China starts smartphone inspections to boost 'anti-espionage efforts', raising fears among expatriates and foreign business people about arbitrary enforcement
- China implemented new regulations on Monday under its toughened counterespionage law, which enables authorities to inspect smartphones, personal computers and other electronic devices, raising fears among expatriates and foreign businesspeople about possible arbitrary enforcement.
- A Japanese travel agency official said the new regulations could further prevent tourists from coming to China. Some Japanese companies have told their employees not to bring smartphones from Japan when they make business trips to the neighboring country, according to officials from the companies.
The new rules, which came into effect one year after the revised anti-espionage law expanded the definition of espionage activities, empower Chinese national security authorities to inspect data, including emails, pictures, and videos stored on electronic devices.
Such inspections can be conducted without warrants in emergencies. If officers are unable to examine electronic devices on-site, they are authorized to have those items brought to designated places, according to the regulations.
It remains unclear what qualifies as emergencies under the new rules. Foreign individuals and businesses are now expected to face increased surveillance by Chinese authorities as a result of these regulations.
A 33-year-old British teacher told Kyodo News at a Beijing airport Monday that she refrains from using smartphones for communications. A Japanese man in his 40s who visited the Chinese capital for a business trip said he will "try to avoid attracting attention" from security authorities in the country.
In June, China's State Security Ministry said the new regulations will target "individuals and organizations related to spy groups," and ordinary passengers will not have their smartphones inspected at airports. However, a diplomatic source in Beijing noted that authorities' explanations have not sufficiently clarified what qualifies as spying activities.
Last week, Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council upgraded its travel warning for mainland China, advising against unnecessary trips due to Beijing's recent tightening of regulations aimed at safeguarding national security.
In May, China implemented a revised law on safeguarding state secrets, which includes measures to enhance the management of secrets at military facilities.
Another reason to not go to China
At some point I'm going to have to because the woman I love is from there. Probably I will need to get a burner phone for the occasion. It does seem like a beautiful country full of interesting culture. Shame about the government though.
Stick close to her and trusted family and friends. Though cash must be accepted legally , its hardly used. Getting a simcard requires registering with your passport now. If you're okay with that, a cheap burner phone with wechat for payments and comms and standard phone number yo get hold of your family back home. Needless to say you wont be anonymous so my attitude when visiting there was kind of just accept that, and don't do/say anything stupid. i.e assimilate temporarily with that way of life. All of these concerns are only a small part of life and of course a billion or so people are living with it. You are totally right that the place is full of interesting and amazing history, culture, food and really friendly and hospitable people despite the bs they have to put up with.
Yeah I would definitely just accept that I don't get to have privacy from government surveillance. That's why I'd not want to bring any of my personal electronics with me. It may be particularly challenging since I know two of the places my GF really wants to travel to are Tibet and Xinjiang (apparently both are popular tourist destinations), in both of which I understand Western tourists are under a lot of extra scrutiny because they don't want more documentary crews and journalists getting in and sneaking some footage of the treatment of minorities. I have to be ready to just swallow my pride and appreciate it for what it is.
I haven't travelled to either province mainly on principle - I don't think I could stomach it - so I cant speak on that. Though, many other locations if not the whole country, have similar history, and treatment of local minorities, culture and language.
It really is a beautiful country with a bunch of really beautiful landscapes, but unfortunately due to their government I wouldn't dare go to it.
Kinda like Florida, beautiful state with a bunch of beautiful beaches and fantastic weather but due to political reasons I wouldn't dare visit.
Edit: Spleling
The countryside is beautiful and the rich parts are nice but most of the country is a slum and the vast majority of the people there live in poverty. Check out China Insider on YouTube.
Yeah, luckily my gf's family is relatively wealthy by Chinese standards. I believe her mother is an engineer for a weapons manufacturer, and my gf herself used to teach civil engineering at a university
Make sure you're out before Canada gets into another dispute with China and they resort to hostage diplomacy again.
Yeah, good point. Luckily my name isn't Michael which improves my odds somewhat
You don't actually have to. Trust me I've been through this.
I guess, but I would like to. Especially because her culture is really important to her
Kinda the same reason it has always been.
Bringing your real phone instead of a burner phone into the PRC is just asking for your shit to get stolen. I have never brought my real phone into the PRC.
I wonder why, knowing this, one would go to China in the first place.
I wanted to see the great wall while I was studying in Asia.
