. The charges have all the appearances of legal formalities that they are used to, so they get processed as if they were legitimate. 

Judges are also under pressure to manually process their caseloads, consisting of mountains of paperwork that clog up the system, most of which is never carefully studied, or read. Their own careers, and retirement interests, can short-circuit their willingness to think hard about the arguments before them. Judges are also risk-averse, especially when cases and facts may be controversial. AI doesn’t worry about controversy.

Law professor and federal appellate judge, Frank Easterbrook, in his increasingly criticized ruling in Klaassen, is an example. It concerned Indiana University student appeal over constitutional violations of their medical privacy. The court ruled against them by relying on an antiquated, irrelevant case from the year 1906. The court used “precedent” not to reason, but to simply process a decision, and ignored medical evidence, political facts, and law itself. At the time, judges were “all in” on the Dr. Fauci fraud, which was also reinforced by institutions including the CDC and NIH, which made any doubts, in their minds, beyond the necessity of critical thinking. 

What would an AI judge have ruled?  It would have been more capable, theoretically, of making a massive sweep, and test, of statistical data concerning documented COVID medical risk, the chemical analysis of vaccines, the regulatory lapses, and corporate profit accounting, including from medical providers.  

The constitutional law interpretations of the First Amendment, and the Establishment Clause of religious rights, were also clear, but ignored by the court. Judges on the bench, and in the Bar, can be motivated to protect their own closed system: legal precedent, even if utterly irrelevant to new facts, is a method of reinforcing that system.  AI has no culture to protect. 

Some elite law schools, such as the University of Chicago, are claiming that they are providing a “template for law schools around the world” by the way AI is simply added into their curriculum.  In some cases they are providing public presentations that report on how AI compares with human judges in case decisions. Their larger teaching posture, however, is that AI is just an elective, and creates no underlying disruption to the traditional law degree. It is still business as usual.  They’re likely wrong.

What schools like UChicago are really representing, is an AI policy for the ABA law school system, asserting their legacy institutional domain over technology which threatens to replace them.  Apparently, doing things the way they’ve always been done is their template for the future. 

The entire legal system from schools to firms to courts, don’t have a firm grasp on what the larger AI strategic implications are. Few are acquainted with, or understand, the AI data centers that are being built across the U.S.  The number of such centers already reaches into the thousands. 

So, what are they for?  

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Dr. Anthony Fauci declines request to appear before a second Senate panel after GOP contempt vote

Dr. Anthony Fauci has declined a request to appear voluntarily before a second Senate panel.

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Friday declined a request to appear voluntarily before a second Senate panel after majority Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee voted along partisan lines last week to hold the longtime infectious disease expert in contempt.

In a pointed letter to Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, a lawyer for the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said any effort to compel him to appear before a Senate subcommittee, after a contentious July 29 hearing, would be to “impermissibly harass or degrade Dr. Fauci for political purposes.”

During the July hearing on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 100 times, prompting the Aug. 6 contempt vote and setting up a referral to the Justice Department for potential investigation over whether he had properly exercised his constitutional rights.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the committee chairman who pressed for the contempt finding, said the constitutional protection did not apply because Democratic President Joe Biden had issued a preemptive pardon to Fauci, and he did not need to be concerned about potential prosecution.

Paul has long accused Fauci of misleading the public during the pandemic and the July hearing was the latest episode in his highly publicized confrontations with him. Paul has repeatedly called for Fauci to be prosecuted and imprisoned.

Johnson, chairman of the subcommittee on investigations, had sought to open a parallel avenue of congressional investigation about Fauci’s role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines.

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Rage Politics: Hakeem Jeffries Will Take A Baseball Bat To The Supreme Court

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has struggled to pander to the mob to secure power in the midterm elections, including brandishing a baseball bat on social media to show his radical bona fides.

With Democratic Socialists chanting “you’re next” when seeing Jeffries, he continues to struggle to stay in front of the mob.

