Chinese border officials are installing a surveillance app on the phones of tourists entering the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region across the border from their neighbor Kyrgyzstan.

China’s Xinjiang autonomous region is primarily the area inhabited by the Uyghurs, a Muslim Turkic minority group of about 8 million people. We already know from our press that China exerts all kinds of pressure to keep this minority under control. I recommend you speak with a Muslim living in China to understand the oppression of Muslims and the restriction of their freedoms. One that I met was able to go to Saudi Arabia for the Umrah pilgrimage by obtaining a Turkish passport. They didn’t have the courage to go with a Chinese passport.

According to media outlets including the New York Times , The Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung and more, the surveillance app is used to instantly extract emails, texts, calendar entries, call logs, and contacts, and securely upload them solely to a local server set up at the checkpoint.

Interviewing an Android user who crossed the border in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region this year, The Guardian reports that the tourist stated: “I was asked to hand my phone over to the authorities at the border. They took my phone to another room. There were other tourists who handed over their phones along with me. We waited there for about an hour.” The use of such an app at the border was revealed when tourists took their phones to journalists in Germany and showed them. Chinese authorities were contacted for comment on the matter, but no response has been received yet. The Chinese government had previously defended the high-tech surveillance system in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region on the grounds that it increased security in the region.

Source: thehackernews.com/2019/07/xinjiang-fengcai-spyware.html