Fair enough, I mean the history is fascinating, some years ago I might have gone, but nowadays....
Yeah, definitely, the intensifying cold war makes me wonder if I'll ever go back again. Doesn't feel like tourists will really be allowed back in, in my lifetime, once things start getting really bad.
Love to live in a country where my data is always secure and my government would never try to harvest my data in bulk. Liberty! Whiskey! Sexy! USA! USA!
Ah yes, my country also has serious problems and therefore it is not only relevant but equivalent.
Nonsense. The only problem my country has is the problem created by the evil foreigners who threaten my liberty and security from the other side of the border. We need to be protected from those evil outsiders. Therefore, I will endorse and participate in an even more invasive degree of surveillance and a more draconian degree of policing.
That's the only way to keep the foreign bodies from infecting me and taking over. And the idea of the foreigners having any amount of power over me is significantly more frightening than the prospect of a domestic administration having unlimited authority to protect me.
Where's the /s?
I'm not kidding, I can't tell if you're being sincere or sarcastic. XD
Tbh, I'm loving it. I know Poe's Law and all that, but I think they're just sarcastic enough I can tell, but other people with those sincere beliefs can also believe them and get caught in the trap lol.
Poe's Law and its corrolaries are the bane of my existence. XD
It's hard to laugh at absurdity when a not-insignificant percentage of the population genuinely believes it to be truth.
This shit belongs in your diary dude.
I legitimately can't tell if this is satire or not. I think you're confusing the USA with a European country that actually has data privacy and consumer protection laws.
Europe has an enormous surveillance state, increasingly modeled (and managed) by Israeli surveillance systems used in Palestine.
Germany, France, the UK, and Spain already have some of the most advanced facial recognition imagine in the world deployed in their surveillance networks.
And the EU just expanded their legal use
Maybe you're safer from an American tech company. But not from the local police.
every day we get closer and closer to ctOS in Watch Dogs becoming a reality
The worst that my country wants to do with my data is attempt to sell me shit I don't want. (OK yeah we have one or two taboos: antisemitism and actual terrorism, but that's about it.)
In some other countries, drawing parallels with certain emperors and certain A.A.Milne characters could cost me my freedom and possibly my life. Ain't nothing stopping me standing outside #10 and yelling Rishi is a wanker!
Facial recognition technology and the growing power of artificial intelligence
Of course. Always in other countries. Never in mine.
Even as far back as 2010 the corpo I worked for had an official travel protocol that dictated backing up Blackberries, factory resetting them, crossing the border, then restoring them from the cloud. That was for crossing any border.
I'm not saying that that's an unreasonable policy for companies to have, but I will bet that only a very small portion of individuals normally do that for personal smartphones.
Like even crossing from France to Monaco or Germany or from the usa to Canada?
I think it was a general "when you leave Canada" policy.
I've personally never done the trip to China for a lot of reasons (you know you are living your best life when a postdoc explains that you should never under any circumstances go to China because of what you have said) but do a lot of foreign travel for work:
No company should let any employee bring corporate electronics on international travel. Have burner phones and laptops that are set up to do incredibly minimal work locally (basically just have the slides... maybe) and to remote in. And work with your IT department to "randomly lock" them if a wrong password is detected in an airport or government facility.
It doesn't matter if it is the UK asking if we want the left or right hand this time or the CCP: It is just an unnecessary risk that is easily avoided.
And then inform the traveler of whether they want to bring their personal devices or not.
This is the approach I use with laptops domestically, and I think that there's something to be said for it. Like, the laptop itself doesn't store important information. A remote server does. The laptop is just a thin client. If the laptop gets lost or stolen -- which I've had happen -- I revoke the credentials. No important information is lost, and no important information is exposed.
Whole-disk laptop encryption has improved things too from an exposure standpoint (albeit not a loss standpoint), though I don't use it myself (don't want to spend any battery life on it). I assume that smartphones have some form of reasonably-secure storage hardware, but I don't know if it involves encryption.
What I found irritating -- and this is years back now -- was an employer who didn't care if I took a laptop in or out or what information I stored on it (as long as it was a work system), but who refused to provide remote access to the network, so I couldn't just keep the important information on the work network. I mean, I get if they want to have some sort of isolated DMZ and require an externally-accessible server to live there, not provide VPN access in to the general network, but not having the ability to have remote network access to work systems at all is just incredibly obnoxious.
