Asia Pacific
Since 2014, the Chinese government has escalated its repression against Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region in northwestern China. The entire region has been subjected to a comprehensive system of mass surveillance, mobility controls, arbitrary detention, forced labor, and forced sterilizations. China’s efforts extend also across borders as its authorities engage in a widespread campaign of transnational repression that targets individuals both on the basis of their ethnic identity and their activities.
Drawing on the lived experiences of 85 women human rights defenders originating from 24 countries of origin and residing in 23 host countries, we examine how gender and sexuality play a central role in digital transnational repression.
On November 14, 2024, The Citizen Lab’s Irene Poetranto will participate in the panel “What the World Can Learn from Indonesia’s Democracy” hosted by the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
This report performs the first public analysis of MMTLS, the main network protocol used by WeChat, an app with over one billion users. The report finds that MMTLS is a modified version of TLS, however some of the modifications have introduced cryptographic weaknesses.
Research FAQ for the full report “Should We Chat, Too? Security Analysis of WeChat’s MMTLS Encryption Protocol”
The Citizen Lab’s Emile Dirks will present at the upcoming APSA 2024 Annual Meeting & Exhibition as part of a panel discussing how autocrats and aspiring autocrats capture social institutions and stifle counter-mobilization. At the event, Dirks will present a working paper co-authored with Diana Fu, associate professor of political science at the University of […]
In response to a call for input issued by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, Emile Dirks, research associate at The Citizen Lab, prepared a written submission underlining the legal and human rights implications of the collection and usage of biometric recognition data by the People’s Republic of China.
In this report, we examine cloud-based pinyin keyboard apps from nine vendors (Baidu, Honor, Huawei, iFlyTek, OPPO, Samsung, Tencent, Vivo, and Xiaomi) for vulnerabilities in how the apps transmit user keystrokes. Our analysis found that eight of the nine apps identified contained vulnerabilities that could be exploited to completely reveal the contents of users’ keystrokes in transit. We estimate that up to one billion users could be vulnerable to having all of their keystrokes intercepted, constituting a tremendous risk to user security.
Emile Dirks, Research Associate at the Citizen Lab, prepared a written submission for the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) about the state of human rights in the country. The CECC was established by Congress in October 2000, with the legislative mandate to monitor human rights and the development of the rule of law in China, […]
As part of our ongoing project monitoring changes to Chinese search censorship, we tracked changes to censorship following Li Keqiang’s death across seven Internet platforms: Baidu, Baidu Zhidao, Bilibili, Microsoft Bing, Jingdong, Sogou, and Weibo. We found that some keyword combinations in search queries triggers hard censorship whereas others trigger soft censorship. Our results demonstrate China’s ongoing efforts to push state-sanctioned narratives concerning politically sensitive topics, impacting the integrity of the online information environment.
