For years, many democracy experts have warned that U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing the country toward authoritarianism. During his first term, they raised alarm bells as Trump repeatedly tested democratic guardrails with unprecedented and, at times, incendiary actions—particularly his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election. When Trump was reelected last year,…
It was clear Donald Trump and his allies would ramp up their crackdown against any and all opposition in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — and this week, the president’s second administration unleashed its most authoritarian blitz yet. The Trump administration got late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show taken off the…
For the past 25 years, top American tech firms including IBM, Cisco, and NVIDIA helped build China’s digital police state, an Associated Press investigation revealed Tuesday. The report shows these companies sold billions of dollars in technology that became the foundation of China’s vast surveillance network. This equipment enabled severe human rights abuses, from the…
Reports and other media articles over the past month detail the ways in which the technology and norms underpinning China’s surveillance industry are proliferating in other countries around the world. This week, Emily Baker-White at Forbes published an investigation finding that Intel, which recently agreed to give the U.S. government a ten-percent stake in the…
During much of the first half of this year, things were looking up for Ahmed al-Sharaa. Syria’s new president was basking in Donald Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on his country. After more than a decade of civil war, Damascus and other cities had begun to hum again. Investors from the Gulf and Turkey piled…
Monday marks five years since China imposed a draconian national security law on Hong Kong, criminalizing dissent and bringing the semi-autonomous city to heel after months of pro-democracy, anti-government demonstrations that drew as many as 2 million protesters into the streets. “The law itself was a weapon for Beijing to silence dissent in Hong Kong,…