Since late 2019, Hong Kong police have been seizing electronic devices from arrested protesters. After the Hong Kong government’s mass arrests of Hong Kong pan-democrats on June 6, it has begun to turn over the seized electronic devices (cell phones) to the Chinese Communist Party in an attempt to crack the electronic devices of the arrested people and their spouses, sweeping up information and fully dismantling the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
According to the Washington Post, a Hong Kong police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the Hong Kong unit in charge of Internet security and technology had discovered ways to hack into Android (Android) and Google cloud-based hard drives, but had failed to break into the Apple cell phone (iPhone) system. As a result, the Hong Kong police have begun to transfer these searched electronic devices to the mainland, where the Chinese Communist Party has more advanced cracking technology, in order to obtain information from them to assist in the investigation. The newspaper said this may mean that Hong Kong is moving closer to the mainland and wants to implement stricter digital regulation and censorship in Hong Kong.
Glaci Kwong, who works to defend Hong Kong’s digital rights, said the authorities clearly want to outline a human network of dissidents in order to combat the last free space that allows dissent. Democratic lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting also said that the Hong Kong government is casting a wide net to get as much evidence as possible against the pan-democrats.
In addition, shortly after the pro-democracy activists were arrested, colleagues and associates of the detainees confirmed that unusual activity began to appear on their social media and email accounts. For example, Tam (Tam), who has been jailed, appeared to have joined the encrypted messaging App Telegram, which is popular among Hong Kong protesters, but the administrator of his Facebook page said Tam had not reactivated his Telegram account, urging people to ignore the messages.
Ray Chan, a former democratic lawmaker arrested at his home, also said he had been receiving a replacement phone confirmation code sent by Telegram after police confiscated his device, which is used to verify the authenticity of users trying to log into their accounts.
Staffers of 2 former Democratic Party lawmakers, Clementine Lam and Wong Kit-yee, also received a notification from Google that state-sponsored hackers were trying to compromise their work accounts, which are stored on Gmail servers.
In response, a Hong Kong police spokesman said the force would not comment on specific cases, but noted that national security laws allow police to unilaterally ban access to online content, though police would not disclose details of the investigation.
In addition, the police also searched the residence of Robert Chung, CEO of the Hong Kong Institute of Public Opinion Research, who was responsible for providing the electronic voting system and vote counting work for the primary election last year, as well as the Institute’s headquarters in Wong Chuk Hang and the office of its Wanchai branch, taking away a number of computers, servers, documents, etc.
During his meeting with the media on the 12th, Robert Chung said that the police took away many computers and servers, and seized one of his personal phones during the search at his residence. He also noted that during the search at POP’s office, the police searched for documents related to the word “primary election”.
Chung said that after the police search in July last year, POP had already done a lot of system reinforcement work, but did not anticipate that law enforcement would come to the house again and use public power to take away the Institute’s 2 servers and other equipment. However, all the public information about last year’s primary election voting, POP has long destroyed.
He said that some of the information taken by the police this time may involve personal privacy, and some of the information is similar to news materials that need to be kept confidential.
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