Since publishing her private phone number online, Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Carol Ng has won threatening calls from foreigners and been bombarded with messages calling her “cockroach. “
She’s alone.
A complicated and dubious man named HK Leaks has stepped up his “doxxing” – where people’s non-public main points are published online – from Hong Kong’s political activists, targeting those who say they have violated a radical new national security law.
Promoted through teams connected to the Chinese Communist Party and hosted on Russian-based servers, HK Leaks has the largest doxxing site aimed at pro-democracy activists since its emergence in 2019.
The online page continues to operate despite last year’s requests from the Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner to remove all non-public profiles, and has been forwarded to Hong Kong Police for investigation.
Personal addresses, social media profiles, and numbers are indexed along with descriptions of people’s alleged “crimes. “
Data released on at least 14 other people who it said violated security law, a rate punishable by a maximum sentence of life in prison, within weeks of Beijing law imposed on the city, according to an AFP investigation .
“When this first happened, I placed a lot of emphasis,” he told AFP Ng, president of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions.
“I’ve won phone calls and messages from other people from the ‘blue ribbon’ on Facebook,” he said, referring to government supporters who have followed the color because it’s related to the police.
“Every now and then, I get a lot of WhatsApp messages, thousands of stickers. We’re cockroaches. “
“They know they’re going to scare people, but I’m not afraid, because it’s my freedom and I’ll protect it,” Ng added.
– ‘Ballproof accommodation’ –
HK Leaks has so far published the non-public main points of more than 2,000 other people it considers guilty of “misdeeds,” ten times more in a year.
Registered on a Russian server, it is specially designed to evade prosecution, according to experts. It uses so-called unlisted bulletproof accommodation, also favored through debatable white supremacist sites such as 8kun, and adjustment mastery.
Online traffic has grown to about 230,000 pages according to the outlook for the year, according to SiteWorthTraffic.
In an update since last year, he now presents a pop-up indicating that “the troublemakers have ruined the rule of law and order of society in Hong Kong,” claiming that more than 2,000 police and pro-Chinese have been convicted through activists.
Pro-democracy leaders Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow, co-founders of the disbanded Demosisto party, are in a subsection titled “Hong Kong Independence Riot,” while media mogul Jimmy Lai is also on the list.
Among the 14 alleged violators of national security law who were allegedly deceived are also well-known activists Tony Chung, Nathan Law and Ray Wong.
In July, Chung was the first politician arrested under the law on charges of promoting Hong Kong’s independence through Studentlocalism, an organization he co-founded in 2016.
Law, a former president of Demosisto, fled to Britain after the passage of the National Security Act.
Later in the month, Chinese state media reported that Law and Wong were among six others wanted by Hong Kong police for “inciting consultation and collusion with foreign and external forces. “
Ray Wong, who gave prestige to political refugees in Germany in May 2018, told the AFP that he suspected that he was targeting him as part of a crusade of harassment through the government in Hong Kong and mainland China.
“I am somewhat surprised,” he said. “The Hong Kong government said it would check to prevent me by any means. “
Online registrations recommend that HK Leaks migrated to its last Pakistani domain in November 2019.
The site moved its domain several times last year, to avoid detection, based on an AFP analysis.
To date, however, no one has been charged for the doxxing campaign.
rhb-I / fox / am / qan