We are shocked to learn oppressive authoritarian surveillance state China injects spyware into foreigners' smartphones Authorities in a tumultuous region of China are ordering tourists and other visitors to install spyware on their smartphones, it is claimed. The New York Times reported today that guards working the border with Krygyzstan, in China's Xinjiang region, have insisted visitors put an app called Fengcai on their Android devices – …
Repression works best in the silence.
Everybody knows the horrors committed in North Korea, it does not deter Norks to continue. Knowledge is not a way to stop atrocities. Sadly.
If there's no money involved, a dictatorship can freely torture, murder, exterminate, nobody will care.
Do we? We have scanty reports, second hand information, and North Korea likes to play with that - look at the reports someone has been eliminated and then reappears - it's a tactic to make sources look unreliable.
Do we have images from their camps? Direct reports from independent journalists? We mostly have some cheerleaders from abroad allowed to visit it - and only see what they want you to see.
There's a huge difference between open knowledge of shittery committed existing _outside_ and _inside_ a dictatorship. They generally tend to not give a shadow of a flying fsck about what people outside know (well they do prefer you not knowing but if that's not an option: meh...) but anything being discussed inside tends to be cracked down on with extreme prejudice. As long as people inside can't get organized or even become aware of the true scale and nature of things going on, nobody cares how much democratic states might dislike a dictatorship they already despise anyway.
How sure are you "everybody" inside North Korea also knows all about those horrors (assuming they didn't happen to their neighbour / family), and how many might even dismiss them as subversive rumours and western propaganda, when people's access to information is basically limited to what their state has been telling them all their life (at full volume, day in and day out, because why not) and what they might gossip about with their neighbour (assuming they dare opening their mouths at all in front of someone who might any time be a state informant)...? You will find nothing but "fervently patriotic righteous people*" anywhere you look in a country where it's reasonably well known (or suspected) that anything else may well get you "un-personned".
*that's what they will be looking like, and you'll never tell how many might be faking it, because those you could tell tend to fail the Darwin test by definition. All you will know for certain is that at least some of them truly do believe most of it...
A friend had a visit from government security specialists and one piece of advice was that if you are travelling to such countries, you should use a disposable phone during your stay and just reset it and throw it in the bin at the airport when you fly back home. The same advice was also given for laptops and tablets, just throw them in the bin, when your visit is over.
You don't know what could have been installed and you can never be certain that it has been successfully removed (UEFI rootkits etc.)
I really like my Q10 as well. If my infant son hadn't used it as a teething ring and drooled into the microphone it would still be my main phone (was in contract at the time but Vodafone just kept playing support pingpong until the contract ended). The amazon app store still works, that's what I use overdrive on. Some of the websites do come up with your browser is too old message now.
U.S.Government has DROPOUTJEEP.
DROPOUTJEEP: "A software implant for the Apple iPhone that utilizes modular mission applications to provide specific SIGINT functionality. This functionality includes the ability to remotely push/pull files from the device. SMS retrieval, contact list retrieval, voicemail, geolocation, hot mic, camera capture, cell tower location, etc. Command, control and data exfiltration can occur over SMS messaging or a GPRS data connection. All communications with the implant will be covert and encrypted."[8]
Between my cell carrier, U.S., and Chinese spyware it's a wonder my phone can still play my games.
Having spent a bit of time in that part of China, I'd have to say that this level of repression is not really new - just different tech / better publicized. At that time (turn of the century), the roads in the area were some of the best in China - and were built *solely* for the benefit of heavy troop movements.
Even then we used Chinese-made burner phones; cash, rather than credit cards - you get the drift..... maybe still good advice.
Incidentally, part of the ongoing Han Chinese paranoia towards the Uighurs may stem from the fact that, unlike the Tibetans further South, the Uighurs are not (at all) given to turning the other cheek. In other (completely unreported at the time) news, the PLA and their nastier cousins, the Gong An, came off a decidedly poor second in several small encounters with Uighur groups in the desert West of Urumqi.
Didn't really help in the long run though, and its hard to see this ending well.
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