Thread by @adrianzenz

BREAKING: huge trove of files obtained by hacking into Xinjiang police / re-education camp computers contain first-ever image material from inside camps, reveal Chen Quanguo issuing shoot-to-kill orders, Xi Jinping demanding new camps because existing ones are overcrowded. 🧵

The material is unprecedented on several levels:
1. High-level speeches, implicating top leadership and containing blunt language

2. Camp security instructions, far more detailed than China Cables, describe heavily armed strike units with battlefield assault rifles

3. Vivid image of police drills, and over 5,000 images of persons taken at detention centers/police stations, 2,884 of them are interned.

4. Spreadsheets showing vast scale of internments: over 12% of adult population of Uyghur county in 2018 shown in camps or prisons.

The youngest person confirmed to be in a re-education camp is Rahile Omer, age 14 when she was detained, nearly age 15 when her image was taken by the police.

I am please to have my authentication and analyses published peer reviewed by JEACS: journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/jeac… (download links for material are being fixed)

Big thanks to @sascha_kb for his dedication and assistance, and to the peer reviewers.

A second report of mine specifically on the speech by China's Minister of Public Security, implication Beijing and Xi in the campaign of mass internment, is published by @ChinaFile:
chinafile.com/reporting-opin…

I assembled a consortium of 13 media outlets around the globe from 10 countries, who reviewed much of the material, some of them with large OSINT and investigative teams, putting a huge amount of work into this. Expect significant media reporting this week.

You can view and download many of the files, documents and nearly 2,900 images of detained persons from the #XinjiangPoliceFiles website:
xinjiangpolicefiles.org

The #XinjiangPoliceFiles contain a very large amount of visual material, including police training PowerPoints, image material from Xinjiang, including sensitive material showing police stations, police headquarters etc. This significantly aided in the authentication.

The #XinjiangPoliceFiles contain for example the entire unredacted Xinjiang Papers document no.5 on history (the leaked Xinjiang Papers contained only a redacted version of this internal document).