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William Saunders: Welcome everybody to a podcast of the Barefoot Lawyer Reports. I’m William Saunders, Director of the Center for Human Rights at Catholic University, and joining me today are Cynthia Sun and Mark Yang from the Falun Dafa Information Center. Mark and Cynthia, welcome.
Mark Yang: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here again.
W: I understand that you guys did some kind of survey or something with 1,000 people in the US. I wonder if you learned anything from them that’s relevant to our discussion.
M: Yes, for sure. Yeah. So this is the survey they can see right here.
W: Why don’t you just read us the title for those who can’t see it?
M: Yes. The title is called Americans Targeted by Beijing. So this is a nationwide survey that is based on respondents from across the United States, over 1,000 of them. And what they reported is that nearly 50% of them have encountered at least one case of transnational repression since 2022. So this is a really, really large percentage. And we have documented over 600 cases of transnational repression in 30 states. Right, so this is a really, really large number. And the majority of the people that are responding to the survey are American citizens. So this is clearly how the CCP is impacting Americans right here in our home turf.
W: Can you just tell people, anybody listening who wants to get that survey, how they could get it?
M: Yes, you can visit our website. It’s called faluninfo.net, and you can find the full report over there, both in the web format or in a PDF format. I think within the survey there are some stories I think are particularly relevant to what we are discussing today. There are quite many cases that are involved with surveillance. And one of them really jumped out to me when I was doing the survey.
There is a Falun Gong practitioner that works in the media. And when he was planning his trip to Taiwan – and he only told about this to a few of his close friends, saying that, “Oh,” you know, “I’m traveling to Taiwan, here are some of my travel plans, I’m thinking about doing this, doing that,” you know, some fun activities.
And then within just a few days, his family inside China was asked to relay a message to him, saying that it was a Chinese security agent, actually, asked them to do that. And the message was, “Why travel to Taiwan when you can come to China?” He was so shocked. He was like, “How did you know about this? I didn’t publish online. I didn’t do anything. I only told my close friends, yet you know about it.”
So he was like, this really confirms his suspicion that the CCP is constantly trying to surveil us through all kinds of mediums possible. And that really really brings a lot of concern and paranoia to him too.
There are also— this is a New York Falun Gong practitioner, he was literally called by a Chinese security agent to his landline, and when he picked it up, they were able to name him exactly by name, saying that, “I know what you’re doing. I know the events that you attended. I know your activities. Do not do them because what you are trying to do is trying to undermine the CCP.” So these are some of these…
Cynthia Sun: That’s the whole point!
M: All these intimidation tactics are coming in, and they’re clearly showing that they know what is happening and they’re actively surveilling Falun Gong practitioners. So what is concerning is that they have the technology to do that. They have the intention to do that. They have laid the foundation to do exactly that in the United States. And the same infrastructure, the same foundations, can then be applied to every single person, every single entity that they’re trying to target next.
So this is really a grave national security, national sovereignty concern that we are dealing with right now. So that is why we’re really calling on the administration to increasingly pay attention to this area as we are really facing a crisis, in some ways, about safeguarding the safety of our Americans.
C: For example, to be frank, because I’m a woman. So one of the most horrifying parts that I found out through this research is there are death threats specifically targeting women and girls, underage children. And in one, there was an email threat, and in the email there was an image of a knife, and it was about a 14-inch kitchen blade, and the message said something along the lines of, “If you keep speaking out, I will toss your daughter off of a high-rise in New York.”
And that was something that stuck with me. I had nightmares about it, things like this. The fact that they could even…
W: And anybody listening, if you are subject to anything like that, you should report it immediately to the FBI.
C: I agree. Yeah.
W: They can’t get away with it if you report on them. They just want to scare you. They’re cowards. And they hide in the dark, so you want to shine the light on it.