I think that some of it is that Windows is not phenomenal to use remotely. Yeah, there are solutions, but they aren't great if you're on a high-latency, low-reliability, or low-bandwidth link. I try to use console Linux for as much of my stuff as possible. That whole ecosystem was designed around thin-client, remote use.
Oh yeah. I DEFINITELY have some horror stories over needing to access GUI apps remotely (my favorite involved a secure tunnel to one facility to then tunnel back to a machine that was literally three doors down from my office...)
But stuff like the web interfaces to ms/google office make the vast majority of this trivial. Since SSH always worked in Windows via (god awful) putty. And increasingly other applications are understanding they need to support server/client setups so you are just connecting over a tunnel rather than using a remote desktop protocol.
I mean, Windows can do the thin client side fine. I'd personally somewhat-prefer to use Linux for that, but that's not really my sticking point. I'm normally keeping my software, data, stuff like that on the server, and just running two remotely-connected terminals and a web browser on my client. Virtually all the software can run on the server. My problem is Windows on the server side; like, it's just not reasonable to use a Windows machine remotely via a command-line for anything other than some very basic administrative tasks, and using a GUI remotely once latency goes up or bandwidth down is just painful.
Unfortunately, there's this baseline understanding of liberal western democracies providing security while eastern fascist dictatorships of the proletariat are looking for people to punish arbitrarily. The tolerance for British mass surveillance (some of the worst in the world) is sky high, simply because they're doing it the white way.
The CCP are actively engaging in genocide (remember the Uyghurs? Probably shouldn't if you don't want to piss off the CCP) and have a long history of "reeducation" camps.
While I have very serious problems with how the majority of western nations handle immigration and human rights violations, that is more along the lines of "oh, please stop isreal. By the way, here are all those bombs you asked for. Don't use them all on one mosque!" or actively turning people back to be executed in the horror they are running from (although, the US is doing a great job of having some stuff that looks a lot like concentration camps on the Southern border...).
But it is still night and day in terms of horror. The day is pretty shitty but the night... holy fuck.
But also? That doesn't change anything. It is a nation's responsibility to engage in basic espionage if only to protect its people's interests. And governments all have the power to basically shit on a visitor's human rights so long as they can keep the embassies from finding out. So why take any risks you don't need to?
It always gets me to see how Americans treated Afghanistan for 23 years, only to find religion when they see China doing the same Radical Islamic Extremism crack downs the Ted Cruz masterbates to in the middle of the night.
Literally right on the other side of the border! Practically the same dudes. And we outright applauded China for helping us with the genocide under Bush, when we were applauding Russia for the same shit in Chechnya no less.
But now we're out of there, and in between kicking off massive famines and looting their Treasury, we've decided to care about Uyghurs now.
More black and white.
It's not called The China Man's Burden, ffs. Who do they even think they are?
Anyway, back to explaining to Houthis why we don't have health care by blowing up another elementary school in Yemen.
That's just so impractical. The point of business travel is to get something done. For that you need your devices, and access to relevant data and systems.
Setting up a clean device for every trip where you cross a controlled border is such a hassle it wouldn't really pass in any company. Well with the exception of defense companies, I could understand them being paranoid enough.
Plenty of companies are, rightfully, adopting security models where even domestic workers never have a copy of anything sensitive on a laptop (sometimes even desktop) and rely on corporate servers to do work. Yes, it really fucking sucks during an outage but it avoids the never ending problem of people leaving their laptop at a starbucks. There is absolutely zero reason to not do that on foreign travel.
Also: The point of business travel is to have meetings or collaborations that can't be done remotely. For the former, you basically just need that set of slides and the ability to fetch a limited subset of other data. For the latter? You are by necessity taking corporate secrets and having a secure connection back home is a bare minimum.
And if your IT department have problems reprovisioning laptops to contain basically a VPN client and a web browser? Then you have even bigger problems. In a semi-competent world, you just reimage a laptop in a closet to the minimum machine that you give to a new hire and then you flag the user's account for heightened security in whatever VPN setup you have. Because it is REALLY easy to detect if something is connecting from where it shouldn't be (e.g. Fred is in Canada but suddenly is trying to connect from Australia) or is anywhere near a government facility or airport (... no comment).
As an aside, I'll point out that I have worked with various government and government adjacent orgs over my years. Their security is complete dogshit next to a decent sized company. Because they are just protecting government secrets and focused on covering their asses. A company is protecting potentially billions of dollars and everyone's livelihood. Which makes for an environment where you aren't ten years behind the state of the art because nobody wants to risk jail time (which they would not get if they are acting in good faith...) over approving something as crazy as a VPN.
