Submitted by The Bureau’s Sam Cooper,

Over the past five years, some of the world’s most technologically advanced campuses in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom — including MIT, Oxford and McGill — have relied on taxpayer funding while collaborating with artificial-intelligence labs embedded in Beijing’s security state, including one tied to China’s mass detention of Uyghurs and to the Ministry of Public Security, which has been accused of targeting Chinese dissidents abroad.

That is the core finding of Shared Labs, Shared Harm, a new report from New York–based risk firm Strategy Risks and the Human Rights Foundation. After reviewing tens of thousands of scientific papers and grant records, the authors conclude that Western public funds have repeatedly underwritten joint work between elite universities and two Chinese “state-priority” laboratories whose technologies drive China’s domestic surveillance machinery — an apparatus that, a recent U.S. Congressional threat assessment warns, is increasingly being turned outward against critics in democratic states.

The key Chinese collaborators profiled in the study are closely intertwined with China’s security services. One of the two featured labs is led by a senior scientist from China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), the sanctioned conglomerate behind the platform used to flag and detain Uyghurs in Xinjiang; the other has hosted “AI + public security” exchanges with the Ministry of Public Security’s Third Research Institute, the bureau responsible for technical surveillance and digital forensics.

The report’s message is blunt: even as governments scramble to stop technology transfer on the hardware side, open academic science has quietly been supplying Chinese security organs with new tools to track bodies, faces and movements at scale.

It lands just as Washington and its allies move to tighten controls on advanced chips and AI exports to China. In the Netherlands’ Nexperia case, the Dutch government invoked a rarely used Cold War–era emergency law this fall to take temporary control of a Chinese-owned chipmaker and block key production from being shifted to China — prompting a furious response from Beijing, and supply shocks that rippled through European automakers.

“The Chinese Communist Party uses security and national security frameworks as tools for control, censorship, and suppressing dissenting views, transforming technical systems into instruments of repression,” the report says. “Western institutions lend credibility, knowledge, and resources to Chinese laboratories supporting the country’s surveillance and defense ecosystem. Without safeguards … publicly funded research will continue to support organizations that contribute to repression in China.”

China
This is how Chinese AI cameras see every person and vehicle at every moment pic.twitter.com/s7pHvnIl9V

— nikola 3 (@ronin19217435) February 16, 2024

Cameras and Drones

The Strategy Risks team focuses on two state-backed institutes: Zhejiang Lab, a vast AI and high-performance computing campus founded by the Zhejiang provincial government with Alibaba and Zhejiang University, and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SAIRI), now led by a senior CETC scientist. CETC designed the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP — the data system that hoovered up phone records, biometric profiles and checkpoint scans to flag “suspicious” people in Xinjiang.

United Nations investigators and several Western governments have concluded that IJOP and related systems supported mass surveillance, detention and forced-labor campaigns against Uyghurs that amount to crimes against humanity.

Against that backdrop, the scale of Western collaboration is striking.

Since 2020, Zhejiang Lab and SAIRI have published more than 11,000 papers; roughly 3,000 of those had foreign co-authors, many from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. About 20 universities are identified as core collaborators, including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, UC Berkeley, Oxford, University College London — and Canadian institutions such as McGill University — along with a cluster of leading European technical universities.

Among the major U.S. public funders acknowledged in these joint papers are the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Department of Transportation. For North America, the warning is twofold: U.S. and Canadian universities are far more entangled with China’s security-linked AI labs than most policymakers grasp — and existing “trusted research” frameworks, built around IP theft, are almost blind to the human-rights risk.

In one flagship example, Zhejiang Lab collaborated with MIT on advanced optical phase-shifting — a field central to high-resolution imaging systems used in satellite surveillance, remote sensing and biometric scanning. The paper cited support from a DARPA program, meaning U.S. defense research dollars effectively underwrote joint work with a Chinese lab that partners closely with military universities and the CETC conglomerate behind Xinjiang’s IJOP system.

