Transparency Report | My Tea Drinking Experience - 2019.10.01

Foreword: I have read @陈春's "Fighting Terror with Words" , and I am convinced, so I have also considered publicizing my experience of drinking tea (and other negotiating with state power agencies) from now on (except for personal information that may be identified). part). Main purpose: 1) Self-healing through narration, which is a good way to fight terror; 2) Increase personal transparency, treat colleagues and colleagues in the past with sincerity, and do not do evil or be an accomplice of totalitarianism; 3) Accumulate and share experience .

On the afternoon of October 1, 2019, three police officers from the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau made a phone call and then came to the door through the local police station (about 7-8 people). I was asked to go to the police station in my jurisdiction to cooperate in making a transcript. I agreed to go to the police station with them after they explained that they wanted to ask about #Changsha Public Welfare Three.

The reason why they chose to come to me at this time is from their threatening words to me: If you don't cooperate, I'm afraid you won't be able to go to Thailand tonight - some reasons. I did prepare to leave for Thailand (playing) late at night, so hehe.

I've switched, switched, switched. The reason for changing careers is also very simple, it is the reason of my personality: I have a science and engineering brain, severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a little "Asperger's". It is more serious and needs repeated confirmation. I like monotonous and stereotyped things, and I will write code in the future. I've been working on information security and Linux machines all my life. I admire my colleagues and what they do, it's just that I don't have the rigorous training to do it well enough. I'll just do what I'm good at.

But what hasn't changed is still caring about society, the weak, equality and justice. Knowing my own and other human societies remains my life's work.

Just say this. Let’s start with the experience related to this technology monitoring:

They asked me to unlock my phone and check my contacts and WeChat for someone's phone number. I refused, they threatened to let me go for 24 hours, but said I could unlock it myself and show them. I had to unpack it, searched the address book for relevant keywords and showed him (but didn't find it), they said a phone number and called me to broadcast (to see if it would show anything), and finally no contacts were shown. Later, he didn't ask me to open WeChat.

If you use Signal or Whatsapp, it is easy to have a pit. For these two software, when the chat object is stored, it is directly saved as the contact of the mobile phone, and it is also left in the mobile phone address book after the software is deleted. It is recommended not to save the chat object, but only the mobile phone number is displayed on the interface (if the other party does not share his name), which is not very user-friendly. So one solution is to set your own name/nickname in the software and share it with others (if you don't want to be anonymous), and others will also share it with you, so that you can view the other party's phone number without recording it in the address book to the other party's name.

Other software is actually fine, it is not strongly related to the address book, the chat object in the software does not necessarily have to be associated with the mobile phone address book, it is enough not to be associated.

So if possible, use software that has nothing to do with your phone's address book, such as Riot.im, XMPP (eg ChatSecure on iOS, Conversations on Android, Pidgin on Windows, macOS and Linux). Of course, you can also choose to use an anonymous phone number that no one else knows.

As a final review, when the police came knocking on the door, I was still quite flustered. A password database that was planned to be backed up on the same day turned out to be too late to back up (although I have backed it up once a month), so I deleted the entire password manager directly from the phone. Also removed: Signal, Riot.im. Of course, there are photos (fortunately I had already transferred the photos the day before). The computer at home, in order to resist the police raiding the house, has not used the computer's own system for a long time, but uses the system (live OS) installed on the USB device. In an emergency, just turn off the computer and unplug the USB. The hard disk in the computer is either fully enhanced with LUKS, or the empty partitions are erased (overwritten) with /dev/zero.

good luck

Posted on October 1, 2019

(The latest version of this article is at: https://mdrights.github.io/os-observe/posts/2019/10/%E9%80%8F%E6%98%8E%E5%BA%A6%E6%8A% A5%E5%91%8A-1.html)