Chinese Intelligence Compiles 'Vast Database' About Millions Around the World (abc.net.au) 75
Australia's national public broadcaster ABC reports:
A Chinese company with links to Beijing's military and intelligence networks has been amassing a vast database of detailed personal information on thousands of Australians, including prominent and influential figures. A database of 2.4 million people, including more than 35,000 Australians, has been leaked from the Shenzhen company Zhenhua Data which is believed to be used by China's intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security. Zhenhua has the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party among its main clients.
Information collected includes dates of birth, addresses, marital status, along with photographs, political associations, relatives and social media IDs. It collates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and even TikTok accounts, as well as news stories, criminal records and corporate misdemeanours. While much of the information has been "scraped," some profiles have information which appears to have been sourced from confidential bank records, job applications and psychological profiles.
The company is believed to have sourced some of its information from the so-called "dark web". One intelligence analyst said the database was "Cambridge Analytica on steroids", referring to the trove of personal information sourced from Facebook profiles in the lead up to the 2016 US election campaign. But this data dump goes much further, suggesting a complex global operation using artificial intelligence to trawl publicly available data to create intricate profiles of individuals and organisations, potentially probing for compromise opportunities.
Zhenhua Data's chief executive Wang Xuefeng, a former IBM employee, has used Chinese social media app WeChat to endorse waging "hybrid warfare" through manipulation of public opinion and "psychological warfare"....
The database was leaked to a US academic, who worked with Canberra cyber security company Internet 2.0 and "was able to restore 10 per cent of the 2.4 million records for individuals...
"Of the 250,000 records recovered, there are 52,000 on Americans, 35,000 Australians, 10,000 Indian, 9,700 British, 5,000 Canadians, 2,100 Indonesians, 1,400 Malaysia and 138 from Papua New Guinea."
Information collected includes dates of birth, addresses, marital status, along with photographs, political associations, relatives and social media IDs. It collates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and even TikTok accounts, as well as news stories, criminal records and corporate misdemeanours. While much of the information has been "scraped," some profiles have information which appears to have been sourced from confidential bank records, job applications and psychological profiles.
The company is believed to have sourced some of its information from the so-called "dark web". One intelligence analyst said the database was "Cambridge Analytica on steroids", referring to the trove of personal information sourced from Facebook profiles in the lead up to the 2016 US election campaign. But this data dump goes much further, suggesting a complex global operation using artificial intelligence to trawl publicly available data to create intricate profiles of individuals and organisations, potentially probing for compromise opportunities.
Zhenhua Data's chief executive Wang Xuefeng, a former IBM employee, has used Chinese social media app WeChat to endorse waging "hybrid warfare" through manipulation of public opinion and "psychological warfare"....
The database was leaked to a US academic, who worked with Canberra cyber security company Internet 2.0 and "was able to restore 10 per cent of the 2.4 million records for individuals...
"Of the 250,000 records recovered, there are 52,000 on Americans, 35,000 Australians, 10,000 Indian, 9,700 British, 5,000 Canadians, 2,100 Indonesians, 1,400 Malaysia and 138 from Papua New Guinea."
China probably not the only ones (Score:4, Insightful)
Any country with the technical capability and "enemies" probably has something similar. Maybe not on this scale, but they have it.
Even in the days before computers, world powers kept track of people they could target for "influencing."
tl;dnr: This is not new. It's just bigger thanks to technology.
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Re:China probably not the only ones (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought you'd say something more definitive...like...I mean, something to the effect: -
"They (the Chinese), must have *cough* *cough* copied from the NSA & CIA playbook."
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I think you meant to say:
"They (the Chinese), must have *cough* *cough* copied the NSA & CIA playbook."
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The difference is what they do with the information. China has demonstrated they are willing to put down[emphasis mine] anything they don't like ref to Hong Kong urger muslims etc. Saying you don't like Trump and calling him a bunch of names won't get you thrown in jail or made a target like it would if you insulted the chinese leader
For someone with a signature denouncing profanity, the language of your post makes use of hedging and a lack of specificity that "demonstrates" several hooks to provoke idealogues from Slashdot's readers.
