Authorities describe them as a series of “filters” or “sieves” throughout the region, sifting out undesirable elements. While the Chinese government has primary responsibility for the human rights violations taking place in Xinjiang, these companies also have a responsibility under international law to respect human rights, avoid complicity in abuses, and adequately remedy them when they occur.Īs detailed below, the IJOP system and some of the region’s checkpoints work together to form a series of invisible or virtual fences. In creating the IJOP system, the Chinese government has benefitted from Chinese companies who provide them with technologies. The IJOP app, in part, aims to control government officials to ensure that they are efficiently carrying out the government’s repressive orders. The app also scores government officials on their performance in fulfilling tasks and is a tool for higher-level supervisors to assign tasks to, and keep tabs on the performance of, lower-level officials. Our analysis of the IJOP system suggests that gathering information to counter genuine terrorism or extremist violence is not a central goal of the system.
It also instructs officials to watch out for “adherents of Wahhabism,” a term suggesting an ultra-conservative form of Islamic belief, and “families of those…who detonated and killed themselves.” But many-if not most-behaviors the IJOP system pays special attention to have no clear relationship to terrorism or extremism.
While the app instructs officials to check for “terrorism” and “violent audio-visual content” when conducting phone and software checks, these terms are broadly defined under Chinese laws. The authorities have sought to justify mass surveillance in Xinjiang as a means to fight terrorism. For example, the IJOP app instructs officers to investigate people who are related to people who have obtained a new phone number or who have foreign links. Authorities seem to consider some of these relationships inherently suspicious. When the IJOP system detects irregularities or deviations from what it considers normal, such as when people are using a phone that is not registered to them, when they use more electricity than “normal,” or when they leave the area in which they are registered to live without police permission, the system flags these “micro-clues” to the authorities as suspicious and prompts an investigation.Īnother key element of IJOP system is the monitoring of personal relationships. This is consistent with Xinjiang local government statements that emphasize officials must collect data for the IJOP system in a “comprehensive manner” from “everyone in every household.” The system is tracking the movement of people by monitoring the “trajectory” and location data of their phones, ID cards, and vehicles it is also monitoring the use of electricity and gas stations of everybody in the region. Our findings suggest the IJOP system surveils and collects data on everyone in Xinjiang. But most of the other behavior the app considers problematic are ethnic-and religion-neutral.
The IJOP app demonstrates that Chinese authorities consider certain peaceful religious activities as suspicious, such as donating to mosques or preaching the Quran without authorization. The app also labels the use of 51 network tools as suspicious, including many Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and encrypted communication tools, such as WhatsApp and Viber. Our analysis also shows that Xinjiang authorities consider many forms of lawful, everyday, non-violent behavior-such as “not socializing with neighbors, often avoiding using the front door”-as suspicious. Human Rights Watch finds that officials use the IJOP app to fulfill three broad functions: collecting personal information, reporting on activities or circumstances deemed suspicious, and prompting investigations of people the system flags as problematic.Īnalysis of the IJOP app reveals that authorities are collecting massive amounts of personal information-from the color of a person’s car to their height down to the precise centimeter-and feeding it into the IJOP central system, linking that data to the person’s national identification card number. Share this via Facebook Share this via Twitter Share this via WhatsApp Share this via Email Other ways to share Share this via LinkedIn Share this via Reddit Share this via Telegram