This week, he doubled down on his pledge to throw the Supreme Court to the mob if they make him the next Speaker of the House of Representatives.

After the recent gains by far-left candidates in states like Minnesota and the near victory of Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong in Wisconsin, Jeffries came out to reaffirm his intent to radically change the highest court. According to the Washington Times, Jeffries declared, “There’s a variety of different options that are on the table, and I think that we can’t foreclose any single one of them.” He added that the “conservative, right-wing majority on the Supreme Court has become basically a subsidiary of the MAGA Republican Party.”

He promised to make far-left Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) the driving force behind changing the Court, including possible 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices and expanding the Court to create an instant liberal majority.

Notably, none of these figures were claiming that the Court was fundamentally flawed until it ruled against them, particularly in cases that impacted their political power such as declaring racial gerrymandering to be unconstitutional.

What is interesting is that the liberal justices reject this narrative, reminding citizens that the Court has delivered major losses to the Trump Administration. Indeed, President Trump has routinely attacked conservative justices for ruling against him and his Administration.

In addition, polls show that the majority of the public supports virtually all of the recent major rulings, including the ban on racial gerrymandering.

It is only the Democrats who oppose those rulings and are now demanding a hostile takeover of the Court.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) has called for packing the Court because it does not follow her views and those of “widely held public opinion.” I have pushed back on that rationale, given the Court’s function as a countermajoritarian institution. However, these polls even challenge the flawed rationale for court packing.

So Jeffries is promising that the work of James Madison will be undone by the likes of Jamie Raskin and Elizabeth Warren. To have these calls on our 250th anniversary is crushingly ironic.  Other leading Democrats have lined up to pledge to fundamentally change the Court, which has played a key role in making this the oldest and most stable republic in history.

It is simply about power. Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder has put packing the Supreme Court front and center, explaining, “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.”

I have called it the Nike School of Constitutional Law. Democratic leaders are pledging to “just do it” to appease the mob. Of course, some of these measures would be challenged if done without constitutional amendment. The Supreme Court would then have to rule on the effort to pack or limit its members. The expansion can be done by legislative vote. Although most Americans oppose court packing, Democrats view control of the Court as essential to pushing through a radical agenda to change the political system to their advantage.

Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out a radical agenda to change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” However, he warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described.” Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to allow these changes to occur.

In Federalist 10, Madison discussed the destructive impact of factions in forcing through opportunistic changes to advance their interests:

“By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

We are witnessing the same factional politics being pushed by leaders who believe that they can ride a rage wave into power. They have a greater likelihood of causing lasting damage to our system than guaranteeing their own lasting power. History is not on their side. Today’s revolutionaries are often tomorrow’s reactionaries in an age of rage.

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Woke 2.0 Will Be Worse

Readers familiar with Dr. Seuss’s classic, The Cat in the Hat, will remember the twin chaos agents Thing 1 and Thing 2.

“‘These Things are good Things,’” the Cat reassures the children whose mother has inexplicably left them under the supervision of a fish.

“‘They are tame. Oh, so tame! / They have come here to play.’”

The Things briefly feign innocence, then quickly reveal themselves to be marauding imps, knocking over nightstands and ruining the linens.

“I do not like the way that they play!” says the son of the house.

Now here comes Woke 1 and Woke 2.

“Woke 1 was crazy,” said U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, quoting an unnamed city councilman in a viral interview for ABC. The congresswoman sheepishly acknowledged that Americans did not like the way Woke 1 played out, while also implicitly announcing that there will soon be, or already is, a Woke 2. And it will be tame. Oh, so tame!

There is, in fact, a new version of wokeness in the making. But just as Thing 2 was fundamentally identical to Thing 1, Woke 2 will not be any different in essence from Woke 1. They are both here to upend the furniture.

Wokeness in all its forms is grievance politics.

