China surveillance: How a prototype police dashboard tracks foreign journalists and residents

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Beijing: It goes with the territory that foreign journalists in China routinely question how closely the government monitors their activities.<br>Reporters swap stories of having travelled to regional or “sensitive” areas only to be met by police on arrival, sometimes even before checking into their hotel – something I experienced first hand when on assignment near the China-Russia border last year.<br>The Chinese security state hoovers up vast amounts of data, including via some 700 million CCTV cameras installed across the country, checkpoints at train stations, prolific use of facial recognition software, and requirements that hotels register foreigners with police.<br>Less clear is how sophisticated Chinese authorities are at pulling this data together to comprehensively track movements and surveil targets.<br>But a German cybersecurity journalist’s recent discovery of a prototype policing dashboard has helped piece together a picture of how it could work – and may already be working in some form in parts of China.

A screenshot of the demonstration model Chinese policing database uncovered by German journalist Marc Hofer. It shows the distribution of foreign residents across Zhangjiakou, in Hebei province, which neighbours Beijing.NetAskari“Overall, I think this is the first time we have really seen the access and seen how it could work as a coherent system, even if this is just a demo of a test system,” Marc Hofer says in an interview after publishing his findings on his NetAskari substack blog last month.

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Hofer unearthed the platform, which had been left unsecured on the open web, while poking around in the back end of sites affiliated with China’s Ministry of Public Security.<br>The dashboard was still in test mode but appeared to have been developed as a foreigner-tracking tool for the Public Security Bureau in Zhangjiakou, a city in Hebei province that hosted parts of the 2022 Winter Olympics.<br>It had a blue log-in page featuring the insignia of the Gong’an (Chinese police) and was titled “Dynamic Control Platform for Overseas Personnel”.

The database had the details of about 350 foreign journalists who were based in Beijing in 2021, including four Australian reporters working for international news outlets. NetAskariHofer says he was able to connect to the dashboard and download some of the data. The dashboard gave an overview of the number of foreigners registered in the Zhangjiakou prefecture and their nationalities, and broadly pinned their locations at a district level on a map of the area.<br>But, more significantly, it had been pre-filled with several datasets with what appeared to be profiles of hundreds of real people.<br>This included profiles on the approximately 350 journalists based in Beijing in 2021, seemingly so they could be tracked if they crossed into Zhangjiakou for work or even visited as tourists.

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Each profile contained a headshot of the reporter, and listed their news agency, their passport details, mobile phone numbers and date of birth. Hofer’s own profile was among the files, though he has since left Beijing and is now based in Europe.<br>Recorded in the database were four Australian reporters working for international news outlets in Beijing at the time, including the BBC and Bloomberg. At the time, there were no Australian-owned media companies operating in China following a fallout in bilateral relations and the arrest of Chinese-Australian TV anchor Cheng Lei.

A profile of a foreigner captured in a Chinese policing “test” database, tracking their movements, including hotel information and hospital visits.NetAskariA few journalists were listed as “trackable” in the system, giving authorities access to more granular data.<br>One of them was the London Telegraph’s former China correspondent, Sophia Yan. Using Hofer’s information, she wrote a story for the paper revealing how the database contained CCTV records of her movements across China. She was recorded on 78 occasions at one particular intersection, as well as at supermarkets and subway stations.<br>Another “trackable” American journalist was recorded at Zhangjiakou snow fields, his image captured via a ski pass system as he was wearing his snow gear.<br>Overall, the system appeared to have more comprehensive profiles on foreign residents rather than on journalists in Zhangjiakou, including international students in the region, Hofer says.

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The most detailed profiles gave authorities access to information such as the number of hospital visits they had made, which hotels they were staying at, frequently visited places, and even petrol purchases – possibly reflecting authorities’ anxieties about self-immolating protesters in Tibet and other rural...