China Intercepts WeChat Texts From US and Abroad, Researcher Says (npr.org) 27
China is intercepting texts from WeChat users living outside of the country, mostly from the U.S. Taiwan, South Korea, and Australia. NPR reports:
The popular Chinese messaging app WeChat is Zhou Fengsuo's most reliable communication link to China. That's because he hasn't been back in over two decades. Zhou, a human rights activist, had been a university student in 1989, when the pro-democracy protests broke out in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. After a year in jail and another in political reeducation, he moved to the United States in 1995. But WeChat often malfunctions. Zhou began noticing in January that his chat groups could not read his messages. "I realized this because I was expecting some feedback [on a post] but there was no feedback," Zhou tells NPR at from his home in New Jersey.
As Chinese technology companies expand their footprint outside China, they are also sweeping up vast amounts of data from foreign users. Now, analysts say they know where the missing messages are: Every day, millions of WeChat conversations held inside and outside China are flagged, collected and stored in a database connected to public security agencies in China, according to a Dutch Internet researcher. Zhou is not the only one experiencing recent issues. NPR spoke to three other U.S. citizens who have been blocked from sending messages in WeChat groups or had their accounts frozen earlier this year, despite registering with U.S. phone numbers. This March, [Victor Gevers, co-founder of the nonprofit GDI Foundation, an open-source data security collection] found a Chinese database storing more than 1 billion WeChat conversations, including more than 3.7 billion messages, and tweeted out his findings. Each message had been tagged with a GPS location, and many included users' national identification numbers. Most of the messages were sent inside China, but more than 19 million of them had been sent from people outside the country, mostly from the U.S., Taiwan, South Korea and Australia.
As Chinese technology companies expand their footprint outside China, they are also sweeping up vast amounts of data from foreign users. Now, analysts say they know where the missing messages are: Every day, millions of WeChat conversations held inside and outside China are flagged, collected and stored in a database connected to public security agencies in China, according to a Dutch Internet researcher. Zhou is not the only one experiencing recent issues. NPR spoke to three other U.S. citizens who have been blocked from sending messages in WeChat groups or had their accounts frozen earlier this year, despite registering with U.S. phone numbers. This March, [Victor Gevers, co-founder of the nonprofit GDI Foundation, an open-source data security collection] found a Chinese database storing more than 1 billion WeChat conversations, including more than 3.7 billion messages, and tweeted out his findings. Each message had been tagged with a GPS location, and many included users' national identification numbers. Most of the messages were sent inside China, but more than 19 million of them had been sent from people outside the country, mostly from the U.S., Taiwan, South Korea and Australia.
Cummunism (Score:1)
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non caps for stupid non irony detecting algos
Re:Cummunism (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't news at all. All WeChat traffic, even US-to-US is diverted through servers in China, and Tencent, the parent company, has openly stated many times that it is monitored by the government, as well as by their own employees.
WeChat is a great app, and I use it all the time. But I have never considered it to be private.
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Not so much the US gov.
What makes you think they need help? (Score:1)
Sure they do.
Surprise surprise! (Score:4, Insightful)
China is NOT the west (Score:3)
Yes, there are privacy issues in the West.
But you do everyone a great disservice when you say that they are just the same. The west does not block messages, certainly not normal politicial ones. It does not punish people overtly for disagreeing with the government.
Not perfect. But no comparison to China. Get real.
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I might add that the reach of China is wide. Chinese students do not want to demonstrate in Australia because they are being reported to China, and may be punished when they return.
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Who is kidding who. Does not block messages, what the fuckity fuck fucking fuck, they block users and every single message, delete (well only to the actual end user, entire years worth of messages). Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, all censor like mad and totally politically and very little to do with illegal content, worse than anything the government of China does. Do you know, recaptcha, Google used it to censor me, recaptcha was taking twenty to thirty tries, complained to disqus and now it is one. Hell, for
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You don't know what you are talking about or you are some kind of China apologist. It is not my intention to downplay what is going on at Facebook and Youtube etc. But to say even for one second that they are "worse than anything the government of China does" is unbelievably ignorant.
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How is this even news? I assumed they were doing just like all the Western companies with centralized messaging systems, i.e. recording everything they possibly could.
Next they are going to tell us that email isn't secure.
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You don't have to go that far out of your way. Signal [signal.org] provides seamless end-of-end encryption. Moxie Marlinspike [wikipedia.org], its creator, designed it specifically to be impossible to eavesdrop. A lot of its technolody ended up in Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp - putting it into the hands of billions of users, including people that aren't on Facebook.
Of
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Every Chinese who uses Wechat knows they are being spied on. They still use it, because everything else is blocked. When they want to discuss things that might attract censorship, they use ever-changing euphemisms,
I knew it (Score:2)
Darn Chinese. American corporations would never do such a thing.
Message banned in China content (Score:2)
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Everyone in China knows about Tianamen Square. They know that they must NEVER talk about it. If you think about it, there is no way they can be aware of the fact that they must never discuss it, nor allude to it inadvertently by various code names, without actually having some idea of what went on (or at least an idea that something went on). If you go to China and talk to people about Tianamen Square, they will become extremely uncomfortable. The anniversery of Tianamen Square is marked by tons of extra ce
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Blame Huawei! (Score:1)
Anyhoo (Score:3)
They're viewing content. For a related issue, where the US feds track "metadata" on who you call, but not the contents AKA listening, ask yourselves this: is tracking who, back in China, this dissident calls useful to the dictatorship even without content?
Something to consider. Just metadata alone could have crushed the US revolution, and may very well have ended up as part of the First Amendment, had the revolution miraculously succeeded.
Who else is shocked at the commies doing this? (Score:1)
Precisely no one.
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Keep on investing in Communist China to show Communist China the wonders of the wests "freedoms"?
What your friends say about you (Score:3)
No Chinese expat with a brain would say anything controversial on WeChat.
But what if your friends start being careless, and talking about you.
Also, if you have WeChat on your phone, it knows where you are all the time. And probably quite a bit more. If your associates have WeChat it knows you you are with.
Chinese students do not want to demonstrate in Australia because they are being reported to China, and may be punished when they return.
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Unlike the issue in the summary, that is actually novel and is good to know!
Thank You, Captain Obvious (Score:2)
Of course they are intercepting 100% of all WeChat traffic. Everybody has assumed this is true since forever.
What is more, the US WeChat client is blocked in China. You have to re-install the Chinese version (or use a VPN) for the US version of WeChat to work. So, most likely, the Chinese version of WeChat is probably even more compromised (maybe it backdoors your phone...).
But people in China are using WeChat for everything, and many other chat solutions are blocked, so you have little choice. It is like t
stoopid does it (Score:2)