Its central idea is that an injustice lies at the heart of America and must be corrected to atone for the historical misery inflicted on groups of innocents.

What is changing in Woke 2 is the account of who those innocents are, and how they have been wronged. Woke 1 was founded on the notion that black women are the most oppressed, and therefore most righteous, of all people. “I’m thinking,” said Kamala Harris in her vice presidential victory speech, “about the generations of women—black women.” She mentioned many other kinds of women, of course, but the list began and ended with “the black women—who are too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of this country.”

This approach had rhetorical power, up to a point. It traded on the successes of second-wave feminism and the reality of black slavery in America’s past. But it ran into some problems. Third-wave feminism, as worked out by theorists like Judith Butler, made it basically impossible not to affix the prefix “trans-” wherever the word “woman” appeared. So the flag of Woke 1 became the complicated and confusing progress pride flag—a gay rainbow with black and trans colors intruding from the left.

To make matters worse, the legacy of slavery did not actually touch all the racial minorities that Democrats wanted to bring into their fold. Most Nigerians, for example, had not experienced segregation in the United States. Nor had the millions of unvetted South and Central Americans streaming across the border. They were certainly “people of color.” But so were Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Americans, whose typically enviable life outcomes fit awkwardly into the narrative that the country was built on a ruthless caste system.

The contradictions heightened as Woke 1 faced a series of embarrassments such as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the 2023 Supreme Court case in which Asian students complained that admissions officers were discriminating against them in favor of black applicants. Then there were the notorious Trump ’24 ads that pinned Harris to her previous support of taxpayer-funded gender surgeries for federal prison inmates. Placing black women at the center of the moral universe created an unexpected and electorally unworkable set of obligations to illegal immigrants and queer felons.

Clearly, the coalition needed shuffling. And so rearranging the order of priorities in the grievance hierarchy is what the reinvention of woke has actually been about. In place of the black trans woman who defined Woke 1, Woke 2 has chosen as its ideal victim the dispossessed Palestinian liberationist, fighting with Hamas against Israel. This has a number of interesting strategic advantages.

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Valuable Stolen Picasso Found Hanging on Milwaukee Apartment Wall After Tenant Was Evicted

A stolen Pablo Picasso print worth $50,000 has been claimed by its rightful owner after it was discovered by a landlord in Wisconsin while cleaning out a vacant apartment.

Gallery owner Bill DeLind thought the print by the iconic Spanish artist was gone for good after it was stolen in 2018 from his Milwaukee showroom.

Then, last week, he got a call from police. They wanted him to took at the reduction-style image that a Milwaukee landlord had discovered while turning around one of his apartments.

DeLind knew immediately what he was looking at. It was his stolen “Torero” print, one of 30 known to exist signed by Picasso, the New York Post and other outlets reported.

“I was overwhelmed,” DeLind said Friday. “I was at a loss for words. It was an overwhelming moment for me.”

“It was indeed mine,” he added. “It came back full circle.”

The landlord, Tim Dertz, told WISN-TV that he found the print while cleaning out an apartment of a tenant he had to evict.

“It was kind of in a weird spot hanging on a wall,” Tim Dertz told the station, per the Post’s report. “It looked like it had been there for a long, long time because it had tons of dust across the top of it.”

The landlord said he showed it to an antique dealer friend who recognized it as an authentic Picasso.

Dertz handed it over to police, who then contacted DeLind.

The Milwaukee Police Department told the Post Friday that the statute of limitations for theft and property crimes is generally six years. Still, the case remains under investigation, the department said.

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House Committees Detail Harvard Ties With Chinese Entities In New Report

A report released by House committees on Aug. 13 alleged that Harvard University prioritized financial ties over American national security and received more than $600 million from China, the most of any U.S. university.

The report, released by the House Select Committee on China and the House Education and Workforce Committee, alleged that Harvard created a nonprofit called Harvard Global to circumvent federal requirements for disclosing foreign donations to higher education.