Have you read de-classified reportage from FBI's files? I ask because you wouldn't gloss how readily investigations noted and characterized what people said in private calls and in public settings. "Saying you don't like ____," was more than enough provocation for federal investigations to be initiated, co
Re: China probably not the only ones (Score:2)
That won't happen in China either.
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Ohh seriously, what utter fucking nonsense. Why the fuck would anyone reivent the fucking wheel. Most governments just contract the information from a bunch of data mining corporations, get information far more detailed than the idiot ABC is claiming, from hundreds of millions of people, even billions. Every single potential politician data mined before they even enter politics, their fears, how they can be manipulated, who can be bribed.
Your ignorant stupid fuckers, I would trust government over corporati
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Their database is not really bigger. They just broke into the NSA machine in Utah
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Talking out of your ass probably strikes you as insightful comment.
And this is news how? (Score:1)
The "War on Terror" is about tapped out and Iran and Venezuela didn't pan out as villains so it's painfully obvious China's next on the popular American game show, "Who Wants To Keep The Military Industrial Complex Going?".
Please don't f
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But.... Trump says that China is bad, mmmkay?
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If we're going down, and it definitely looks like we're going down, I'd just as soon take China with us. Maybe some good will come of it for the rest of the world.
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Apart from the puzzling and unnecessary reference to "race baiting" it was bang on.
We are not at war with Eurasia. We've always been at war with Eastasia.
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There's a difference between having vast databases on people in your own country vs. amassing vast databases on people in other countries. The former you can (hopefully) address through political action in your own country. The latter is something that can only be resolved through less-civilized means, provided it is a foreign country compiling databases on you and your fellow citizens.
China can and will manipulate its own people through data analytics. Due to their system of government, their people hav
Re: And this is news how? (Score:2)
Exactly.
America seems to be becoming what it accuses China of being, but which China is not, or at least hasn't been for a long time.
It seems we westerners have been brought up to think of the CPC as a single minded entity that never changes. Well, it is made of many millions of individuals and can and does change, it just does so it more rational ways over longer periods of time, instead of flip flopping every few years in some sort of negative feedback loop. It has even come to share some characteristics
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Slashdot turning into an American anti china propoganda engine and little else nowadays
It's not just slashdot, it's somebody much higher up.
(PS: It's election season...)
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America has been doing this to its allies, its enemies and itself for years
Why does that make it less concerning that China is doing it?
While the US is likely better at it, the US is not (yet?) a regressive dictatorship with extensive thought and speech control. Americans do not suddenly find they have an extra guest for a month or 6, checking on everything they do.
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While the US is likely better at it, the US is not (yet?) a regressive dictatorship with extensive thought and speech control. Americans do not suddenly find they have an extra guest for a month or 6, checking on everything they do.
*raises hand* And if I am born into an American ghetto of an ethnic persuasion other than mixed-European, can I have the flying car that comes out your butt?
*another student in the class raises a hand* My auntie has a guest every month she whispers to my mother she'd just as soon be rid of sooner than later. Is that what you mean, teacher?
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Nice false equivalency.
Re: Pot meet kettle, kettle meet pot (Score:1)
Imo, the USA is much more like that than you think, and China much less like that....and the trend is continuing. It's like the two countries are swapping their positions on the scale of morality.
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As far as I can tell, China is getting worse, not better. Dictactor for life? Check. Concentration camps for undesirable minorities? Check. Regressive social control technology? Check.
The US has a lot of problems, but it also has a lot of people who know they are problems and try to fix them. Democracy in the US survived civil war, segregation, two world wars, McCarthyism, disputed elections. There is a lot of hope that it will survive Boogaloo and QAnon too. Either way, we will know a lot more in January.
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Unlike the american concentration camps filled with Hispanics?
Or the slave labour camps of privatised prison for profit system?
or regressive social control via your tech giants and AI designed to manipulate people?
Yes, very much unlike those. Just like the internment camps for Japanese in the US during WW2 were bad, but not Auschwitz bad.
The US should certainly be criticized for the camps for Hispanics, for the private prisons, and for letting the tech giants run rampant. Democracies should always be held to higher standards than other countries, and we should always strive to do much better.
