The officers took Liu’s iPhone, hooked it up to a handheld device that looked like a laptop and told him they were “checking his phone for illegal information”.
Liu’s experience in Urumqi, the Xinjiang capital, is not uncommon in a region that has been wracked by separatist violence and a crackdown by security forces. But such surveillance technologies, tested out in the laboratory of Xinjiang, are now quietly spreading across China. Government procurement documents collected by Reuters and rare insights from officials show the technology Liu encountered in Xinjiang is encroaching into cities like Shanghai and Beijing.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKBN1KZ0R3