In a disturbing development, the Guardian reported that the Chinese border police are secretly installing surveillance apps on the phones of visitors and downloading their personal information as a part of the government’s intensive scrutiny of the remote Xinjiang region. When travelers attempt to enter the Xinjiang region from the neighbouring Kyrgyzstan using the remote Irkeshtam border crossing, border guards make travelers unlock their phones, and take them and other devices such as cameras. They then secretly install an app that extracts emails, texts, contacts and calendar entries, along with information about the handset itself, the investigation by the Guardian, the New York Times and Süddeutsche Zeitung revealed. What does the app do? The app appears with the default Android icon and the words 蜂采 (Fēng cǎi); the term has no direct English translation, but relates to bees collecting honey. The app, that according to the Guardian has been designed by a Chinese company, ‘searches Android phones against a huge list of content that the authorities view as problematic’. iPhones are unlocked and then plugged into a reader that scans them. The banned content is a list of more than 73,000 items stored within the app’s code, the New York Times reported. The list includes terms related to Islamist extremism, fasting during Ramadan, literature by the Dalai Lama, and music by a Japanese band. Analysis of the app by the Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Ruhr-University Bochum and the German cybersecurity firm Cure53 suggested that it was designed to upload information such…