Carnegie Mellon projects with Zhejiang Lab focused on multi-object tracking and acknowledged funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Multi-object tracking is a backbone technology for modern surveillance — allowing cameras and drones to follow multiple people or vehicles across crowds and city blocks. “In the Chinese context,” the report notes, such capabilities map naturally onto “public security applications such as protest monitoring,” even when the academic papers present them as neutral advances in computer vision.

The report also highlights Zhejiang Lab’s role as an international partner in CAMERA 2.0, a £13-million U.K. initiative on motion capture, gait recognition and “smart cities” anchored at the University of Bath, and its leadership in BioBit, a synthetic-biology and imaging program whose advisory board includes University College London, McGill University, the University of Glasgow and other Western campuses.

Meanwhile, SAIRI has quietly become a hub for AI that blurs public-security, military and commercial lines.

Established in 2018 and run since 2020 by CETC academician Lu Jun — a designer of China’s KJ-2000 airborne early-warning aircraft and a veteran of command-and-control systems — SAIRI specializes in pose estimation, tracking and large-scale imaging.

Under Lu, the institute has deepened ties with firms already sanctioned by Washington for their roles in Xinjiang surveillance. In 2024 it signed cooperation agreements with voice-recognition giant iFlytek and facial-recognition champion SenseTime, as well as CloudWalk and Intellifusion, which market “smart city” policing platforms.

SAIRI also hosted an “AI + public security” exchange with the Ministry of Public Security’s Third Research Institute — the bureau responsible for technical surveillance and digital forensics — and co-developed what Chinese media billed as the country’s first AI-assisted shooting training system. That platform, nominally built for sports, was overseen by a Shanghai government commission that steers AI into defense and public-security applications, raising the prospect of its use in paramilitary or police training.

Outside the lab, MPS officers have been charged in the United States with running online harassment and intimidation schemes targeting Chinese dissidents, and MPS-linked “overseas police service stations” in North America and Europe have been investigated for pressuring exiles and critics to return to China.

Meanwhile, Radio-Canada, drawing on digital records first disclosed to Australian media in 2024 by an alleged Chinese spy, has reported new evidence suggesting that a Chinese dissident who died in a mysterious kayaking accident near Vancouver was being targeted for elimination by MPS officers and agents embedded in a Chinese conglomerate that the U.S. Treasury accuses of running a money-laundering and modern-slavery empire out of Cambodia.

The new reporting focuses on a former undercover agent for Office No. 1 of China’s Ministry of Public Security — the police ministry at the core of so-called “CCP police stations” in global and Canadian cities, and reportedly tasked with hunting dissidents abroad.

Taken together, cases of alleged Chinese “police station” networks operating globally, new U.S. Congressional reports on worldwide threats from the Chinese Communist Party, and the warnings in Shared Labs, Shared Harm suggest that Western universities are not only helping to build China’s domestic repression apparatus with U.S. taxpayer funds, but may also be contributing to global surveillance tools that can be paired with Beijing’s operatives abroad.

To counter this trend, the paper urges a reset in research governance: broaden due diligence to weigh human-rights risk, mandate transparency over all international co-authorships and joint labs, condition partnerships with security-linked institutions on strict safeguards and narrow scopes of work, and strengthen university ethics bodies so they take responsibility for cross-border collaborations.

Israel’s military has confirmed it carried out new waves of air attacks in southern Lebanon that damaged several homes and buildings, which the IDF said primarily targeted Hezbollah training camps.

The largescale attacks occurred despite what’s supposed to be a agreed upon truce in effect going all the way back to November 2024. Prior to that, Hezbollah had been engaged in daily exchanges of rocket and drone fire, in a war which kicked off in tandem with the Gaza war.

via Associated Press

Lebanon’s National News Agency reported late Monday that new strikes hit Mount Safi, the town of Jbaa, the Zefta Valley, and the area between Azza and Rumin Arki, and cited that “several waves” were launched, but there appeared no initial reports of casualties.

Despite the ceasefire, Israel is vowing to essentially finish off Hezbollah after already having largely decimated its leadership in 2024. The IDF announced that “military structures and a launch site belonging to Hezbollah, used to advance terror attacks against IDF troops and the State of Israel, were also struck.”

