As a professional large aerial snowboarder Julia Marino completed her final preparations for the Winter Olympics, U.S. officials warned Marino and her teammates about China’s surveillance apparatus. Athletes were warned not to bring their personal phones to the games. “We use hot phones while we’re there,” said Marino, a seven-time X Games medalist, in an Instagram interview. Athletes were also warned not to speak out against human rights abuses. “There was a discussion about what might happen if we spoke out,” Marino said in the interview.
As the Beijing Winter Olympics begin, Marino is not alone. Thousands of foreign athletes, coaches, (some) diplomats and members of the media descend on the Chinese capital and take extra measures to protect themselves from eavesdropping by authoritarian law enforcement officials. That means taping laptops and phones to ensure sensitive data can’t be transferred, and self-censoring potential criticism of human rights abuses against the Muslim Uyghur population in the northwestern region of Xinjiang. “For anyone visiting China, you have to anticipate that anything you do with an electronic device is taken,” said Fergus Hanson, director of international cyber policy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank. “The level of security you have there is very low.”
Much has changed since China last hosted the Olympics in the summer of 2008. The nation has become a technological superpower with advanced capabilities in everything from artificial intelligence to quantum computing. Its domestic tech giants make products that have hundreds of millions of users and are at the heart of basic tasks in people’s daily lives. At the same time, technological surveillance and censorship of the country’s citizens is widespread, China maintains a sophisticated group of state-backed hackers, and the United Nations has warned about the detention and treatment of Uyghurs.
Up to 1 million Uighurs are held in detention camps in the Xinjiang region. Many countries, including the US, have declared that the Chinese government is committing genocide. Evidence shows that the Uyghur population is being used as forced labor and sterilized. International diplomats are boycotting the games over the human rights crisis, but critics say the action is not enough to force China to change its approach. Meanwhile, state-sponsored hackers in China have become increasingly ruthless over the past few years, while other related groups have waged massive disinformation operations against critics of the country’s human rights record.
Countries participating in the Olympics take the risks seriously. Olympic organizations in Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the United States have warned athletes that any devices they bring into China are likely to be monitored. “It should be assumed that every text, email, online visit and app access can be monitored or compromised,” said an advisory from the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee obtained by Axios. An FBI briefing note said passengers should use makeshift phones and receive training to spot potential social engineering efforts.
In addition, the FBI advises anyone heading to China to regularly update VPNs, network equipment and devices, and check logs for new service users and administrator accounts on systems. Security precautions do not exceed the expectations of diplomats and members of non-governmental organizations traveling to China, but the measures have drawn increased attention as Beijing hosts the games and the influx of foreigners associated with them. “What is perfectly normal in China for reporters to have to work in a dangerous work environment is not normal for the Olympics,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, who previously lived and worked in Hong Kong. .
