My third Data Science insight focuses on Chinese surveillance of foreign individuals.
A Chinese technology company in Shenzhen called China Revival recently leaked data they have collected on over 2.4 million individuals around the world. Covert intelligence collection, even on Chinese citizens, has been the norm for the Chinese Communist Party for decades. This recent leak turns over a large piece of the CCP puzzle, namely identifying a private entity selling this data to the State. The database was called the ‘Overseas Key Information Data Base’ or OKIDB. The database contained information on everyone from everyday citizens to the Royal family, and even marked some individuals as important based on a ranking system. The overall purpose of this database seems to be to use machine learning techniques on large-scale data to analyze effective routes of influence. For example, shifting support from one candidate to another within a certain demographic. The official story from China is that this database does exist, yet it is merely used to connect individuals to their social media accounts.
The Sun in China claim many such databases exist around the world, which they do. The US is involved in many of the same techniques to track individuals from every nation (including American citizens) and influence their actions. The interesting aspect here lies within the intentions behind the collection of this data as well as the fact that the Chinese government is outsourcing to a private company for this kind of intelligence collection. Additionally, the fact that this process can be done more and more easily leads to concern over the security of these databses. This concern, unfortunately, will only increase in the near future as more entities practice such high levels of data collection and storage.
The paper was published on 13 September 2020, and is called “Chinese Open Source Data Collection, Big Data, And Private Enterprise Work For State Intelligence and Security: The Case of Shenzhen Zhenhua”, written by Christopher Balding and Robert Potter Et. Al. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3691999
The article I accessed in reading about this piece is titled “Zhenhua Data Leak: Personal Details of Millions Around World Gathered by China Tech Company”. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/zhenhua-data-full-list-leak-database-personal-details-millions-china-tech-company
A statement regarding concern over the threat of the CCP: https://www.baldingsworld.com/2020/09/14/personal-statement-on-shenzhen-zhenhua-data-leak/