(PresidentialWire.com)- A new report from The Washington Postv just revealed how the Chinese Communist Party is using its huge surveillance network and technology to harvest data of citizens of Western countries, including specific Western targets. The Post reviewed “hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings” to come to the shocking conclusion.
Intelligence shows how the Chinese Communist Party is using Western social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, and the data that can be obtained from these networks, to “equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets.”
And sometimes, the data doesn’t even need to be obtained maliciously – the information is willingly given up by social media network users who share aspects of their life with their followers on public profiles.
According to the report, the Chinese government is maintaining a network of government data surveillance services, known as public opinion analysis software, that have been developed over the last ten years. The software is used to warn government officially of any politically sensitive information that might be published online, and while it is usually used domestically, it’s now being deployed to collect data shared by foreign targets on social media platforms.
Documents seen by the Post, which include contracts and bidding filings for over 300 Chinese government projects since the start of 2020, show how the Chinese government repeatedly ordered for the gathering of data relating to specific foreign targets.
“These include a $320,000 Chinese state media software program that mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics; a $216,000 Beijing police intelligence program that analyzes Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan; and a cybercenter in Xinjiang, home to most of China’s Uyghur population, that catalogues the mainly Muslim minority group’s language content abroad,” The Post revealed.
Chinese analysts have argued that the system allows the Chinese Communist Party to “better understand” the network of “anti-China personnel” – but let’s be honest…this is just a fantastic way for the Chinese government to build intelligence on foreign enemies.