However, implying that when it comes to human rights, the failings of the US and the failings of China are in any way equivalen
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The US has been building dossiers on limited selections of individuals, yes. And it's been a subject of some controversy. Some of this information-gathering is a part of the Five Eyes system which is a mess in-and-of itself.
The scale of China's operation, and the targets they select, seems to be the differentiating factor.
Also, the outrage about Snowden never wore off. It changed the way a lot of people look at the US government. Stuff the tinfoil hat nutters were raving about decades ago now appears to
Re: Pot meet kettle, kettle meet pot (Score:2)
Yeah, like those laws or rules make any difference. You're deluding yourself.
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At the present, they DON'T make any difference. Nobody's going to enforce them. But there's hope, sort of. An entire wing of the Republican party - the Trumpsters - are actually turning against the intelligence community. Whether or not you think they're turning on the three-letter orgs for the right reasons is really not the point. There's already grumbling among Trumpsters that FISA courts have too much power and too little accountability. Barr is hunting the people who instigated the investigation
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I've dealt with Google for years. The Big Three reporting agents don't source data from them for my credit score. There are plenty of people watching my bank accounts, my home/car loans, etc. that will have a much greater impact on my financial credit score than Google ever will. And Facebook? They have nothing on me.
Collation (Score:5, Insightful)
The bigger story behind this one is that this data is actively collated to find valuable targets for state apparatus to target for national/ideological benefit. Almost every imperialist nation on the planet is doing this sort of data collection. But very few can effectively collate it into the kind of information that your state structures can utilize for their purposes. And almost none can meaningfully act on it.
And in case of China, state being totalitarian and utterly unconstrained by considerations that tend to constrain most states able to conduct this level of data collection and data collation is what makes it uniquely dangerous to people around the planet. There are at least some, often exceedingly limited avenues to resist being targeted even by nations as powerful as the sole superpower in the world, US. Even if you do end up imprisoned in a US ally state of UK like Assange or a refugee in Russia. But even there, they have some avenues, legal, media and otherwise to challenge the nation trying to persecute them.
There are no such avenues in China. There's no separation of powers in China, and judiciary and media are simply a part of government. And that is why this is much worse when China does it.
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What this tells us is that China is well behind Western intelligence agencies, maybe by two decades. They only have millions of entries in their database. Compared to what the West has its tiny and not enough to do real "big data" mining.
The fact that it's only millions tells us that they don't have unlimited access to Facebook like the NSA does, for example. No backdoor into iCloud. The low numbers of foreigners listed in TFA suggest it's mostly a domestic project, not like the global ambitions of FIVE EYE
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What this tells us is that China is well behind Western intelligence agencies, maybe by two decades.
Are you so stupid you don't think every single country has a database like this already? When we know the NSA was doing just as, if not more extensive data gathering than even which China is doing?
The whole reason China is being banned from the Telco space is so they cannot get the level of detailed profile info on eery single person the NSA has been collecting for a decade or more...
Hilarious to think China
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I don't think you read my post beyond the first paragraph, as the second paragraph specifically addresses your complaint. Before you ever got to make it.
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But very few can effectively collate it into the kind of information that your state structures can utilize for their purposes. And almost none can meaningfully act on it.
There's no separation of powers in China, and judiciary and media are simply a part of government. And that is why this is much worse when China does it.
The problem I have with this framing of what characterizes fascism as Germany innovated if from Roman example is organs of social function and anthropology.
China is a republic of over 50 cultures and glosses such as yours you frequently post to Slashdot ignore bureaus and committees are ultimately individuals who are as susceptible to patterns of human behavior as any and all humans are that a discipline like Anthropology describes much better than Political Philosophy.
Reading such exercise on Slashdot is
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>The problem I have with this framing of what characterizes fascism as Germany innovated if from Roman example is organs of social function and anthropology.
Italy. Not Germany. And point of evolution from was Marxist version of socialism, where Fascists and Communists both saw Socialism of early 20th century crises as a failure, and evolved from it in two diametrically opposite directions. Fascists putting the "nation state" as the highest moral actor and Communists putting the "oppressed group identifie
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As for the rest, reading another 1970s reject bitching about tightness of their parents in 1960s, all while forgetting that half a century has passed testing their wonderful hypothesis of China opening up to become an open society with free market economy and rule of law. The judgement of history is out on this one. Wonderful hypothesis was wrong.
