Hong Kong’s mass arrests are giving police crucial intelligence: people’s phones

Joshua Wong’s black iPhone sat in a room on the 22nd floor of the Hong Kong Police Headquarters in the heart of the city’s business district, where over a total of 21 hours between late September and early November, its data were examined by officers, and hundreds of chat messages exported.

The 23-year-old pro-democracy activist only learned months later that his locked phone had been cracked into when authorities presented him with a search warrant in February. His phone had been confiscated following his arrest the previous summer on charges of inciting others to take part in an unlawful assembly at the height of Hong Kong’s mass protests against a controversial extradition law.

These details were documented in a judicial review filed last month by Wong and Agnes Chow, an activist and fellow founding member of political party Demosisto who was arrested alongside Wong and also had her phone confiscated. While the police managed to crack into Wong’s iPhone, which was locked with a four-digit passcode, they did not manage to access the contents of Chow’s Google Pixel phone using the force’s existing digital forensics tools, according to the court filing. Chow says her phone is still in police possession.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.