zlacker

Before I went to China I bought a burner phone, mainly to install WeChat (which is also a kind of malware and also "required" in China). Basic Android phones are not too expensive these days - I wonder if it will become commonplace to own several and physically separate your life across them?

FWIW I got a Huawei phone (Honor 10 Lite) for under 200 EUR, but much cheaper phones than that are available.

Edit: To be clear this is not to avoid Chinese surveillance. That's unavoidable whatever you do because China is a police state. It's to separate out that surveillance from my contacts and my regular life at home. (I also think it's at least arguable that the Chinese government has a duty to look closely at what foreigners are up to. It's not an argument that I agree with myself very much because it infringes freedom while also making the wrong trade-offs, but given we live in a world of nation states it follows logically from that.)

>>rwmj+(OP)
I bought a dual sim Mi phone for this purpose as well. It worked out really well. At the border crossing from Hong Kong into mainland china, they didn't seem interested in my devices fortunately. Still will wipe my phone before I use it again, however.

>>rwmj+(OP)
Kind of ironic you bought a burner phone to avoid Chinese surveillance then turn around and buy a Huawei phone

>>mfatic+j2
But he bought that phone as a burner phone. So then it doesn't matter that it is Huawei right? Apart from supporting them.

>>mfatic+j2
What difference does it make? Even if the Huawei phone is doing surveillance on its own (and no one credible has ever come up with evidence that this is the case, even though it would be easy to discover), it's got WeChat on it which we know scans every possible Android location and network API all the time and is in constant encrypted communication with the mothership.

>>mfatic+j2
I read that as the Huawei phone being the burner phone, which is the point.

>>ericye+f3
Maybe he can save a little time at the border by buying the phone that already reports back to the Communist Party, avoiding the hassle of having the border agents install the spyware while you wait.

>>rwmj+(OP)
Next time when you buy a burner phone, please try to be more conscious.

Huawei is likely one of the companies that contributed to this very Xinjiang endeavour [0].

Even if it's not directly related, by buying a Huawei phone, you are voting with your money to support a company that's been hurting innovation with IP theft through the years [1].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/05/25/huawei-ac...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-litte...

>>cltsan+5D
> Huawei is likely one of the companies that contributed to this very Xinjiang endeavour

The article you cite just says that they supplied networking equipment, how is that different than, for example, U.S. conecetration camps using Dell laptops? Would you also blame Dell?

I swear whenever China/Huawei is mentioned on HN, the comments transform into a huge propaganda machine.

>>curiou+vG
That's a rather unfair comparison, and softens the harsh reality of Huawei's actions. Dell didn't sell the laptops with the intent of them being used for that purpose. China says jump and Huawei jumps to build whatever state-sponsored surveillance tooling they need. That's not how it works with Dell, Cisco, Juniper, etc. Remember the stories about network devices being intercepted via parcel services?

I'd bet I can make you never buy another IBM product. :)

>>curiou+vG
You may have missed this paragraph from the article:

> Huawei said they would "provide industry-leading products and services... to build a safer and smarter society with the public security department of the autonomous region." Three months later, the company launched the Huawei Urumqi DevCloud to "promote the development of the software information industry in the district and all of Urumqi."

If that's not enough, please read this another article also from forbes [0].

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/04/25/huawei-xi...

>>aejnsn+oH
I'll offer you good odds that Dell, Cisco, Juniper et al happily sell equipment to companies and agencies they know are likely to be used to break security systems and harass undocumented migrants.

>>rwmj+(OP)
> Edit: To be clear this is not to avoid Chinese surveillance. That's unavoidable whatever you do because China is a police state. It's to separate out that surveillance from my contacts and my regular life at home.

Not sure what's wrong with avoiding Chinese surveillance. And why you think having a burner phone to separate US and Chinese life is not an act to avoid surveillance.

>>curiou+vG
Not sure if it makes it right but people have cited IBM during WW2. It's odd that one complains about propaganda while parroting propaganda (U.S. concentration camps) but that's 2019 for you.

>>rwmj+(OP)
> China is a police state

May be good to make the distinction between the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region† in the very north-west of China and the rest of China itself. The surveillance, monitoring, detention, "education", and de-radicalisation that are happening in Xinxiang are not to my knowledge representative of the rest of China. It is, of course, very troublesome that this illiberal dragnet exists anywhere in China. We would do well to remember that the crackdown (on the face of it) is a heavy-handed response to multiple Uyghur Muslim terrorist attacks‡ over decades that have claimed the lives of many and injured many more.

While an argument could be made that if any part of China is a police state then all of it is the same could have been said of, for instance, the United Kingdom at the height of the Troubles. At the time the UK deployed watch towers, mass stop and search checkpoints, and harsh anti-terrorism laws that encroached on everyone's freedoms. This was in Northern Ireland but the rest of the UK was relatively unaffected. And nobody at the time that I'm aware of called the UK a police state. The measures were seen as a clumsy response to localised terrorism.

