An extensive new investigative report conducted by the Associated Press (AP) has uncovered how, over the last quarter century, more than a dozen American tech companies worked directly with Chinese contractors and, in some cases, the communist government itself to build the world’s largest surveillance network that is used to suppress the Chinese people and deny them basic human rights. Lawmakers say the time is now for the U.S. government to place heavy restrictions on tech companies in order to curtail their business relationships with Xi Jinping’s communist regime.

The report, published Tuesday, details how “American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known.” The U.S. tech companies named in the report include IBM, Dell, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Nvidia, HP, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Seagate, Intel, Motorola, Amazon Web Services, Western Digital, and ArcGIS Esri.

As the AP described, the “predictive policing” system that China’s regime has developed “sucks in and analyzes data to prevent crime, protests, or terror attacks before they happen. Such systems mine a vast array of information — texts, calls, payments, flights, video, DNA swabs, mail deliveries, the internet, even water and power use.” This vast surveillance system allows China’s police to “threaten friends and family and preemptively detain people for crimes they have not even committed.” The technology has also allowed the regime to conduct a mass persecution campaign against religious minorities and political dissidents, including the sweeping detention and forcible assimilation of the Muslim Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region.

The AP’s investigation revealed that U.S. tech companies specifically catered products to the demands of China’s government. Following riots in the Xinjiang region in 2009, the regime set out to combine all of its digital information gathering (which were already running on American technology) into a single database in order to identify dissidents within the Uyghur population. “Soon, lucrative contracts went up for bidding,” the report notes, and IBM sought to profit from them. A company pamphlet stated that IBM’s technology could “ensure urban safety and stability” and “prevent problems before they happen.” Two years later, IBM licensed its i2 software to China’s police, which they used to analyze social media posts.

Other American companies also contributed to the regime’s “Golden Shield” policing system, which Beijing uses to “censor the internet and crack down on alleged terrorists, the Falun Gong religious sect, and even villagers deemed troublesome.” AP uncovered documents showing that Chinese police purchased “tens of millions of dollars’ worth of products” from IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft in order to upgrade the system.

In addition, the AP found that some companies even used race to sell their technology to the communist regime. Dell “promoted a ‘military-grade’ AI-powered laptop with ‘all-race recognition’” in 2019, and up until August, Thermo Fisher Scientific’s website “marketed DNA kits to the Chinese police as ‘designed’ for the Chinese population, including ‘ethnic minorities like Uyghurs and Tibetans.’”

Even though many companies contacted by the AP now say have ceased doing business with Chinese contractors following the widespread outrage and sanctions that were established in 2019 in response to atrocities being reported against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the report states that “contracts to maintain existing IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft software and gear remain ubiquitous, often with third parties.”

Lawmakers like Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) say that the revelations are further proof that Big Tech companies remain unconcerned about seeking monetary profit over human rights violations.

“It ought to be a wake-up call for every American,” he emphasized during Tuesday’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “And frankly, I mean, it’s really a betrayal of what we believe in for our own companies, these so-called American companies to be helping the worst purveyor of evil in the world right now from a state perspective … to help them enslave their own citizens, suppress religious liberty in China. That’s what these technologies are being used for. … And our companies are making billions of dollars by doing this.”

Hawley continued, “It’s about profit 100%. It’s why they come before Congress, take the oath, and lie to the American people and say, ‘Oh, no, we’re not helping China.’ Listen, we had a whistleblower from Facebook, top Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams, who testified just a couple of months ago that Facebook was deeply involved in China, helping China with its AI technology, helping them with their surveillance technology.”

Hawley went on to argue that America’s government must work toward establishing laws that reflect biblical values regarding Big Tech.

“[T]he laws reflect our shared … biblically rooted values like, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ ‘You shall not cause harm to children.’ … [T]his is something I think that these tech executives ought to listen to. What does that mean practically? It means that we need to say that it ought to be illegal in this country to allow chatbots to have sexually explicit conversations with eight-year-olds [on Meta platforms]. It ought to be illegal in this country to sell surveillance technology to a police state like China, when you know what they’re using it for.”

Hawley concluded by contending that with a Republican-led White House and Congress, the time for addressing these issues is now.

“If not now, when?” he asserted. “… [T]his is absolutely the time to do it, to protect what we believe in our national security, to protect our families and our children. … [W]e shouldn’t be afraid to say this. As Christians, we need to protect the values and principles that make us Americans. It is right that our law should reflect those principles. It doesn’t get any more important than protecting liberty, protecting kids.”