Recently, the U.S. media revealed that tens of millions of U.S. government personnel data have been stolen by Chinese hackers for more than eight years, and that China is rewriting the intelligence war between the U.S. and China by using its vast information aggregation and surveillance capabilities. What is the ultimate goal of China’s growing espionage and infiltration capabilities?
Chinese hackers have stolen nearly 750 million pieces of personal information since 2012
Foreign Policy magazine began releasing three consecutive exclusive investigative reports on the 21st, interviewing more than thirty current and former U.S. intelligence and national security officials to provide an inside look at the U.S.-China race for data intelligence over the last decade.
The key event occurred in 2012, when U.S. intelligence officials first became aware that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which manages information on federal government employees and contractors, had been hacked. In two hacking campaigns, the U.S. government had more than 21.5 million employees’ names, social security numbers, health status, criminal records, financial records and several other background check records, some containing fingerprint information, stolen.
A former NSA official interviewed said the OPM intrusion “opened up a global Pandora’s Box problem.”
Around 2013, U.S. intelligence units became aware of an unusual set of circumstances. As U.S. intelligence officers operated in African and European countries, they were quickly targeted by Chinese intelligence systems.
Chinese hacking continues, moving from targeting U.S. government departments to U.S. travel or finance-related businesses. in 2014, nearly 80 million user information was stolen from Anthem, the second largest U.S. health insurance company; between 2014 and 2018, more than 500 million user information was stolen from Marriott International (USA); in 2016, more than 130,000 sensitive U.S. Navy In 2016, more than 130,000 people in the U.S. Navy had their sensitive information stolen; and in 2017, 147 million user profiles were stolen from the U.S. Consumer Information Company (Equifax).
Foreign Policy reports that Chinese intelligence officers have used this vast amount of stolen information to identify U.S. intelligence officials. “Who can control the data, who can protect it and who can steal it and use it for economic and security goals is defining the global conflict between Washington and Beijing,” the report reads.
China’s data scramble ambitions
“Their (the Chinese Communist Party) goal is to infiltrate various institutions in the U.S. economy, politics, society and slowly begin to influence U.S. interests at the individual level. Taking control of the data is an important piece of the puzzle for the CCP.” Brigadier General Robert Spalding III, former senior director of the White House National Security Council, told the station that the U.S. government was aware of the problem as early as 2012, but delayed acting on it, which is even more problematic.
Reports reveal that China began to reorganize the resources of the Department of State Security around 2010 to focus more on data intelligence. Specific actions included the creation of a database used to track espionage flights and passengers, the moving of China’s intelligence agencies closer to data centers, and the hacking of passenger data at Bangkok International Airport.
These layouts paved the way for future large-scale data theft and hacking operations by China.
That’s why, Spalding said, when he joined the White House and worked on the National Security Strategy report, he advocated a secure and clean Internet for the American people and defined China as a “strategic competitor.
Consensus at the End of Obama’s Administration: “China Threat” Has Surpassed Russia
The second of Foreign Policy’s investigative reports focuses on the Obama years. According to the report, the U.S. intelligence system in China was undermined at the time, and China’s severe information retrenchment made it difficult to obtain intelligence. Xi Jinping‘s “anti-corruption” campaign also affected the operation of the U.S. intelligence system in China. On the other hand, Chinese officials are also more fearful of talking and communicating with Americans in private, fearing that leaks could lead to their liquidation.
The Obama administration has tried and failed to reach an agreement with China on the theft of information.
At the end of the Obama administration, even though there was a threat of Russian interference in the U.S. election, there was a consensus in the U.S. intelligence community that China was the more serious problem and that the potential threat had surpassed that of Russia, the report said.
“He (the Chinese Communist Party) ultimately wants to be the engineer of the human soul, which is a naked global ambition.” U.S.-based Humane China President Zhou Fenglock said he has been advocating for years for China’s expansion of its totalitarian ambitions through digital surveillance, but the U.S. has only grown alarmed in recent years by “gullibility and wishful thinking. Gullibility is a lack of understanding of the CCP’s power and ambition in this area; wishful thinking is that many people still have an appeasementist attitude and don’t see the CCP as a global enemy like the Soviet Union used to be (viewed by the U.S.).”
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