Chinese region forces residents to install spyware on phones, wants to “register and scan” all devices

Xinjiang police checking residents’ phones for spyware

Well, this is horrifying. Whilst Westerners are trying to shine light on their governments’ backroom efforts to snoop on their activities and communications, officials in one part of China have decided to do away with any pretense and are openly forcing residents to install spyware on their phones under penalty of imprisonment:

On July 10, mobile phone users in the Tianshan District of Urumqi City received a mobile phone notification from the district government instructing them to install a surveillance application called Jingwang (or “Web Cleansing”). The message said the app was intended to “prevent [them] from accessing terrorist information.”

But authorities may be using the app for more than just counter-terrorism. According to an exclusive report from Radio Free Asia, 10 Kazakh women from Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture were arrested for messages sent to a private WeChat group chat soon after they installed the app.

The notification from police said the application would locate and track the sources and distribution paths of terrorists, along with “illegal religious” activity and “harmful information,” including videos, images, ebooks and documents.

Jingwang's website describes the application as follows:

[…]

Jingwang is a protection service with an adult and child categorization system introduced by Jiangsu Telecom. The main function is to block pornographic websites, online scams, trojan horses, and phishing sites; to alert users of how much time they spend online; and to enable remote control of one's home network. The tool is intended to help kids develop a healthy lifestyle by building a safe web filter for the minors.

I’m struggling to imagine a more blatant move to impose total government control on the lives of its citizens. And it only gets creepier, as anyone who might try to opt out of being cyber-nannied will quickly find out they can’t:

A Twitter-based media outlet, “Images from mainland China” (即时中国大陆映像), which covers censored news in China, posted photos taken from a checkpoint where police officers randomly checked residents to see if they have installed the surveillance app:

[…]

Authorities from Xinjiang are checking to make sure that people are using the official Jingwang application. A mobile notification demanded people install the app within 10 days. If they are caught at a checkpoint and their devices do not have the software, they could be detained for 10 days.

At least government snoops in the Americas and Europe still have the decency to act like the shady moral (and often legal) criminals they are, running their privacy-violating tricks behind everyone’s backs, thus allowing for some plausible deniability, no matter how transparent. On the other hand, it’s almost refreshing to see a government that completely gives up on pretending to care about civil liberties. Almost.

This renewed push for control isn’t limited to people’s smartphones, either:

A recent report from Freedom House, a US-based human rights group, also touched on the new surveillance practices:

In Xinjiang, authorities in a district of the regional capital Urumqi issued a notice on June 27 instructing all residents and business owners to submit their “personal ID cards, cell phones, external drives, portable hard drives, notebook computers, and media storage cards” to the local police post for “registration and scanning” by August 1.

Big Brother is coming to China even faster and more openly than usual. Then again, situations like this are the very reason projects like Tor exist and thrive in places like China.

(via Privacy News Online)