In less than two weeks, two major reports have been released containing Chinese government documents about the persecution of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in China, and they highlight the extent to which technology has helped them monitor people's daily lives.
The first was a New York Times article detailing how government leaders, including President Xi Jinping, developed and implemented policies against the Uyghurs. The latter, from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, details over 24 pages how the government is using technology to monitor and identify groups to be rounded up and held in camps in the Xinjiang region.
These publications are particularly significant because leaks of this magnitude from within the Chinese Communist Party are rare.
ICIJ police and other authorities are using the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), a policing platform to collect personal data, along with data from facial recognition cameras and other surveillance tools, and then using artificial intelligence to identify Xinjiang residents.
The publications also report that the Chinese government has ordered security officials in Xinjiang to monitor Zapya users for any connections to terrorist organizations.
The app was created in 2012 by DewMobile, a Beijing-based startup that has received funding from InnoSpring Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley and Tsinghua University, and is intended to give people a way to download the Quran and send messages and files to other users without being connected to the internet.
According to ICIJ, the documents show that since at least July 2016, Chinese authorities have been monitoring the app on Uyghur phone calls in order to flag users for investigation. DewMobile did not respond to ICIJ’s repeated requests for comment.
