China monitors phones of Uyghurs, flags them as extremists for possessing Quran: Report

Police in China's Xinjiang region rely on a master list of 50,000 multimedia files they deem “violent and terrorist” to flag Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim residents for interrogation, according to a report by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) on May 4. An investigation by HRW into the metadata of this master list found that during nine months from 2017 to 2018, police conducted nearly 11 million searches of a total of 1.2 million mobile phones in Xinjiang's capital city Urumqi. Xinjiang’s automated police mass surveillance systems enabled this phone search.

Maya Wang, acting China director at HRW, said that Beijing's use of surveillance technology in Xinjiang meant that Uyghurs who simply store the Quran on their phones may trigger a police interrogation.

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The New York-based international non-governmental organisation (NGO) has repeatedly raised concerns about China’s approach to countering acts it calls “terrorism” and “extremism.”

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"China’s counterterrorism law defines “terrorism” and “extremism” in an overly broad and vague manner that facilitates prosecutions, deprivation of liberty, and other restrictions for acts that do not intend to cause death or serious physical harm for political, religious, or ideological aims," the report said.

The Human Rights Watch searches found more than 1,000 unique files on about 1,400 Urumqi residents’ phones that matched those on the police master list. The analysis of these matched files revealed that 57 per cent appeared to be common Islamic religious materials, including readings of everysurah(chapter) of the Quran.

The list is part of a large database (52GB) of over 1,600 data tables from Xinjiang leaked to the Intercept in 2019. The Intercept, an American media group, reported that police in Xinjiang's capital conducted surveillance and arrests from 2015 to 2019 based on texts of police reports that were part of this database.

"The master list of multimedia files that Human Rights Watch examined is located in a different part of the same database and has not been previously reported on or analyzed. Some of the numbers in this reporting have been rounded up so that the authorities cannot identify the source of the leak," the HRW highlighted in its May 4 report.

What do the media files contain?

An analysis of the metadata of this master list revealed photos, audio, and video files which contain violent content, but also other material that has no evident connection to violence.

These media files contained materials such as content depicting beheadings or forms of torture that appeared to have been carried out by the Islamic State, drug cartels, details about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The files contained materials that involved foreign organisations including the East Turkistan Independence Movement and the World Uyghur Congress.

The files also contained Islamic religious content, including Quran readings and wedding songs.

"Human Rights Watch also found another related list in the database that has the same MD5 hashes – the unique signature of these files. This list apparently contains the search result of the Jingwang Weishi app, a surveillance application," the report further said.

According to a report by Al-Jazeera, police in Urumqi have required residents to download Jingwang Weishi, which gives authorities the ability to monitor the contents of their phones. And visitors to Xinjiang can also be required to download a similar application called Fengcai.

The HRW urged the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to urgently form an independent, international investigation into rights violations and the suppression of fundamental freedoms in Xinjiang by China against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims.

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