What? You actually thought they wanted China to become a democracy? LOL.
They wanted China to become a free-market source of cheap labor, and they succeeded. If China was a democracy America would be a second rate world power. They are much more useful as a boogeyman, all while lining the intended pockets.
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Original text:
>their wonderful hypothesis of China opening up to become an open society with free market economy and rule of law.
Idiot's lens on:
>You actually thought they wanted China to become a democracy?
Thinking that former means latter. LOL indeed.
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So you wanted them to be an open dictatorship with a free market economy and rule of law then. OK right. About as equally likely as democracy in the end.
But in reality cheap labor was still the only goal, and it worked.
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>So you wanted them to be an open dictatorship
Remember folks, politics is binary between democracy and dictatorship.
As I'm not interested in explaining basics of political structures like you're five, which is apparently what will be needed to have anything other than this hilarious failure of a discussion, I think we're done here.
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Remember folks, politics is binary between democracy and dictatorship.
For most practical purposes, yes. Unless "elected" dictatorships confuse you. Which seems likely.
Have a great day!
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In other news, for all practical purposes there are only two colours. And there are no gradients between them either.
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There are lots of different kinds of democracies - republics, parliamentary, direct, representative - but they are all democracies. There are lots of kinds of dictatorships too - military and civilian, absolute or pretending to be representative, but they are all dictatorships. Sometimes it can be hard to tell, it all comes down to if elections are free and fair or rigged, but that is not a gray area, it is a question with an actual objective answer.
It's not like there is a rainbow of other systems that a
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By your definition, there's no democracy either, because by your definition, democracy is simply a dictatorship with large amount of dictators.
Which is indeed a natural outcome of reducing complex reality to a single variable, and only assigning two possible values to it.
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You can make it as simple or complex as you like, depending what you are trying to do. Complexity for its own sake is rarely useful.
Not only was rapprochement not going to make China a democracy, it was not going to make it less dictatorial either. The point remains that was not the purpose to begin with and so it should not be a surprise. Semantic games don't change the underlying premise.
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>Semantic games don't change the underlying premise.
Mirror mirror on the wall...
Re: Collation (Score:2)
If the past several years has thought us anything, is that this separation you speak of is ultimately meaningless. The very examples.you give show that to be true, imo.
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Could you elaborate on this please? If anything, recent examples tell us why this separation is so critical, i.e. Trump's worst tendencies being unable to be rapidly pushed through the system without recourse.
Everybody starts small (Score:2)
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb fucks
Vast database of.... (Score:3)
By comparison and also considering modern divorce rates, I think I'll sign up for the Chinese special interest lists instead!
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That's 5 Eyes, and that's there so your government can spy on you using our government. You're welcome.
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No worries. You can be sure we return the favor.
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Exactly! That's the beauty of the system. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder, and all that.
Love your counrty (Score:3)
absolutely nothing compared to 5 eyes (Score:2)
China isn't running TURBULENT or TURMOIL.
This is like pointing to a minor issue to distract from a major issue.
It's an issue, but pretty obvious distraction from shit that matters more.
Lions, Tigers, Bears (Score:3)
Lions, and Tigers, and Bears! Oh My!
As if China is the only one. What does Australia itself have? How about the US? You could argue that there are different intentions but that is no excuse. We seem to have forgotten privacy is a basic human right.
https://www.un.org/en/universa... [un.org]
No DUH! (Score:4, Insightful)
EVERYBODY is making such lists, including the USA and the Australians.
The fact that Cambridge Analytica got in trouble did not make the lists disappear, anybody who does not care about the legality (or contractual obligations) of their actions can still do exactly the same thing now, even Cambridge Analytica can.
The best that can possibly be hoped for is public shaming for using the information. I suspect this works about equally well for the Chinese as Cambridge Analytica. I also suspect the end result will be that everybody gives up and we live with micro-targeted propaganda.
hmmm... (Score:3)