From a lab in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly

Beijing: Filip Liu, a 31year- old software developer from Beijing, was traveling in the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang when he was pulled to one side by police as he got off a bus.

The officers took Liu’s iPhone, hooked it up to a handheld device that looked like a laptop and told him they were “checking his phone for illegal information”.

Liu’s experience in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital, is not uncommon in a region that has been wracked by separatist violence and a crackdown by security forces.

But such surveillance technologies, tested out in the laboratory of Xinjiang, are now quietly spreading across China.

Government procurement documents collected by Reuters and rare insights from officials show the technology Liu encountered in Xinjiang is encroaching into cities like Shanghai and Beijing.

Police stations in almost every province have sought to buy the dataextraction devices for smartphones since the beginning of 2016, coinciding with a sharp rise in spending on internal security and a crackdown on dissent, the data show.

The documents provide a rare glimpse into the numbers behind China’s push to arm security forces with high- tech monitoring tools as the government clamps down on dissent.

The ministry of industry and information technology and the public security bureau, which oversee China’s high- tech security projects, did not respond to requests for comment.

The scanners are handheld or desktop devices that can break into smartphones and extract and analyse contact lists, photos, videos, social media posts and email.

Hand- held devices allow police to quickly check the content of phones on the street. Liu, the Beijing software developer, said the police were able to review his data on the spot. They apparently didn’t find anything objectionable as he was not detained.

The data Reuters analysed includes requests from 171 police stations across 32 out of 33 official mainland provinces, regions and municipalities, and appears to show only a portion of total spending.

The data shows over $ 19 million in budgeting or spending on the equipment since the beginning of 2016, with amounts accelerating in 2017 and 2018.

In Shanghai, China’s gleaming international port city, two districts budgeted around 600,000 yuan each to purchase phone scanners and data- ripping tools. Beijing’s railway police budgeted a similar amount, the documents show.

“Right now, as I understand it, only two provinces in the whole country don’t use these,” said a sales representative at Zhongke Ronghui Security Technology Co Ltd, a Shaanxi- based firm that produces the XDH5200A, one of the scanners detailed in several police procurement documents.

The representative said police stations across the whole country could consult a centralised repository of extracted data. “Almost every police station will have the equipment.”

Chinese- made devices cost as little as about 10,000 yuan for smaller ones, to hundreds of thousands of yuan for more sophisticated ones, according to prices seen at a police equipment fair in Beijing earlier this year.

The scanners have not been immediately apparent in cities like Shanghai and Beijing.