“The targets that were struck, and the military training conducted in preparation for attacks against the State of Israel, constitute a violation of the understandings between Israel and Lebanon and a threat to the State of Israel,” the statement added.

Significantly, the aerial assault reached some 20-30 km north of the Israel’s border, as described by Israeli Army Radio.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said these operations are “likely” to continue and that Israel will not stop until ‘terror infrastructure’ is destroyed and dismantled. Israeli citizens of far northern settlements and communities have only recently been able to safely resettle in their homes. 

“We are enforcing in Lebanon, without compromise, against any Hezbollah armament and any violation of the ceasefire,” Smotrich said.

“It is likely that we will soon need to return and operate there to preserve the gains achieved against Hezbollah,” added the minister.

Israel’s military has carried out a wave of air strikes in southern Lebanon, damaging several homes, according to Lebanese state media. Israel says it targeted around 13 Hezbollah-linked sites. pic.twitter.com/gd8xR6TjuE

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) December 9, 2025

“We will not allow Hezbollah to remain. Residents of the north deserve to live in complete security in their communities,” he described. “There will no longer be a situation in which towns are the front line and the IDF is behind them. The IDF will be the front protecting the communities, and the communities will be behind it.”

Washington has also lately been pressuring the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah; however, the Shia militant group is actually far better armed than the Lebanese Army. Ironically it has been the United States which has kept Lebanon’s military intentionally weak, on fears that any heavy armaments could be used against Israel.

Authored by Daniel McCarthy via The Epoch Times,

What will it take to get crime under control in our subways and public transit systems?

On Monday, Dec. 1, news broke of another passenger set on fire in New York City’s subway—although this story wasn’t all it seemed.

The homeless man who at first said he was the victim of an attack turned tight-lipped when police pressed him about what happened.

Had he set his own clothes ablaze to attract attention?

In the wild environment our subways have become, a malicious attack or a madman’s self-inflicted injury are both all too believable.

Most trips on the New York City subway or Washington’s Metro system don’t resemble a clip from “Mad Max,” but sooner or later anyone who rides the rails of our cities regularly encounters insanity, aggression, and the prospect of violence—or actual violence, including the murderous kind.

The life-changing and very nearly life-ending attack on Bethany MaGee, the woman set aflame on a Chicago Blue Line train last month, was no hoax.

Nor was the assault that killed Iryna Zarutska on a commuter train in Charlotte, North Carolina, this summer.

Nor was the burning alive of Debrina Kawam on the New York City subway in December 2024.

None of those women had any reason to fear for her life, yet a commute turned into unspeakable terror.

And it was predictable—not because these victims had anything special to fear but because everyone knows what’s allowed to happen in the tunnels and on the trains.

If a thug with 72 arrests to his name—such as the man who tried to immolate the 26-year-old MaGee in Chicago—or with “just” 14 arrests—such as Zarutska’s murderer—decides that this is the day to take an unsuspecting victim, what chance does the victim have?

Her fate was already decided by judges who chose to not lock up men who were a demonstrated threat to the public.

The killers and would-be killers are only half the problem.

The other half are the judges and lawmakers who put them on the streets in the first place, leaving them free to ambush unsuspecting victims on train cars, where they can’t escape.

(MaGee did try running, but her attacker caught up and torched her.)

Legislators in North Carolina, at least, are trying to stop this murderous chain of events before it begins, by putting men with criminal records like those of Zarutska’s killer in prison or mental institutions as soon as they start breaking the law.

“Iryna’s Law” restricts cashless bail, requires judges to order more mental evaluations, and makes it easier to involuntarily commit offenders found to be disturbed.

It also attempts to restore the death penalty in North Carolina, which has been blocked for nearly 20 years by legal challenges.

The law is a good start, and other states need similar reforms to incarcerate and institutionalize more of the people who commit horrors such as the subway attacks of recent months.

There’s a federal role in this, too, including rigorous enforcement of immigration law.

Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, the man charged with burning Kawam to death, is an illegal immigrant who should never have been in this country to begin with.

