During demonstrations in Hong Kong, faces were turned into weapons

HONG KONG – Police were fighting with Colin Cheung in a police car that seemed special. They needed to register his face.

They took it by the jaw to force him to put his head in front of his

iPhone

. They slapped him. They shouted, "Wake up!" They opened his eyes. Nothing worked: Cheung had disabled access to his phone with
facial recognition after pressing a button quickly upon arrest.

After several weeks of
Intense demonstrations, protesters and Hong Kong police turned their identities into weapons. The authorities question the leaders of the event online and register their phones. Today, many protesters are covering their faces and fear that the police will use cameras and perhaps other tools to locate them.

When the police stopped using badges when violence escalated, some protesters began to reveal the identity of police officers online. A channel of
Telegram, the messaging application, researches and publishes personal information about agents and their families. The channel, Dadfindboy, has more than 50,000 subscribers and promotes violence in a crude and caricatural way. Rival chains in favor of the government seek to unmask the demonstrators in the same way.

Cheung, who had been arrested last week for "conspiracy and complicity in homicide", is a subscriber to the Dadfindboy channel, although he denied being one of its founders, as claimed by the police, and condemned the publications inciting violence. Cheung thinks he's been arrested because he's developed a tool for comparing images with a set of official photos to find matches, a project that he later abandoned.

"I do not want them to be like a secret police," said Cheung, who was released on bail and was not charged with any crime. "If the law enforcement forces do not use anything to show their identity, they will be corrupted and they will be able to do what they want."

"With the tool, ordinary citizens can know who the police are," he added.

Hong Kong is at the forefront of a major change in the methods used by the authorities to track down dangerous criminals and legitimate political protestors, as well as in the ability of their targets to respond. On the other side of the border with China, police often capture people via digitized fingerprints, obtained through one of the most invasive surveillance systems in the world. The arrival of
facial recognition technology and the rapid expansion of a vast network of cameras and
Other monitoring tools have greatly increased these capabilities.

The transformation affects a very sensitive fiber in

Hong Kong

. The demonstrations began with a bill that would have allowed the city to extradite crime suspects

China

continental,
where the police and the courts finally answer to the Communist Party.

The Hong Kong authorities have established strict privacy controls for the use of facial recognition and the collection of other biometric data, although the extent of these efforts is not clear. It also seems that they use other technological methods to monitor the protesters. Last month, a 22-year-old man was arrested for leading a group of telegrams.

The demonstrators respond. On Sunday, when another demonstration turned into a violent confrontation with the police, some of the people involved directed laser pointers at police cameras and used spray paint to block the lenses. security cameras placed in front of the liaison office. from the Chinese government. Some riot officers held cameras on stems just behind the front, while firing tear gas and rubber bullets.

The protesters' anger intensified after the police withdrew the identification numbers from their uniforms, no doubt to prevent reports of violence from being reported to the city's leaders. For some protesters, the maneuver suggests that the police follow the example of the mainland of China, where the police have no public responsibility and often do not identify themselves.

Hong Kong police officials said the personal information of the police and their friends and relatives was posted online. On July 3, police reportedly arrested eight individuals accused of unauthorized disclosure of personal information, among other charges. A spokesman for the security forces said members of the police force reported more than eight hundred incidents in which police officers or their relatives were harbaded after the data was released.

Dadfindboy is a forum for revealing private information (or
doxxing) police officers. In an ingenious tone, young, cruel or profane, are published personal information and photos, sometimes intimate, of the family of police officers.

The chain has called for violence, often in a caricatured manner, although there is no evidence that this has provoked a specific act. A publication informed the demonstrators of the use of slings. Another explains how to make a torch with an aerosol deodorant. A recent survey asked fans of the channel what were the best ways to punish the police. Options included prison, gas chambers, burial alive, guillotine and machine gun executions. He managed to bury them alive with about a third of the votes.

Police arrested Cheung eleven days after the establishment of Telegram and accused him of being the administrator. He also accused him of having published a guide on how to kill police officers. Cheung denies the charges and an investigation by the New York Times failed to find any publications that corresponded to what had been described by the police.

Cheung, a slim 29-year-old man, was arrested at a shopping center around noon on July 18, according to his version of events. Four plainclothes policemen waited for him to unlock his phone, then threw himself on him to try to remove it by the force of his hands.

After the police tried to use his face to unlock the phone, he was taken to the police station where, according to Cheung, he was beaten and interrogated. Subsequently, the police went to his home and used a USB memory loaded with software to access their computers without permission, according to Cheung's version of the incident. He also stated that he was detained for more than ten hours and did not know how the police identified him.

Hong Kong police confirmed the investigation, but refused to make further comments.