In a recent speech, Ali Baba co-founder Jack Ma suggested that the Chinese government should use big data to help prevent crime, a view that resonates with the Communist party’s efforts to establish a system parsing citizen information online. Citizen Lab Senior Research Fellow Jason Q. Ng commented on Ma’s remarks in an interview with Bloomberg.

Citizen Lab Senior Research Fellow Bill Marczak and Senior Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire were featured in an episode of Al Jazeera’s ‘Faultlines’ program, in an episode entitled “Crypto Wars: Behind the Encryption Debate.” They discussed attitudes concerning surveillance in the wake of the San Bernadino shooting as well as other terrorist activities.

In this report, we reverse engineer three popular live streaming platforms (YY, Sina Show, and 9158) and find keyword lists used to censor chat messages. Tracking changes to the keyword lists over the past year gives an inside look into how these applications implement censorship