China Forces Muslim Minority To Install Spyware On Their Phones (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: Chinese authorities in the province of Xinjiang are forcing locals of the Uyghur Muslim minority to install an app on their phones that will allow the government to scan their device for "terrorist propaganda," local media reports. In reality, the app creates MD5 hashes for the user's files and matches them against a database of known terrorist content. The app also makes copies of the user's Weibo and WeChat databases and uploads it to a government server, along with the user's IMEI, IMSI, and WiFi login information. The app is called Jingwang (Citizen Safety) and was developed by police forces from Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital. Authorities launched the app in April, and also included the ability to report suspicious activity to the police. At the start of July, Xinjiang officials started sending WeChat messages in Uyghur and Chinese to locals, asking them to install the app or face detainment of up to 10 days. Police have also stopped people on the street to check if they installed the app. Several were detained for refusing to install it. Locals are now sharing the locations of checkpoints online, so others can avoid getting arrested.

Comments

Re: Good

[ShanghaiBill]

are you saying they don't speak much Mandarin and don't share culture with the rest of China?

Exactly. It is based on culture and ethnicity, and NOT on religion. If you promote separatism, you are going to get hammered, whether you are a muslim Uyghur or a buddhist Tibetan, and the punishment is going to be applied collectively.

China is not "anti-muslim". There are 50 million muslims in China. There are mosques in every major city. Most of these muslims dress, speak, and act just like other Chinese, and consider themselves Chinese. Xinjiang is a much more recent addition to China, and was originally conquered by the Qing (Manchus), not Han Chinese. Xinjiang continued to resist, broke away many times, and was independent as recently as 1949. Many Uyghurs feel more kinship with the people across the border in Kazakhstan that with the rest of China.

Not that that makes much of an argument in favor of Beijing's actions, though.

This policy is not coming from the central government in Beijing. This is an initiative of the Xinjiang provincial government.