isan news organization. Since 2023, its Digital Democracy project has been
collecting every public utterance of California elected officials -- every floor
speech, comment made in committee and social media post, along with their voting
records, legislation, and campaign contributions -- and making all that
information available in a free online platform.

CalMatters this year launched a new feature that takes this kind of civic
watchdog function a big step further. Its AI Tip Sheets feature uses AI to
search through all of this data, looking for anomalies, such as a change in
voting position tied to a large campaign contribution. These anomalies appear on
a webpage that journalists can access to give them story ideas and a source of
data and analysis to drive further reporting.

This is not AI replacing human journalists; it is a civic watchdog organization
using technology to feed evidence-based insights to human reporters. And it's no
coincidence that this innovation arose from a new kind of media institution -- a
non-profit news agency. As the watchdog function of the fourth estate continues
to be degraded by the decline of newspapers' business models, this kind of
technological support is a valuable contribution to help a reduced number of
human journalists retain something of the scope of action and impact our
democracy relies on them for.

These are just four of many stories from around the globe of AI helping to make
democracy stronger. The common thread is that the technology is distributing
rather than concentrating power. In all four cases, it is being used to assist
people performing their democratic tasks -- politics in Japan, litigation in
Brazil, voting in Germany and watchdog journalism in California -- rather than
replacing them.

In none of these cases is the AI doing something that humans can't perfectly
competently do. But in all of these cases, we don't have enough available humans
to do the jobs on their own. A sufficiently trustworthy AI can fill in gaps:
amplify the power of civil servants and citizens, improve efficiency, and
facilitate engagement between government and the public.

One of the barriers towards realizing this vision more broadly is the AI market
itself. The core technologies are largely being created and marketed by US tech
giants. We don't know the details of their development: on what material they
were trained, what guardrails are designed to shape their behavior, what biases
and values are encoded into their systems. And, even worse, we don't get a say
in the choices associated with those details or how they should change over
time. In many cases, it's an unacceptable risk to use these for-profit,
proprietary AI systems in democratic contexts.

To address that, we have long advocated for the development of "public AI":
models and AI systems that are developed under democratic control and deployed
for public benefit, not sold by corporations to benefit their shareholders. The
movement for this is growing worldwide.

Switzerland has recently released the world's most powerful and fully realized
public AI model. It's called Apertus, and it was developed jointly by public
Swiss institutions: the universities ETH

Zurich and EPFL, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). The
development team has made it entirely open source -- open data, open code, open
weights -- and free for anyone to use. No illegally acquired copyrighted works
were used in its training. It doesn't exploit poorly paid human laborers from
the global south. Its performance is about where the large corporate giants were
a year ago, which is more than good enough for many applications. And it
demonstrates that it's not necessary to spend trillions of dollars creating
these models. Apertus takes a huge step forward to realizing the vision of an
alternative to big tech -- controlled corporate AI.

AI technology is not without its costs and risks, and we are not here to
minimize them. But the technology has significant benefits as well.

AI is inherently power-enhancing, and it can magnify what the humans behind it
want to do. It can enhance authoritarianism as easily as it can enhance
democracy. It's up to us to steer the technology in that better direction. If
more citizen watchdogs and litigators use AI to amplify their power to oversee
government and hold it accountable, if more political parties and election
administrators use it to engage meaningfully with and inform voters and if more
governments provide democratic alternatives to big tech's AI offerings, society
will be better off.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The
Guardian.

** *** ***** ******* *********** *************

Huawei and Chinese Surveillance

[2025.11.26] This quote is from House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's
Most Powerful Company.

Long before anyone had heard of Ren Zhengfei or Huawei, Wan Runnan had been
China's star entrepreneur in the 1980s, with his company, the Stone Group,
touted as "China's IBM." Wan had believed that economic change could lead to
political change. He had thrown his support behind the pro-democracy protesters
in 1989. As a result, he had to flee to France, with an arrest warrant hanging
over his head. He was never able to return home. Now, decades later and in
failing health in Paris, Wan recalled something that had happened one day in the
late 1980s, when he was still living in Beijing.

Local officials had invited him to dinner.

This was unusual. He was usually the one to invite officials to dine, so as to
curry favor with the show of hospitality. Over the meal, the officials told Wan
that the Ministry of State Security was going to send agents to work undercover
at his company in positions dealing with international relations. The officials
cast the move to embed these minders as an act of protection for Wan and the
company's other executives, a security measure that would keep them from
stumbling into unseen risks in their dealings with foreigners. "You have a lot
of international business, which raises security issues for you. There are
situations that you don't understand," Wan recalled the officials telling him.
"They said, 'We are sending some people over. You can just treat them like
regular employees.'"

Wan said he knew that around this time, state intelligence also contacted other
tech companies in Beijing with the same request. He couldn't say what the
situation was for Huawei, which was still a little startup far to the south in
Shenzhen, not yet on anyone's radar. But Wan said he didn't believe that Huawei
would have been able to escape similar demands. "That is a certainty," he said.

"Telecommunications is an industry that has to do with keeping control of a
nation's lifeline...and actually in any system of communications, there's a
back-end platform that could be used for eavesdropping."

It was a rare moment of an executive lifting the cone of silence surrounding the
MSS's relationship with China's high-tech industry. It was rare, in fact, in any
country. Around the world, such spying operations rank among governments'
closest-held secrets. When Ed--- FMail-lnx 2.3.1.0
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