Hate to tell you, this is now the norm. Right now, today, thousands of corporate travelers!
Company creates a travel laptop, perhaps even just a completely empty kiosk laptop. Corporate traveler downloads critical data to the laptop in an enclave (like a presentation). They have a two-factor token with them. If they need to get back to the corporate network for whatever reason, they use remote desktop software and no data is stored on the local device. They're given policies telling them that if the computer is out of their possession, or view at any time, that the device is not to be used whatsoever afterwards. Contact security and let them deal with it.
When the traveler comes back to the mothership, laptop is checked into IT, it's completely wiped.
Does remote desktop software suck? Yeah. It's better than the alternative though
Anybody surprised by this hasn't passed basic world history yet..
Where do you think Americans learn about non-European countries in World History? History started with the founding of England and ended with WW2. I think we dropped a nuclear bomb on some East Asian country where all the anime comes from. But other than that, who gives a shit about Asia?
For the CCP arbitrary enforcement is less a risk and more a guarantee.
Authoritarian China acting like authoritarian China. What a surprise
GrapheneOS and duress PIN.
So you are okay with not getting your phone back from authorities...
It's a given if you go to any kind of dictatorship like this one.
In some cases that's better than getting your data stolen by the authorities. Especially in a communist dictatorship like China.
That's better in all cases. But the original comment sounded like "look how I can go to this authoritarian county, encounter police who would ask me for my phone, and remain free and safe afterwards". That would not be a good idea.
That's exactly what I was thinking while I read this
The CCP is growing more paranoid.
Anyone voluntarilly visiting China even with all these is beyond me.
Becoming like North Korea day by day
So same with the people voluntarily visiting the USA right? Because the same laws already exist there.
At some point, its just tiring to see folks slam their fists in their palms and declare whole-heartedly "I will NEVER visit China for ANY REASON!" when half our country is broke as shit and our planes occasionally just have the doors fall off mid-flight.
As if you were booking a vacation to Macau ten minutes ago, but now you've suddenly changed your mind. Come the fuck on, dude.
I'm convinced Americans have the same level of propagandist ignorance as North Koreans. And they also have no idea. Only a few can see the reality. And they try to escape.
Given the budgets they have to work with, I imagine Americans have it much worse off. An hour on Facebook deluges you with more advertisement than any given NKer probably sees in a weak.
Reason 91627 why you shouldn't go to this authoritarian shithole
Posting how much I hate authoritarian surveillance states on all my favorite NSA-infested social media accounts.
I take the same precautions crossing a Chinese border as I do crossing a US one.
That bad, huh?
counterespionage law already pushed a lot business and investment away from China.
Not to mention a lot of stabbing targeting foreigners by nationalist https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-25/japanese-mother-child-attacked-with-knife-in-city-near-shanghai
I don't understand who be interested going to China anymore
So like the TSA?
I don't understand people who downvote you. TSA does indeed the same
Their Authoritarian Surveillance State
Our Robust National Security System
But the US is not an authoritarian shithole (it's not a perfect democracy either, but it can't be compared to the Chinese dictatorship in any way), which develops its domestic industries on industrial espionage and stolen intellectual property. Unlike... China. The TSA doesn't get orders from the US government to steal trade secrets and other critical information from business people, in order to boost US industries.
I mean SCOTUS just made a ruling getting ready to make trump king of the US...
I wouldn't put the US on such a pedestal
Guess who nominated these SCOTUS judges at the end of his presidency?
Um... its called checks and balances, sweetie.
The King selects the priests and the High Priest coronates the wealthiest member of the royal court to be the next king. We live in the fairest, freest, and most godly country in the world, because we adhere to the ancient edicts of our Holy Forefathers. And if you don't like that, you've probably been brainwashed by the unholy barbaric savages from across the ocean.
ha good one. snowden would love a word with you on that one.
You can't compare that to China by any means. I know that American democracy is incredibly flawed (e.g. 2-party system, electoral college, etc.), but China is a straight-up dictatorship, and downplaying it doesn't fix any of the issues that exist in the US.
is this the whataboutism i hear about? can a country with gerrymandering and the electoral college (where most of the population hates its leaders regardless of party affiliation) be considered anything other than a dictatorship?
where people get kicked out of hospitals for not being able to afford it, teenagers are allowed (and sometimes coerced by circumstances) to work gruesome jobs and the schools teach religious slop as part of the law?
the OP article talks about something the US has been doing to the entire planet since the early 2000s with the patriot act, my dude...