What I'm saying is: yes we know that China is authoritarian, yes we know that it is totalitarian (bar Hong Kong and even that is crumbling…), yes we know China employs a (some would say draconian) social credit scoring system – but it might even still be a stretch to label China in its entirety as a police state when the measures being discussed (installing surveillance apps on phones at security crossings) are localised to one region of ~25 million people out of a country of ~1.4 billion. I'd like to think that if the whole of China was treated the same way there would be an uprising. For the record the ethnic composition of Xinjiang is: 45.84% Uyghur, 40.48% Han, 6.50% Kazakh, 4.51% Hui, 2.67% Other.

Calling WeChat "a kind of malware", what do you mean by this? I would see a miniscule difference between WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or whatever and WeChat – none of these corps, be they Tencent or Facebook or whoever are cuddly and friendly, they're all out to extract as much revenue and profit from the eyeballs they engage as humanly possible. If you think WeChat is a kind of malware I expect you think the same about WhatsApp and FB Messenger. If you don't, why don't you? Is WeChat actually required in China? I can't find any article to corroborate this claim. Or are you just saying that it's extremely inconvenient to get by without it. One could say the same about Google or Facebook services in the West.

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang

‡ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China

>>igravi+SO
What definition of "police state" are you using? How do all the things you acknowledge in your third paragraph not make China a police state?

It's effectively totalitarian, special economic zones aside. We've seen what happens if they try to stir the pot politically. Their relative "freedom" is exercised with a guillotine permanently above their heads and no legal rights.

Everyone is surveilled across every arena of life.

And if you really think people only disappear in Xinjiang, look at the history (and continuing present) of human rights or democracy activists. [0]

[0] https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/05/30/human-rights-activism-po...

>>hartat+zL
It makes sense to me. Here's why: In China, surveillance is so pervasive that attempts to avoid it are typically a waste of time and may even arouse suspicion. Seperating US and Chinese life does not prevent surveillance, but it does limit the amount of intelligence gathered.

>>elefan+eS
I think a state can be all the things I said that China is and still not be a police state. All the online articles referencing China being a police state that I can find talk about the extreme measures in that one "autonomous" region of Xinxiang specifically. Do an internet search for yourself and see. Can't freedoms in China be pretty terrible in many respects without it being equated with the worst regimes ever?

>>eladri+D1
even if you wipe your phone you can still have a compromised baseband.

>>aejnsn+oH
> China says jump and Huawei jumps to build whatever state-sponsored surveillance tooling they need

We'll see your Huawei and raise you AT&T

"The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.” It is a collaboration that dates back decades [...] The NSA exploits these relationships [..] commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies."

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...

>>igravi+SO
<<--Calling WeChat "a kind of malware", what do you mean by this? I would see a miniscule difference between WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or whatever.-->>

WeChat doesn't have end-to-end encryption, while other apps have them. So the difference is not minuscule. Any communication on Wechat is interceptible by Chinese govt agencies. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/07/wechat-chinese...

Wechat doesn't fit the definition of a "malware", but it is a weapon that Chinese govt uses to monitor it's citizens.

<<--Is WeChat actually required in China? I can't find any article to corroborate this claim. Or are you just saying that it's extremely inconvenient to get by without it. One could say the same about Google or Facebook services in the West.-->>

Read this https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/opinion/learning-to-survi...

>>kjafta+Fb1
Could you elaborate a bit on this please? I have never heard of such a phenomena which intrigues me quite a bit!

>>manjan+CC1
I suspect OP is thinking where a phone may be taken out of your hands/sight and had paranoid things physically done to it - as in the article.

>>helloi+Tu1
> WeChat doesn't have end-to-end encryption, while other apps have them

So by that reckoning any program supporting smtp is a "kind of malware"? Or http?

> Is WeChat actually required in China

Not for a typical westerner visiting Beijing, Shanghai etc. Most places will take cash or international credit cards. For immigrants, sure.

Xinjiang may well be different, but it's not on the typical western tourist/business track.

>>manjan+CC1
All phones have a 'baseband' firmware which controls the actual radio hardware - it's a binary blob installed by the manufacturer and generally not available to the user to tinker with, although as expected there have been many projects to reverse-engineer them. The firmware exists 'beneath' the OS and all user settings, so in theory, if it's compromised (and there have been PoCs), anything that happens in the baseband would survive a wipe and reinstall of the OS. Basically it means putting malware in a place that the user cannot delete it from.

Malware in the baseband firmware could theoretically intercept or disrupt radio traffic, or migrate from the firmware to the phone via other exploits in the OS to gain even more control. In essence, it's a particularly nasty thing that surveillance states would definitely use to their advantage.

This is why 'burner' devices should be exactly that - destroyed after use, because you simply cannot trust them after they've been anywhere near an invasive surveillance setting.