According to the report, Harvard Global initially stated on its website that it could serve as a “proposal applicant and awardee” for awards the university was unable to accept for legal or financial reasons. The nonprofit later removed the language after the committees sent Harvard a draft of the report.

“Harvard created an entity in a blatant attempt to get around federal foreign funding disclosure laws. That’s unacceptable, especially given Harvard’s history of failing to comply with these requirements,” Education and Workforce Committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a statement.

The committees identified 140 publications co-authored by Harvard-affiliated researchers and researchers affiliated with Chinese universities, including a “Seven Sons” university, the report stated.

The “Seven Sons of National Defense” is a group of elite Chinese universities directly subordinate to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which regulates China’s defense sector.

The House committees alleged that Harvard-affiliated researchers have worked with “Chinese universities that, as a matter of policy, conduct extensive weapons research and development and hold top-secret security clearances with the PLA [People’s Liberation Army].”

The report cited a 2023 research paper on magnetic materials co-authored by a Harvard-affiliated researcher and a researcher at China’s National University of Defense Technology – which the U.S. government has placed on its entity list as a threat to American national security.

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Judge Blocks DHS From Obtaining 17 Million Commercial Driver’s License Records

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Department of Homeland Security from obtaining 17 million Commercial Driver’s License records.

US District Judge Anthony Trenga, a George W. Bush appointee, entered an administrative stay and prevented the Trump Administration from obtaining the records it subpoenaed.

Judge Trenga also ordered the DHS to immediately return any subpoenaed documents and not inspect the records.

The judge said he needs more time to consider the motion to quash the subpoenas.

On Friday, 21 Democrat state attorneys general and DC filed lawsuits challenging the records request.

The blue state attorneys general sued the Department of Transportation (DOT), the DHS and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Last month, President Trump unveiled his “Freedom Haulers” initiative to license veteran truck drivers and crack down on illegal alien truck drivers.

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UK Left Blames Death of Ex-Cambridge Professor Arday on ‘Racism’, Media Scrutiny of Plagiarism Claims

British leftists have attempted to blame racism and media scrutiny for the untimely death of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who sensationally resigned last week amid plagiarism allegations and accusations of fabricating his backstory.

On Friday afternoon, Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor, Jason Arday, was found dead at a London address at the age of 41, just days after resigning from his post as professor of sociology of education amid swirling controversy and claims that he had engaged in plagiarism.

According to a Substack article last month from University of Ghent philosopher Nathan Cofnas, who was fired from Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 after expressing race-realist views on IQ differences, Arday’s thesis had been flagged by plagiarism-detection software.

It then emerged that Cambridge had been alerted to potential plagiarism in his thesis and in other papers by Plymouth Marjon University Emeritus Professor Dave Harris in 2023, yet the university only launched an investigation into the matter earlier this month.

London’s Daily Telegraph reported that it had “identified more than 100 passages that are identical or nearly identical to a 2009 PhD thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a Brunel University student.”

On top of allegations of plagiarism, questions were also raised over Arday’s supposedly remarkable early life, as he claimed to have risen to the top of academia despite allegedly being unable to talk until the age of 11 and being unable to read or write until he was 18 as a supposed result of autism. Arday also previously boasted of having run 30 marathons in 35 days, partly while suffering from a leg fracture.

Amid the controversy, the previous media darling resigned on August 5th, claiming that the “relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.”

Less than ten days later, he was found dead. A spokesman for London’s Metropolitan Police said on Friday that his “death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious.” The left-wing Guardian newspaper reported that the force is “understood not to believe anyone else was involved in the death.”

Despite limited information about the circumstances of his death, prominent left-wing figures were quick to blame the media scrutiny and “racism” for Arday’s death. For example, far-left Labour MP Nadia Whittome said that Arday was “hounded by the British press in a way that went far beyond scrutiny, was disproportionate, and simply would not have happened to a white, middle class person in the same position.”

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