A mainland China style digital dragnet is descending on Hong Kong. In the past month HK police have broken into the Facebook account of one politician, hung a camera outside another's house, and tried to phish the login details to Jimmy Lai's Twitter. nytimes.com/2020/08/25/tec…
With the Nat Sec law biting, we're seeing more extreme tactics. Police pinned Tony Chung's head in front of his phone to trigger the facial rec. Then they held his finger to the phone's fingerprint scanner. Even tho neither worked, they seemed to break into his FB account later.
Agnes Chow's neighbors said a surveillance camera was set up by her doorstep. She shows how people are adjusting. She appointed a 2nd admin to her FB account, who worked with FB to shut it down after she was arrested. Here's her video tutorial to cybersec:
Finally there's Jimmy Lai. After he was arrested a message came into Next Digital using the right names of employees asking for Twitter logins to set up a new phone for him. They believe it was a phishing attempt by police to get into his account.
“The problem is this slows everything down, because now everyone is double checking: ‘Did you send this message? Did you send that?’ It never stops; it just never, ever stops,” said Mark Simon after Mr. Lai's arrest.
We all think of HK as a global financial hub, but it's also becoming something else: a land of internet fault lines, where China’s harsh techno-authoritarian rule collides with the open internet in a society and economy governed by rules that protect digital rights.
