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Beijing [China]Jan. 6 (ANI): Cate Cadell and Christian Shepherd of The Washington Post report that Chinese protesters protesting the zero-COVID-19 policy were arrested in police custody. Close surveillance and harsh interrogation.
Even though China rolled back its zero-coronavirus policy after the protests, it still sent police equipped with the latest technology to hunt down those who took part in the protests. Dozens of those who participated in the protest paid a heavy price for dissent.
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Some protesters in Beijing and Shanghai mentioned that during these interrogations by Chinese police over their participation in the protests, they had to deal with increased digital surveillance, strip searches, threats to family members and physical coercion.
It’s unclear how exactly protesters are being tracked at protests, but insights from lawyers, analysts, protesters and police purchases of documents offer some clues about the types of tools being used. The Washington Post report mentions a theory, though it’s hard to prove that police use cell towers to extract all the phone numbers from places where crowds congregate, and then deploy officers en masse to process the lists.
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“[The police] It seems that some modern technology was used, cyber technology, they collected a database of phone numbers of all the people involved in the incident,” the Washington Post quoted a lawyer with direct knowledge of the protesters’ case as saying.
In the same Washington Post report, a month before the start of the protests in Beijing, the city’s Ministry of Public Security announced a 580,000 yuan ($84,000) procurement of a data surveillance project that would combine human analysts and automated catches. Using tools for 24-hour screening of domestic and foreign news and discussions on social media accounts could snowball dissent in China.
Doa, a 28-year-old tech worker from Beijing who was detained after protesting against zero coronavirus, said: “The virus is no longer the enemy, health officials and quarantine are not the enemy… now only the protesting people are the enemy,” said Doa. The Washington Post report further mentioned that those who made statements about police interactions used nicknames or anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issues involved.
Cadell and Shepherd Doa reported in the Washington Post that she and her friends kept a low profile during the protest near the Liangma River Bridge in Chaoyang District for just half an hour at midnight on November 28 to avoid prosecution and communicated with anyone to interact with. Policemen. Two days later, her mother was contacted to tell her that Doa had participated in an “illegal riot” and would be detained soon. In addition, the police also called Doa and summoned them to a police station in northern Beijing. She was further interrogated for nine hours.
According to the Cadell and Shepherd report, there are no official figures on the number of people detained after the protests, and the Chinese government has not even directly acknowledged that anyone has been arrested.
The report also referred to the government’s 2018 policy requiring internet companies to regularly report in detail on trends that “mobilize” public sentiment or lead to “significant changes in public opinion”. Under the rules, companies must provide details about individual users, including their real names, locations and chat history.
Underpinning this technology-influenced tracking system is a city system of hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras that has set a goal of covering the entire population by 2020 under an ambitious plan called Sharp Eyes. It includes facial recognition cameras designed to automatically identify pedestrians and drivers and compare them to national ID registries and blacklists.
In a related incident, six people were also arrested and interrogated under stress and manual labour. “We could only stand and not talk. They wouldn’t let us sleep, and if I did, they would knock on the door to wake me up,” said a 25-year-old man in Shanghai, who declined to be identified for fear of further repercussions. Name.
The man said he saw others handcuffed and forced to squat for about an hour for disobedience. He said the police punished them at the station by making them do squats and copy handwritten pages of political documents from the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.
“Purpose [of questioning] It was to find out who planned it; “They think it was done by separatists or foreign forces,” he said. China’s. “. (ANI)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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