C: We’ve been recommending people to dial the 1-800-CALL-FBI hotline because they do have a transnational repression hotline now. And so everyone that we’ve talked to, they’ve reported to the FBI and there are open cases right now. And thankfully, like, nothing has happened out of these threats. But it’s ridiculous that they even— I mean, the two of us have received photos of guns and bullets. They hide behind the keyboard.
W: We’ll also repeat that 800 number in the notes too, because I think it’s really important for people to report this stuff because again, they’re trying to scare you and their power comes from making you feel that you’re isolated and nobody will help you. But in fact, the FBI will look into this if anybody has threatened you like this. So I encourage them to call that 800 number if they have been.
C: Yeah. You know, just a few days ago, Anthropic released a report, and in it they exposed how a Chinese state actor used Claude to track Falun Gong practitioners in America. And the two of us are obviously publicly known. And so, even though we’re both American citizens – he went to George Mason, I’m going to Georgetown – the fact that a Chinese actor can use an American tech company and use a platform like Claude to monitor us on American soil is very concerning.
And for me personally, it gives me paranoia that, if I go to the grocery store and use my Apple Pay, or if I go to Georgetown and I go to a seminar, that I can be tracked and I can be not only followed in person but digitally as well. And what we were talking about right before this interview was, it’s funny how the Chinese state actor didn’t use DeepSeek. He chose to use Anthropic, of all things.
W: Yeah.
C: DeepSeek is a Chinese LLM. And so we were joking, maybe he doesn’t have enough nationalism. Maybe he’s not loyal enough to the Chinese Communist Party.
W: How would they use Claude? I mean, how— I’m not sure even I— I say even I, I think I’m representative of many people listening who maybe are not very tech savvy, but what do you mean, “used Claude?” Like, is that a breach behind a wall or something, or could anybody out there use Claude to track you?
M: Yeah, yeah, totally. I think what they’re utilizing, at least from the language of the report, is that they’re utilizing Claude to gather information. So kind of to feed a daily digest of information and analysis to their team that is doing this intelligence operation. And what they’re doing is that they’re gathering language, sources of information from multiple different languages,
and they want them to translate those materials into Chinese and write the final report in Chinese, right, in a way that is aligning with the Chinese way of putting things, such as that they’re targeting the Tibetans, saying that they’re separatists, And also when they’re targeting Falun Gong practitioners, they want to reframe all the narratives into that, “Oh, this is the state-designated evil cult of China,” right? So they’re gathering all these intel through these forums.
And they’re also using Claude to try to track down a Falun Gong practitioner who is also a professor at the Fei Tian College of Northern.
C: In Canada.
M: Yeah. But this is on LinkedIn, right? So they’re basically tracking all those publicly available information. But then this is done on a daily basis. And the exact prompt that they’re using is that they’re asking Claude to analyze what the person is doing, right? What exactly are their activities, their ideas, and then what are the things that they’re doing, and also potential exploitable handles that they can utilize to target these groups.
W: Well, what would you like a listener to do about this particular issue of, you know, misusing AI to track and try to slant things about Falun Gong? What, what should they do? Should they reach out to their congressman to ask about this, or do you have any advice for a listener?
C: I mean, Anthropic themselves did request for more government oversight. If you can imagine 100 people working on a group project together, and the project turns into something, like, way bigger than they imagined, Anthropic itself doesn’t have any safeguards or even staff to cover all of the bases of geopolitical risk, of bad actors, foreign nationals using our own platforms and technology as a way to commit espionage. Like, a lot of these things are beyond what a technology company is built to do. And so Anthropic has reached out, OpenAI has reached out, and I think the government just needs to act on it. So encouraging the senators would be great.
Open letters to the president would also be great.
Coming soon: a new documentary follows Chen Guangcheng as he travels to California to meet artist Chen Weiming at Liberty Sculpture Park, where powerful works of art confront the reality of human rights abuses under the Chinese Communist Party. Through their encounter, the film highlights the cost of speaking truth under authoritarianism and the enduring role of art and witness in the fight for freedom. Stay tuned for its release, coming soon.