The Associated Press won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting on Monday for a sweeping, three-year global investigation into the expansion of government surveillance — work that found U.S. technology companies supplied the building blocks for China’s mass monitoring of its citizens and that exposed secretive tracking of American drivers by the U.S. Border Patrol.
The award-winning project, titled “Made in America, Watched Worldwide,” was led by AP journalists Dake Kang, Garance Burke, Byron Tau, and Aniruddha Ghosal, with contributor Yael Grauer. The Pulitzer board called it “an astonishing global investigation into state-of-the-art tools of mass surveillance.”
AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Julie Pace said the reporting leveraged the news organization’s global footprint and deep expertise. “It comes at a critical time when the immense and growing power of U.S. tech companies — and their increasingly complex relationship with governments — is in the spotlight and of immense public interest,” Pace said.
The investigation, which examined thousands of documents and included interviews across several continents, found that the architecture used by the Chinese government to police its population was laid down with the help of American firms. Some companies, the AP reported, went so far as to use the surveillance capabilities of their technology as a selling point. Other stories in the series documented how across presidential administrations the U.S. government allowed technology companies and China to circumvent regulations that were supposed to bar Beijing from obtaining advanced computer chips.
A story focused on domestic surveillance found that the U.S. Border Patrol was secretly operating an intelligence program that collected license plate information to track drivers’ travel patterns, not just at border crossings. Drivers whose movements were flagged as suspicious by an algorithm could be stopped and even arrested.
Another contribution to the project, by Michael Biesecker and Sam Mednick, revealed how U.S. technology giants quietly empowered Israel to track and kill many more alleged militants in Gaza and Lebanon through a sharp increase in artificial intelligence and computing services, fueling fears that these tools contributed to the deaths of innocent civilians.
The AP’s statement about the award noted that journalists on the project faced harassment and off-the-record pressure to block the stories from being published. Photographers David Goldman, Marshall Ritzel and Serginho Roosblad provided visual elements for the reporting. Global investigations editors Mary Rajkumar and Jeannie Ohm led and edited the series, with additional editing by Tom Berman.