Children react as Turkish plainclothes police officers try to push back demonstrators during a protest of Uighur supporters outside the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul, July 2018.

A new analysis of an app used by Chinese officials in the far west region of Xinjiang, where Turkic Muslim minorities are being closely tracked and sent to detention centers en masse, suggests Chinese authorities are indiscriminately collecting huge volumes of information about people in the region.



Along with Berlin-based security firm Cure53, Human Rights Watch reverse engineered the app, which is associated with a data collection and analysis system called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), and found that it enables police and other authorities in Xinjiang to collect and file away personal information about people, including behavior considered suspicious, and flag them for future investigations.

“The IJOP is unique," said Maya Wang, the senior researcher on China at Human Rights Watch. "It’s the heart of the mass surveillance system in Xinjiang."

“It’s the system of systems," she added.

Upward of a million people, including ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslims, have passed through mass internment camps in Xinjiang, where detainees are held without charge, taught Chinese, compelled to sing patriotic songs and learn Chinese Communist Party doctrine, and subjected to a wide range of abuses from food deprivation to being held in stress positions, according to many witness accounts.

The IJOP platform tracks people’s travel patterns, their electricity and petrol use, as well as religious activity like preaching or donating to mosques, Human Rights Watch found. The IJOP also prompts police to check for apps deemed suspicious including messaging apps popular outside China, such as WhatsApp, Viber, and Telegram.

Based on these and many other criteria, the app spits out lists of people who are candidates for detention — suggesting there is a direct link between Xinjiang’s complex surveillance apparatus and the mass internment of Muslim minorities.

The app essentially provides an interface for authorities to share information about residents’ behavior and personal traits in many different aspects of their lives.