Hacking a server gives painful images of life in Chinese camps

Police hacking in China’s Xinjiang region has produced thousands of graphics and videos of Uighur prisoners suffering in detention camps, in one of the most serious stories of the long-running humanitarian crisis caused by ethnic harassment of ethnic minorities.

The images are accompanied by training manuals, detailed police work lists and camp security instructions. Using a euphemism to describe prisoners, one document states: “If students do not respond to warning shots and continue to try to escape, armed police shoot to kill,” the BBC reported. The images show one prisoner in an iron torture device known as a tiger chair that immobilizes his arms. Der Spiegel, one of the other editions published tranche of hacked photos and documents, said it confirmed their authenticity in part by analyzing GPS data included in some images.

“The material is unprecedented on several levels,” said Dr. Adrian Cenz, director and senior researcher at the Chinese Research Foundation for the Memory of the Victims of Communism, who received the files and shared them with news agencies. wrote on Twitter. His topic provided an extensive overview of leaked material, which included “high-level speeches concerning top management and containing harsh vocabulary,” “camp security instructions, much more detailed than in China Cables [that] describe heavily armed assault squads with machine guns on the battlefield ”and other evidence of Uighur oppression by the Chinese government.

Most images and documents are available at a special site. Content includes images 2884 detaineestraining Powerpoint images and documents for security exercises, and speeches and directives from senior government officials documenting Beijing’s knowledge and support of camps and politics.

Little is known about the features of the hacking that made the leaked items available. The BBC said only that: “The source of the files claims to have hacked, downloaded and decrypted them from a number of police computer servers in Xinjiang before handing them over to Dr. Adrian Zenz, a scientist with the American organization” Victims of Communism “. A memorial fund previously approved by the Chinese government for its influential research in Xinjiang. ”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC, issued a statement to the BBC saying, “Xinjiang’s issues are essentially countering violent terrorism, radicalization and separatism, not human rights or religion,” she said. the Chinese authorities have taken “many decisive, reliable and effective measures to deradicate”. The statement added: “Locals live safe, happy and eventful lives.”