Chinese propaganda app doubles as new spying tool for authorities, report says - The Washington Post -built by alibaba no?
 6park.com
By Anna Fifield 6park.com
October 12 at 5:57 PM
BEIJING —  The Chinese Communist Party appears to have “superuser” access to all the data on more than 100 million cellphones, owing to a back door in a propaganda app that the government has been promoting aggressively this year.
 An examination of the code in the app shows it enables authorities to retrieve every message and photo from a user’s phone, browse their contacts and Internet history, and activate an audio recorder inside the device, according to a U.S.-funded analysis.
“The [Chinese Communist Party] essentially has access to over 100 million users’ data,” said Sarah Aoun, director of technology at the Open Technology Fund, an initiative funded by the U.S. government under Radio Free Asia. “That’s coming from the top of a government that is expanding its surveillance into citizens’ day-to-day lives.”
The party, led by Xi Jinping, launched the app, called “Study the Great Nation,” in January. The name is a pun because the Chinese word for study — “xuexi” — contains the authoritarian leader’s family name.
[Apple pulls police-tracking app used by Hong Kong protesters]
The app contains news articles and videos, many of them about Xi’s activities or his ideology, “Xi Jinping Thought.” There is even a sense of competition, with users earning points for reading articles and commenting on them, and a leader board showing how users are faring in quizzes. 
The app, which can be downloaded on all types of smartphones including Apple and Android, has been called Xi’s high-tech equivalent of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book and was launched amid a campaign to bolster the Communist Party’s ideological control over the Chinese population.
It quickly became the most downloaded app in China, including in Apple’s app store in the country, with state media reporting in April that it had more than 100 million registered users. Apple said that, while the app could be downloaded on its devices, it would not be able to conduct this kind of surveillance on Apple’s operating system.
There have been suspicions about the app’s invasiveness — although many people in China are conscious that the authorities can read their messages if they want to. A cybersecurity law enacted two years ago required all tech companies to share user data with the government.
Digital forensics
The Open Tech Fund contracted Cure53, a German cybersecurity firm, to break apart the app and determine its exact capabilities. Although they were not able to fully assess the app’s functionalities because of code designed to thwart attempts to dissect the app, the Cure53 auditors found code that amounts to a back door into the phone that is able to run arbitrary commands with “superuser” privileges. 6park.com

An image of Chinese President Xi Jinping planting a tree is displayed on the “Study the Great Nation” app. (Justin Chin/Bloomberg)
Granting such privileges is tantamount to giving administrator-level access to a user’s phone, and this kind of code is generally considered to be malicious. Superuser privileges give developers the power to download any software, modify files and data, or install a program to log key strokes.
[Read the Cure53 report on the Chinese app]
“It’s very, very uncommon for an application to require that level of access to the device, and there’s no reason to have these privileges unless you’re doing something you’re not supposed to be,” said Adam Lynn, the Open Tech Fund’s research director. 
“The access itself is significant. The fact that they’ve gone to these lengths [to hide it] only further heightens the scrutiny around this,” he said.
The investigation could not reveal how the code or the information it gathered was being used, but there was no legitimate reason a supposedly educational app would seek to run commands on users’ phones with high privilege levels, the fund wrote in a commentary about the Cure53 report, which will be published Monday.
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