This report examines the accessibility of certain types of content on VK (an abbreviation for “VKontakte”), a Russian social networking service, in Canada, Ukraine, and Russia. Among these countries, we found that Russia had the most limited access to VK social media content, due to the blocking of 94,942 videos, 1,569 community accounts, and 787 personal accounts in the country.
Read the full report “Beautiful Bauhinia: “HKLeaks” – The Use of Covert and Overt Online Harassment Tactics to Repress 2019 Hong Kong Protests.” What is this report about, and what did it find? The report is an in-depth analysis of the doxxing campaign known as “HKLEAKS”, which began in August 2019 and for at least… Read more »
In August 2019 a wave of websites and social media channels, called “HKLEAKS,” began “doxxing” the identities and personal information of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. While the creators of these sites and channels claimed that HKLEAKS was the product of local volunteer communities, several indicators suggest a coordinated information operation conducted by professional actors in alignment with Chinese state interests.
We conducted the first analysis of WeChat’s tracking ecosystem. Using reverse engineering methods to intercept WeChat’s network requests, we identified exactly what types of data the WeChat app is sending to its servers, and when. This report is part one of a two-part series on a privacy and security analysis of the WeChat ecosystem.
This FAQ accompanies the full report on privacy in the WeChat ecosystem. We analyzes privacy issues with popular app WeChat by reviewing the data collected by the app and sent to WeChat servers during the regular operation of its various features. We find that they collect more usage data than is disclosed in the WeChat privacy policy.
Police led mass iris scan collection in Qinghai, a region with a population that is 49.4% non-Han, including Tibetans and Hui Muslims. Iris scan collection is part of long-standing police intelligence gathering programs. Through this data collection, Qinghai’s police are effectively treating entire communities as populated by potential threats to social stability.
We identified a network of 885 websites and attributed these websites with high confidence as having been used by the United States (US) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for covert communication.
We find that mass DNA collection in Tibet is another mass DNA collection campaign conducted under the Xi Jinping administration (2012–present), along with the mass DNA collection campaign in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the police-led national program of male DNA collection.
On July 27, 2022, Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton spoke before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was invited to provide expert testimony on a hearing devoted to combatting threats to U.S. national security from the proliferation of foreign commercial spyware.
We consistently found that Bing censors politically sensitive Chinese names over time, that their censorship spans multiple Chinese political topics, consists of at least two languages—English and Chinese—and applies to different world regions, including China, the United States, and Canada.
