How Telegram groups can be used by police to find protesters

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

First of all, I’m still processing the whole “Chinese spy balloon” saga, which, from start to finish, took over everyone’s brains for just about 72 hours and has been one of the weirdest recent events in US-China relations. There are still so many mysteries around it that I don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but I will link to some helpful analyses in the next section. For now, I just want to say: RIP The Balloon.

On a wholly different note, I’ve been preoccupied by the many Chinese individuals who remain in police custody after going into the streets in Beijing late last year to protest zero-covid policies. While action happened in many Chinese cities, it’s the Beijing police who have been consistently making new arrests, as recently as mid-January. According to a Twitter account that’s been following what’s happened with the protesters, over 20 people have been detained in Beijing since December 18, four of them formally charged with the crime of “picking quarrels.” As the Wall Street Journal has reported, many of those arrested have been young women.

For the younger generation in China, the movement last year was an introduction to participating in civil disobedience. But many of these young people lack the technical knowledge to protect themselves when organizing or participating in public events. As the Chinese government’s surveillance capability grows, activists are forced to become tech experts to avoid being monitored. It’s an evolving lesson that every new activist will have to learn.

To better understand what has happened over the past two months and what lies ahead, I reached out to Lü Pin, a feminist activist and scholar currently based in the US. As one of the most prominent voices in China’s current feminist movement, Lü is still involved in activist efforts inside China and the longtime cat-and-mouse game between protesters and police. Even though their work is peaceful and legal, she and her fellow activists often worry that their communications are being intercepted by the government. When we talked last week about the aftermath of the “White Paper Protests,” she explained how she thinks protesters were potentially identified through their communications, why many Chinese protesters continue to use Telegram, and the different methods China’s traditional police force and state security agents use to infiltrate group chats.

The following interview has been translated, lightly edited, and rearranged for clarity.

How did the Chinese police figure out the identity of protesters and arrest them over a month after it happened?

In the beginning, the police likely got access to a Telegram group. Later on, officers could have used facial recognition [to identify people in video footage]. Many people, when participating in the White Paper Protests, were filmed with their faces visible. It’s possible that the police are now working on identifying more faces in these videos.

Those who were arrested have no way of confirming this, but their friends [suspect that facial recognition was used] and spread the message. 

And, as you said, it was reported that the police did have information on some protesters’ involvement in a Telegram group. What exactly happened there?

When [these protesters in Beijing] decided to use a Telegram group, they didn’t realize they needed to protect the information on the event. Their Telegram group became very public in the end. Some of them even screenshotted it and posted it on their WeChat timelines. 

Even when they were on the streets in Liangma River [where the November 27 protest in Beijing took place], this group chat was still active. What could easily have happened was that when the police arrested them, they didn’t have time to delete the group chat from their phone. If that happened, nothing [about the group] would be secure anymore.

Could there be undercover police in the Telegram group?

It’s inevitable that there were government people in the Telegram group. When we were organizing the feminist movement inside China, there were always state security officials [in the group]. They would use fake identities to talk to organizers and say: I’m a student interested in feminism. I want to attend your event, join your WeChat group, and know when’s the next gathering. They joined countless WeChat groups to monitor the events. It’s not just limited to feminist activists. They are going to join every group chat about civil society groups, no matter if you are [advocating for] LGBTQ rights or environmental protection. 

What do they want to achieve by infiltrating these group chats?

Different Chinese ministries have different jobs. The people collecting information [undercover] are mostly from the Ministry of State Security [Editor’s note: this is the agency responsible for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence work]. It operates on a long-term basis, so it would be doing more information collection; it has no responsibility to call off an event.

But the purpose of the Ministry of Public Security [Editor’s note: this is the rank-and-file police force] is to stop our events immediately. It works on a more short-term basis. According to my experience, the technology know-how of the police is relatively [basic]. They mostly work with WeChat and don’t use any VPN. And they are also only responsible for one locality, so it’s easier to tell who they are. For example, if they work for the city of Guangzhuo, they will only care about what’s going to happen in Guangzhou. And people may realize who they are because of that.

I’m also seeing people question whether some Twitter accounts, like the one belonging to “Teacher Li,” were undercover police. Is there any merit to that thinking?

It used to be less complicated. Previously, the government could use censorship mechanisms to control [what people posted] within China, so they didn’t need to [establish phishing accounts on foreign platforms]. But one characteristic of the White Paper Revolution is that it leveraged foreign platforms more than ever before.

But my personal opinion is that the chance of a public [Twitter] account phishing information for the government is relatively small. The government operations don’t necessarily have intricate planning. When we talk about phishing, we are talking about setting up an account, accepting user submissions, monitoring your submissions remotely, and then monitoring your activities. It requires a lot of investment to operate a [public] account. It’s far less efficient than infiltrating a WeChat group or Telegram group to obtain information.

