AP wins Pulitzer Prize for investigation into government surveillance tech

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The Associated Press said it won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for international reporting for an investigation into the expansion of government surveillance efforts in China and the role U.S. tech companies played in that work. The investigation, described as global and multi-part, also included a U.S. story about license plate surveillance used by the Border Patrol and stories examining how advanced technologies can be deployed across conflicts.

The Pulitzer board cited the AP team’s reporting on what it called “an astonishing global investigation into state-of-the-art tools of mass surveillance.” It recognized journalists Dake Kang, Garance Burke, Byron Tau and Aniruddha Ghosal, along with contributor and independent journalist Yael Grauer, for the project that combined reporting across countries and subject areas.

AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Julie Pace said the work showed “this complex and difficult reporting, done by journalists across several continents,” and that it “embodies the true spirit of the AP: leveraging our global footprint and deep expertise to tell important, impactful stories.” She added that it came “at a critical time” as “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.”

According to AP, the investigation took place over three years and drew on thousands of pages of documents as well as numerous interviews. The reporting found that the groundwork for the surveillance system the Chinese government used to monitor and police its citizens in recent decades was laid down with help from American companies, and that some firms went so far as to use surveillance capabilities as a selling point.

AP said the project also examined how U.S. government efforts across multiple presidential administrations helped enable technology companies and China to skirt regulations intended to bar access to certain materials, including advanced computer chips. In another component, AP reported on surveillance in the United States, focusing on what it described as secretive use of an intelligence program by the Border Patrol that relied on license plate information.

In that Border Patrol story, AP reported that the program used license plate data to track drivers’ travel patterns, not only for border crossings. AP said drivers whose travel patterns were deemed suspicious by an algorithm could be stopped and even arrested, and that journalists faced harassment and off-the-record pushes to keep the work from being published.

The AP account of the broader project also described a visually driven package that incorporated multiple photographic and video elements. It cited contributions including AP photographer David Goldman and visual journalists Marshall Ritzel and Serginho Roosblad.

Separate parts of the investigation included reporting on the use of technology for tracking and targeting in Gaza and Lebanon, with AP stating that U.S. tech giants quietly empowered Israel to track and kill alleged militants more quickly through a sharp spike in artificial intelligence and computing services. AP said the work fueled fears that these tools contributed to the deaths of innocent people.

AP said Global investigations editors Mary Rajkumar and Jeannie Ohm led and edited the “Made in America, Watched Worldwide” project, with investigative editor Tom Berman also contributing. It listed additional contributors on the technology-and-conflict story, including Michael Biesecker and Sam Mednick.