In the fight against the nationwide protests, China relies on high-tech and toughness. Police appear to be using facial recognition software and mobile phone data to track and arrest participants, said Zhengzhou City human rights lawyer Wang Shengsheng, who provides free legal advice to the protesters. The reason for the protests is the strict Corona policy with its hard, recurring lockdowns. However, they are now generally directed against the communist leadership.
In the capital Beijing, when checking the Corona app, the police could have used the location data of phones recorded either by on-site scanners or by taxi drivers, the lawyer suspects. “Many callers from Beijing were confused because they were contacted by the police as they had just walked past a demonstration. We have no idea how they did it,” said Wang. In other cities, police seem to have used CCTV footage and facial recognition.
More than 20 people have sought advice from the lawyer in recent days. Some of them had self-demonstrated, others were concerned about friends and relatives who had been arrested. However, most of those arrested were released within a day, Wang says.
Telegram accounts are being misused
According to the lawyer, the police in Shanghai have confiscated the mobile phones of all those interrogated. “Maybe to download all their data,” she suspects. Callers from southern China’s Guangdong told Wang that their Telegram accounts had been hacked after police registered their IDs on their way to the rallies.
Friends of detained protesters in Beijing said their friends’ Telegram accounts were used while they were in detention, indicating that police had access to them. Reports of arrests and harassment are circulating in encrypted protester chat groups, accessible in China only with banned VPN software – urging all participants to delete chat histories, videos and photos from the demos.
In online networks, which are heavily monitored in China, users posting about the protests can be easily tracked down because they have to register with their real names.
“You Have No Privacy”
Journalists from the AFP news agency saw several police officers filming protesters in Beijing on Sunday. A protester told AFP she and her five friends had been called by police after the protest march in the embassy district. On Tuesday she was sent to the police station, but then sent away again due to the lack of a current corona test.
In Shanghai, an AFP reporter witnessed several arrests. Police forcibly took a protester’s phone to check for apps on the foreign online networks that had been blocked in China. These are used to organize the protests. “They have no privacy,” an official told a 17-year-old protester in Shanghai.
“In ordinary criminal cases, when people disappear or are killed, they don’t use high-tech surveillance technologies,” Wang says. “But public protests apparently use highly developed digital technologies,” the lawyer complains. “If our phones can be confiscated and manipulated at will, what freedom do we have?” (AFP/jmh)