Yet more is needed: not only zero tolerance toward violent and repeat offenders, but also zero tolerance in the political process for judges who go easy on them.

Some states elect judges, and voters in those places can make known just how they feel about judges’ culpability for crimes committed by the lawbreakers they set loose.

And states have provisions for impeaching judges, just as the federal government does.

Where judges egregiously endanger the public with their leniency toward criminals, they should be impeached and removed from office.

It wouldn’t take many examples before soft-on-crime judges got the message.

Of course, judges themselves, where they aren’t elected by the public, are appointed by politicians who have to answer to voters—and those pols should feel the heat, too.

Five years ago, progressives were pushing, in all seriousness, to “defund the police” and “abolish bail,” meaning, in the latter instance, simply releasing a wider array of arrestees.

In most of the country, those slogans were not political winners, but advocates for these policies count more on elite sympathy, especially within the legal profession, than they do on ballot-box victories.

Their gamble is that most Americans pay no mind to the inner workings of state courts and legislatures, so what loses in an election can still win where laws and legal precedents are actually made.

This populist moment in national politics arises from the distrust our leaders have engendered among the public.

But leaders in states and cities have betrayed Americans’ trust, too, and their betrayal turns public transportation into scenes of public execution for innocents such as Zarutska.

The map, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, highlights how credit card delinquency varies widely across the U.S. in 2025.

These figures represent the share of credit card accounts that became 30 or more days past due from Q1 to Q2. The data for this visualization comes from WalletHub.

Southern States Lead in Delinquencies

The Deep South stands out with the nation’s highest delinquency rates. Mississippi tops the list at 37%, followed by Louisiana at 32% and Alabama at 31%.

These levels are far above the national norm and suggest elevated financial pressures, including lower median incomes and higher reliance on revolving debt. Several neighboring states—Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and South Carolina—also exceed 25%.

Rank
State
Credit Card Delinquency (Q1-Q2, 2025)
1
Mississippi
36.69%
2
Louisiana
32.11%
3
Alabama
30.52%
4
Arkansas
28.11%
5
South Carolina
25.49%
6
Oklahoma
25.43%
7
Texas
24.77%
8
Tennessee
24.62%
9
North Carolina
24.19%
10
Kentucky
24.07%
11
Indiana
23.92%
12
West Virginia
23.71%
13
Delaware
22.76%
14
Georgia
22.40%
15
Missouri
22.26%
16
New Mexico
21.37%
17
Pennsylvania
21.08%
18
Michigan
20.89%
19
South Dakota
20.64%
20
Wyoming
20.23%
21
Kansas
19.76%
22
Arizona
19.72%
23
Nebraska
19.71%
24
Ohio
19.66%
25
Maryland
19.45%
26
Minnesota
19.17%
27
Virginia
19.09%
28
Nevada
18.58%
29
Idaho
18.42%
30
Wisconsin
18.35%
31
Maine
18.27%
32
Connecticut
18.16%
33
Oregon
17.87%
34
Montana
17.17%
35
Alaska
16.90%
36
Colorado
16.85%
37
Illinois
16.58%
38
New Jersey
16.57%
39
North Dakota
16.26%
40
New Hampshire
15.59%
41
New York
15.53%
42
Rhode Island
15.21%
43
California
15.08%
44
Washington
14.99%
45
Utah
14.94%
46
Hawaii
14.90%
47
Massachusetts
14.68%
48
Vermont
14.67%
49
Iowa
14.36%
50
Florida
13.99%

Midwestern and Northeastern States Remain More Stable

Most states across the Midwest and Northeast report delinquency shares between 15% and 21%. These levels reflect more stable household budgets and stronger credit profiles.

States like Iowa (14%) and Minnesota (19%) show some of the lowest delinquency rates, pointing to higher financial resilience.

Western States Show Mixed Patterns

The Western U.S. presents a more mixed landscape. California, Washington, Utah, and Hawaii all sit near the lower end at around 15%, suggesting relatively healthy consumer finances despite high living costs.

Meanwhile, states like Arizona and Nevada land closer to 19–20% in late payments.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out The United States of Unemployment on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.