A Uighur child watches police officers walk by in Urumqi, Xinjiang.
Following the U.S. State Department’s finding that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committed genocide in Xinjiang, on January 29, theintercept.com website exposed a database of millions of police officers, revealing details of the CCP’s shocking and ubiquitous surveillance in Xinjiang. Because of the volume of information, we will continue to provide a series of reports.
Urumqi Public Security Bureau Central Database
The database obtained through surveillance appears to be maintained and used by the Urumqi Public Security Bureau and the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau, and also contains files from units of the State Internet Security and Protection Bureau.
Landasoft refers to the software behind the database as “iTap,” a big data system that it sells publicly.
The database is 52 gigabytes in size and contains nearly 250 million rows of data. The data source provides data to about 12 applications, including.
-Jingwang Weishi, a cell phone file monitoring program that Chinese police forced Uyghurs to download.
-The “People’s Security” program, which has been used by citizens and police to enable citizens to wiretap each other.
-The “Evidence Collection Management” program, which collects “evidence” from applications such as WeChat and Outlook.
- ZhiPu, a graphical interface to human relationships and the extent to which the authorities are interested in them (the database contains only very little information about ZhiPu).
One of the main components of the database is a large collection of minutes from “community stabilization” meetings. Police auxiliaries or citizen police officers discussed what had happened in their area the week before. Also included are a variety of related documents outlining policing and intelligence priorities and intelligence summaries, local facilities inspected, visits to detainee families, and updates on suspicious persons in the community. There are also weekly intelligence and detention reports that include information on investigative leads and suspicious persons.
The database also provides information on many other tools that can be used for digital surveillance analysis. For example, the database files cite a Communist government system called the Joint Operation Platform (IJOP), which has been the subject of extensive attention by human rights organizations. IJOP is the same platform used to publish the investigative WeChat group mentioned in the first episode.
Other documents provide information on the use of the “three categories of people” label, who are considered terrorists or extremists of varying degrees of severity.
The database repeatedly uses “iXvWZREN” to label Uyghurs, placing them in the group of terrorists and ex-criminals. Han Chinese are not flagged.
From Checkpoints to Chat Surveillance: Surveillance in Urumqi
It is well known that surveillance in Xinjiang is extensive and one of the most surveilled regions in the world. The database reveals what kind of uninterrupted surveillance is conducted on the ground and what its purpose is (usually to curb any unsanctioned influence, from practicing Islam to foreign ideas).
People are observed at a distance, information is gathered from their digital devices such as phones and even other data collected from taps and sensors, and more information is obtained from relatives and informants in the community. The police documents use harsh and provocative language to describe the campaign against Vikings and Islamic practices. Paranoid terms about outside influences or various other harmful influences recur.
Some of the most intrusive data in the database comes from the Sword of Terror telephone screening tool. Police at checkpoints throughout the city have people plug their phones into these devices from various manufacturers. They collect personal data from the phones, including contacts and newsletters, and check pictures, videos, audio files and documents against a list of prohibited items. They can display tweets and newsletters. The extracted data is then integrated into IJOP.
A 2018 report from Northeast Urumqi mentions that in the week of March, authorities conducted searches for 1,860 people. In just a short counterterrorism sword in March. The report also details that in the week of April, 2,057 people’s cell phones were checked there. According to government statistics, about 30,000 people live there (Seven Island Bay).
Such checks are also frequently applied in other districts of Urumqi. Sometimes police check phones as many as three or four times a night, and people resent this. This is reflected in the police reports of August and October 2017.
The documents also mention that some people have started using old-fashioned phones to avoid having their phones checked.
Danish anthropologist Rune Steenberg, who focused on Xinjiang and the Uyghurs until 2016 and conducted research in Kashgar, said he switched to using simple cell phones instead of smartphones in 2014, and that many Uyghurs did the same. “It’s not just about letting them discover things on your phone,” he said. “They can place things on your phone to incriminate you. And you will never be able to prove later that it was placed on your phone and not sent by you. So having a smartphone actually becomes very dangerous.”
Steinberg said police often pull tricks to get people to give up their smartphones, pretending to say they have religious content on them and asking if it’s the other person’s phone, because police know they won’t think they have it in order to avoid trouble. “They’ll say, ‘No, that’s not my phone, no, I didn’t bring the phone here,'” he said. The police would then take the phone for what it was and sell it.
The database also helps quantify the extent of phone surveillance deployed around Urumqi. For example, in 1 year and 11 months, authorities collected nearly 11 million text messages. 11.8 million records were collected in 1 year and 1 month about the duration of calls and the participants in those calls. In 1 year and 11 months, they collected 7 million contacts and about 255,000 records on phones, including the IMSI number used to identify the phone on the cellular network; the phone model and manufacturer; the computer network identifier, called the MAC address; and another cellular network identifier, the IMEI number.
The phone information tracked includes the caller, the name of the recipient, and the start and end Time of each call. And documented online dating information, e-commerce purchases, and email contacts can also be extracted from the phone.
Abduweli Ayup, a linguist and poet, says, “You don’t feel safe anywhere because of your phone. You have to have your phone on 24 hours a day, and if the police call you, you have to be ready to answer the phone.” By monitoring chat apps, Uyghurs also have no privacy at Home, he said.
Recent Comments