The news that 700 U.S. citizens have been placed on a secret Chinese watch list has attracted widespread attention, following the revelation that 161 Australian citizens and 150 British citizens have been placed on a watch list, another example of China’s violation of human rights and privacy. U.S. media reported that China’s mass surveillance of Uighurs and foreigners has come to light after a security database of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau was compromised by hackers. Some experts say that other Chinese cities are developing or conducting the same kind of surveillance.
The New York Post obtained a surveillance list from a Shanghai public security monitoring database listing the identities of 697 U.S. citizens, including government workers, business leaders, celebrities and others. Their names, dates of birth and passport numbers are recorded in detail, and even include children, whose data was collected when they entered or transited through China from Pudong International Airport in 2018 and 2020.
Australian Values Coalition member Dr. Zhang Xiaogang, a computer science major, questioned the use of overseas citizen information collected by the Shanghai Public Security Bureau, and did not rule out the possibility that they may be luring key individuals on the watch list through some means to help China’s foreign infiltration and expansion strategy. Zhang called on democratic countries to quickly curb China’s surveillance practices.
Zhang Xiaogang said: “Some of the people on these lists are important figures, including the former head of Australia’s intelligence service, and the Chinese Communist Party can use this data to lay traps, threats and enticements on some of these people to force you to serve their continuous expansion and then influence those they want to influence through you. The incident itself reflects that the Chinese Communist dictatorship keeps collecting all kinds of data so that they can control the whole world in the future. Countries must keep the Chinese Communist Party in check.
A source close to the system, who goes by the pseudonym Song Lin, told the station that the Shanghai Public Security Bureau’s collection of information on incoming foreign citizens is at the lowest level from a technical perspective, and that in recent years the CCP has revealed that state security and support forces (whose main responsibility is intelligence acquisition) hack into overseas websites to obtain confidential and large amounts of information on citizens, and that the CCP is building a high-tech totalitarian regime for the whole world.
Song Lin said: the current exposure is the Public Security Bureau through the entry and exit records to obtain the personal information of foreign citizens, the Public Security Bureau is far less technically advanced than the State Security and support forces, they launched a large-scale hacking behavior, hacking into overseas servers to obtain overseas user information, there is similar to Huawei, Shake, through spy software to collect overseas information, the Chinese Communist Party wants to rule the world through high-tech totalitarian power.
Late last month, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation revealed that a security database of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau (PSB) was hacked late last year and over 1.1 million documents and surveillance records of the PSB were found, and that the PSB has included passport information and photos of over 5,000 foreign citizens in its database since 2017, including at least 161 Australian citizens, 150 British citizens, and the just-disclosed 687 U.S. citizens.
The leaked surveillance information also shows that the Shanghai Public Security Bureau monitors 25,000 Xinjiang Uighurs, political dissidents and others, and that about 8,000 Uighurs are on the “suspected terrorist” list.
Samantha Hoffman, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told Australian media earlier that she had come across a similar Chinese public security database in her research. Other Chinese cities and provinces are also developing or conducting the same kind of surveillance as the Shanghai Public Security Bureau.
Information from the database, originally obtained by Australian cybersecurity firm Internet 2.0, reportedly said the records provide a useful basis for how China uses technology to build surveillance systems and how it uses data as a means of control, suggesting that China is seeking to control all data within its law enforcement and political control.
The list shows that personal information from executives at companies such as Apple, Microsoft, GE Healthcare, Pfizer, Merrill Lynch and others; Grammy Award-winning singer Ashanti Douglas is detailed in the records.
An employee of the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs, a female documentary filmmaker, and a researcher or professor at a U.S. university are also on the watch list.
The State Department and the Chinese Embassy in Washington have not yet commented on the reports.
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