But I don’t think the anxiety is unwarranted. The government’s tools evolve rapidly. Every time the government has learned about our organizing or the information of our members, we try to analyze how it happened. It used to be that we could often find out why, but now we can hardly figure out how the police found us. It means their data investigation skills have modernized. So I think the suspicion [of phishing accounts’ existence] is understandable.

And there is a dilemma here: On one hand, we need to be alert. On the other hand, if we are consumed by fears, the Chinese government will have won. That’s the situation we are in today.

When did people start to use Telegram instead of WeChat?

I started around 2014 or 2015. In 2015, we organized some rescue operations [for five feminist activists detained by the state] through Telegram. Before that, people didn’t realize WeChat was not secure. [Editor’s note: WeChat messages are not end-to-end encrypted and have been used by the police for prosecution.] Afterwards, when people were looking for a secure messaging app, the first option was Telegram. At the time, it was both secure and accessible in China. Later, Telegram was blocked, but the habit [of using it] remained. But I don’t use Telegram now.

It does feel like Telegram has gained this reputation of “the protest app of choice” even though it’s not necessarily the most secure one. Why is that?

If you are just a small underground circle, there are a lot of software options you can use. But if you also want other people to join your group, then it has to be something people already know and use widely. That’s how Telegram became the choice. 

But in my opinion, if you are already getting out of the Great Firewall, you can use Signal, or you can use WhatsApp. But many Chinese people don’t know about WhatsApp, so they choose to stay on Telegram. It has a lot to do with the reputation of Telegram. There’s a user stickiness issue with any software you use. Every time you migrate to new software, you will lose a great number of users. That’s a serious problem.

So what apps are you using now to communicate with protesters in China?

The app we use now? That’s a secret [laughs]. The reason why Telegram was monitored and blocked in the first place was because there was lots of media reporting on Telegram use back in 2015.

What do you think about the security protocols taken by Telegram and other communication apps? Let me know at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. The balloon fiasco caused US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his meeting with President Xi Jinping of China, which was originally planned for this week. (CNN)

• While the specific goals of the balloon’s trip are unclear, an expert said the termination mechanism likely failed to function. (Ars Technica)
• Since the balloon was shot down over the weekend, the US Coast Guard has been searching for debris in the Atlantic, which US officials hope to use to reconstruct Chinese intelligence-gathering methods. (Reuters $)
• The balloon itself didn’t necessarily pose many risks, but the way the situation escalated makes clear that military officials in the two countries do not currently have good communication. (New York Times $) 

2. TikTok finally opened a transparency center in LA, three years after it first announced it’d build new sites where people could examine how the app conducts moderation. A Forbes journalist who was allowed to tour the center wasn’t impressed. (Forbes)

3. Baidu, China’s leading search engine and AI company, is planning to release its own version of ChatGPT in March. (Bloomberg $)

4. The past three months should have been the busiest season for Foxconn’s iPhone assembly factory in China. Instead, it was disrupted by mass covid-19 infections and intense labor protests. (Rest of World)

5. A new decentralized social media platform called Damus had its five minutes (actually, two days) of fame in China before Apple swiftly removed it from China’s App Store for violating domestic cybersecurity laws. (South China Morning Post $)

6. Taiwan decided to shut down all nuclear power plants by 2025. But its renewable-energy industry is not ready to fill in the gap, and now new fossil-fuel plants are being built to secure the energy supply. (HuffPost)

7. The US Department of Justice suspects that executives of the San Diego–based self-driving-truck company TuSimple have improperly transferred technology to China, anonymous sources said. (Wall Street Journal $)

Lost in translation

Renting smartphones is becoming a popular alternative to purchasing them in China, according to the Chinese publication Shenran Caijing. With 19 billion RMB ($2.79 billion) spent on smartphone rentals in 2021, it is a niche but growing market in the country. Many people opt for rentals to be able to brag about having the latest model, or as a temporary solution when, for example, their phone breaks down and the new iPhone doesn’t come out for a few months. 

But this isn’t exactly saving people cash. While renting a phone costs only one or two bucks a day, the fees build up over time, and many platforms require leases to be at least six months long. In the end, it may not be as cost-effective as buying a phone outright. 

The high costs and lack of regulation have led some individuals to exploit the system. Some people use it as a form of cash loan: they rent a high-end phone, immediately sell it for cash, and slowly pay back the rental and buyout fees. There are also cases of scams where people use someone else’s identity to rent a phone, only to disappear once they obtain the device.

One more thing

Born in Wuhan, I grew up eating freshwater fish like Prussian carp. They taste divine, but the popular kinds often have more small bones than saltwater fish, which can make the eating experience laborious and annoying. Last week, a team of Chinese hydrobiologists based in Wuhan (duh) announced that they had used CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology to create a Prussian carp mutant that is free of the small bones. Not gonna lie, this is true innovation to me.