This is The Guardian.

Hi, I'm Darren Byler, an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University,

and I'm the author of the story China's High Tech War on its Muslim Minority.

This story was really my first attempt to come to terms with something I'd been observing

over the last decade of research in Northwest China, where I was studying migration to the city,

policing systems, surveillance, and transformations of those systems.

Internet at first seemed to provide a lot of freedom for Uighurs,

but over time it became something that was controlling their lives.

I was hearing these stories of people who were being detained

and having their faces and their phones scanned.

I was hearing stories of Uighurs hiding SD cards from their phones in trees

and burying them in their backyards trying to keep them out of the gaze of the state.

So there was a kind of desperation in the air.

So this was me trying to come to grips with that.

Since I wrote the article, I've published a book-length piece on this called

In the Camps China's High Tech Penal Colony, which builds on the research for this article,

but then looks at a whole range of different experiences of detention,

of the perspective of the police, people working in camps,

who were in charge of detaining these people and re-educating them.

And we've also been given access to internal police documents,

which show us how the system actually begins to control people's lives,

what its goals are, what proportion of population is being detained,

...