Lawfare Daily: Investigating the Investigators: Sophia Yan on Journalism in the PRC
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Senior Editor Michael Feinberg sits down with Sophia Yan, a senior foreign correspondent with The Telegraph, to discuss her time reporting on the Chinese government, and how it leveraged its security services to investigate her in turn. Sophia recently wrote in-depth about this experience in “The secret Chinese surveillance programme tracking people like me,” in The Telegraph.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, this is Mia Richardson, operations manager here at Lawfare. I'm usually busy working |
| 0:10.0 | behind the scenes, keeping our office running smoothly so that your favorite lawfare contributors |
| 0:14.4 | can focus on creating the content that you love. At Lawfare, our team is dedicated to tackling |
| 0:20.0 | with the hard national security questions, |
| 0:22.5 | the ones without easy answers. We provide in-depth, nonpartisan analysis on issues that impact |
| 0:28.2 | not just policymakers and legal experts, but anyone who cares about democracy, cybersecurity, |
| 0:33.9 | foreign policy, or the rule of law. If you're trying to understand what's happening and what it really means, this kind of analysis |
| 0:41.3 | is more important than ever. |
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| 1:06.7 | Thanks for listening and for caring about the things that matter. |
| 1:22.0 | The platform itself is really fascinating because it was a back-end look at how the government is seeking to bring all these data points together that they have from this close |
| 1:25.7 | internet, from the millions of security |
| 1:28.0 | cameras that they've installed over the years, how they're trying to bring it all together |
| 1:31.4 | and make it usable in real life for the police, for China security apparatus. |
| 1:37.4 | It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Lawfare Senior Editor Michael Feinberg, sitting down today with |
| 1:43.4 | Daily Telegraph journalist Sophia |
| 1:45.3 | yet. |
... |
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