Unruly Speech by Saskia Witteborn

Author:Saskia Witteborn
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Technology experts have found increasing evidence over the years of long-term targeted digital attacks against the Uyghurs and their advocates such as the Scarlet Mimic campaign (Stone 2016). This cyber-espionage campaign targeted human rights organizations as well as other entities knowledgeable about the work of those organizations and individuals, including academic institutions and governments. Malware and trolls are key to sowing uncertainty through disinformation among diasporic Uyghurs. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab (Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy) studied the use of malware by China to target diasporic Uyghurs and Tibetans (Citizen Lab 2014; Whittaker 2019). The technology was developed by the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), a defense manufacturer run by the Chinese state. The company grew out of military research labs in China and a defense-based mission to include civilian securitization, which means that Chinese military surveillance technology is tightly linked to civilian surveillance technology (Buckley and Mozur 2019).

Mobile security firm Lookout has estimated malware to be working on diasporic Uyghurs’ Android phones since 2013 (Lookout 2020). The researchers surveyed four surveillanceware families, including GoldenEagle, SilkBean, DoubleAgent, and CarbonSteal. Malware can imitate virtual private networks (VPNs) to discover prohibited content access and to imitate apps. Examples of apps that are mimicked are Sakuy (Uyghur music service), Tawarim (e-commerce site), or Tibbiyjawhar (pharma app). Some apps mimic real ones from third-party platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Baidu. The apps collect information on people’s behaviors, including shopping, beauty, music, and news consumption in the diaspora. Some of the malware is able to delete itself when the chance of detection is high as a result of its using too much phone battery. The apps are able to turn on a phone’s microphone, record location and conversations, export photos, or even record calls, according to the Lookout report.

Malware apps are intended to reach a large international target group. They present Uyghur in four scripts (Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic, and Chinese) and are available in many languages, including English, Arabic, Chinese, Pashto, Turkish, Persian, Malay, Bahasa Indonesia, Uzbek, Hindi, and Urdu. Targeted countries range from Afghanistan to Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, and France, among many others. The Lookout report concluded that apps have specifically targeted Uyghur-reading and speaking communities and that surveillance of Muslim groups was also carried out through the technology (Lookout 2020). A peak of the surveillanceware was 2015, which suggests that the malware has been part of the “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism,” which started in XUAR in May of 2014.

Internet security and governance sources have reported on the surveillance of diasporas from China at least since 2010. In 2009, when I interviewed staff of the UAA in Washington, D.C., I encountered information technology (IT) experts who were busy identifying malware from suspected mainland Chinese sources and who installed protection devices on computers. The communication among the offices of Uyghur advocacy organizations had been interrupted by viruses in the email system, and emails were sent out in the name of staff members who had not written them.

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