Geoffrey Cain

Bio

Geoffrey Cain was a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for American Innovation from 2022-2023, and part of FAI's inaugural FACET Fellowship cohort. He is a technologist, author, and foreign correspondent. His most recent book, The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future, was called “a prescient, alarming work on the overreach of technology and state power” in a Kirkus starred review. His first book, Samsung Rising, was longlisted for the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year award.

A former correspondent at The Economist, Cain has been a regular commentator in the Wall Street Journal, Time, the Financial Times, and Foreign Policy, a contributing editor at the Mekong Review, and a regular guest on CNN, MSNBC, BBC and Bloomberg. Cain writes about the ways that repressive governments deploy novel technologies and how democracies can respond. His work takes him to the world’s most authoritarian and far-off places, from inside North Korea to the trans-Siberian railway across Russia, from investigations into genocide in Cambodia to experiments in technological surveillance in China.

As a TechCongress fellow, he was an advisor to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, investigating malign actors who deployed technology and illicit financial tools to undermine American democracy. A Fulbright scholar, he holds a master’s with distinction from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and a bachelor’s at The George Washington University. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.