PHOTO ESSAY: Those caught in the dragnet of China’s digital cage enabled by U.S. tech

Changzhou, China (AP) – China manages the largest digital surveillance device on earth. An Associated Press survey revealed that US technological companies to a large extent designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a much greater role in allowing human rights violations than that previously.

Many in China barely notice the millions of cameras in the country. But for the tens of thousands of people under surveillance, it is an invisible digital cage, following and restricting their movement.

Among them are the Yang family, living in the rural province of eastern Jiangsu. Caught in a land dispute, they tried to request relief from local officials by calling on the Chinese central government in Beijing. But this surveillance device based on American technological monitors and predicts each of their movements, reporting them for detention each time they try to go to the Chinese capital.

Yang Guoliang lives alone, a virtual prisoner in his own house. His younger wife and daughter were arrested last year and are now tried for disrupting Chinese state work – a crime of a sentence that can go up to a decade of prison.

“Each movement in my own house is monitored,” said Yang, sitting behind black curtains that block him with the eyes of the cameras trained directly at his home. “Their surveillance makes me feel dangerous all the time, everywhere.”

Her eldest daughter, Yang Caiy, pleads for their Japan family, where she now lives.

“Because of this technology … We have no freedom,” says Yang Caiying. “Sooner or later, Americans and others will also lose their freedoms.”

Legal and technological experts say that among the most blatant uses of these technologies were during a brutal mass detention campaign in the Chinese Chinese region in China. Such…