In China, Big Brother is always watching, and now even more so if you’re a Muslim.
According to Mashable, China has begun forcing all citizens in Xinjiang, the country’s westernmost state, to download a “surveillance app” on their phone. It’s the latest in a series of measures to crackdown on what China views as religious extremism there, where much of the nation’s Muslim population lives.
Authorities distributed a notice in early July instructing residents of Urumqui, Xinjiang’s capital, to install the app and warned they would be conducting random checks to ensure citizens had followed through. Those that didn’t have it on their phones would be detained for up to 10 days.
Xinjiang is home to eight million Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim ethnicity, that has complained of systemic discrimination by Han Chinese. The Chinese government has used oppressive tactics targeting Uighurs in the name of national security that include confiscating passports, preventing prayer, as well as banning religious veils and “abnormal” beards.
Mashable reports the app scans users phones for “terrorist and illegal religious videos, images, e-books and electronic documents” that automatically match with files in a government database.
The state’s seen growing unrest in the last decade, which the Chinese government blames on Islamist radicals. A foiled plot in December prompted authorities to ask residents to install GPS-tracking on their cars, according to The Guardian.
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