Fun fact. If you come to Australia the border force can basically do the same thing. Take a burner with you when you travel, it’s not worth the hassle at the airport. Bonus points, if you lose your phone or get it stolen it won’t hurt as much as if it happened to your main device.
Yeah, but Australia isn't going to detain you for posting a picture of Winnie the Poo on your social media.
Nah, but if you’re planning a climate protest or are about to whistleblow some warcrimes/corruption you’re absolutely fucked.
Doesn't matter when occurred in the past. You can be target if you have posted or done something that CCP didn't approve of. What's happening in Hong Kong with the "national security law".
Seems fair to me, tbh. I wouldn't go there without diplomatic immunity or a burner anyways.
The people's surveillance state
There's not going to be anything 'arbitrary' about those inspections... In a bad way.
I can't breathe from all the smokescreen.
Fake news skip the part where every state does this lol
You want every state to be able to be able to confiscate your devices?
Every country already does this, is the point... Nothing to do with what I or you want
This is the law.
I think I'm the comission of a crime possibly, sure. I'm unaware of other countries just willy-nilly snatching devices "just because". I haven't looked at the data recently though, you have that?
They can do it at the border or within 100 miles of it
Also, depending on how you handle your opsec with the phone, they can do it during a detention too if they trick you into opening it via pass code or force you to open with your ugly face or finger.
Pretty sure that's just a US thing (including declaring that international airports are "borders"). Other countries will have other laws.
Still best to bring a burner instead of your real device if you're passing through international customs, though, even if both countries involved claim to be respectable Western democracies. Just in case.
My understanding is that if you going through customs they can do it in any jurisdiction... but you are right US is extra degenerate in its application of this law because it covers 80% of population lol since we all live 100 miles from border or airport
clever
Pretty much any country can search you at their borders if you're seeking to cross in, yes (there may be some special cases—I'm not sure that an EU citizen crossing from one EU country to another is normally subject to search), but most countries only do that at border checkpoints, or if you're caught crossing illegally. "More than an hour's drive away from the border is still the border" is not the law in most places, as far as I know.
First, obviously this is not good. Secondly, if anyone is complaining about this from the USA, you don't get to. CBP has the right to inspect your electronics with no questions asked by you. They have a right to make a copy of all data. They have a right to seize your electronics and decrypt them if you fail to provide the encryption pin. They have the right to compel you to unlock and decrypt your devices if it uses fingerprint or facial unlock. They have the right to revoke your residency status if you aren't a citizen.
CBP has authority to do this at any sea, land, or air crossing. It also has the authority to do this within 100 miles of any border. That means about 70% of all Americans live their day to day lives within the scope of the exact same legislation. And yes it is used, all the time. If you think it isn't, you're just ignorant.
Not one single comment on this post has said anything about how America does not have this issue, or America at all for that matter. In fact, the only comments that are about a country other than china (you know... the country the fucking article is about) mentions how Australia's border/customs do the same thing.
Do you realize we are allowed to discuss and criticize things around the world whether or not America is guilty of something similar right? Is it really necessary to immediately without any prompting regurgitate an 'AMERICA DOES IT TOO!!!' comment on any article with negative sentiment regarding a non-American power?
Yes it is very important to say America does it too. Because most Americans have no idea.
This post is about China's policies not whataboutism. It's one thing if someone is actually saying the bs you prefaced with, but nobody said that shit. Nobody needs you to run around on every post and say B-B-BUT AMERICA TOOOO!!!!!!! when nobody said shit about it
Because Americans like you are too stupid to realize a propagandist article.
It becomes tiresome to read "Foreign Country is doing the EVIL THING! Rally around the burn pit and lets talk about how intrinsically bad their are!" when they learned this shit by watching every other western country do it first. Just feels like another edition of American Exceptionalism and hysterical far-right xenophobia.
A century ago the eunuchs run China. The secretary censors run China now, not the technocrats from the previous generation. Secrets and intrigue instead of information and openess.
Probably wise for Beijing to do that
“Raising fears”
Honestly, let’s just abandon journalism to AI since there's obviously no point to having humans doing it.
I don't think the AI would be able to effectively create new fears to report on.
They wouldn't be as believable without that human element.
Edit: wouldn't not would.