Infiltration of Chinese Agents

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Human Rights Watch wrote the following:

China under the Chinese Communist Party is a one-party authoritarian state that systemically curbs fundamental rights. Under President Xi Jinping, the government has deepened repression at home and sought to muzzle critics abroad. It has arbitrarily detained hundreds of human rights defenders and lawyers, tightened control over civil society, media, and the internet, and deployed invasive surveillance technology. The government imposes particularly heavy-handed control in the ethnic minority regions of Xinjiang and Tibet. Since 2017, authorities in Xinjiang have arbitrarily detained an estimated one million Turkic Muslims. The government is encroaching on Hong Kong’s freedoms, including directly imposing national security legislation on the city. The government’s weeks-long coverup of the Covid-19 outbreak, including silencing health workers, contributed to the global spread of the coronavirus.

Source: China and Tibet

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 boasts of having the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party among its main clients.

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" from open-source material, 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".

The company's [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".



Of the 35,558 Australians on the database, there are state and federal politicians, military officers, diplomats, academics, civil servants, business executives, engineers, journalists, lawyers and accountants.

They range from the current and former prime ministers, to Atlassian billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, and business figures David Gonski and Jennifer Westacott.

But there are 656 of the Australians featured on the list as being of "special interest" or "politically exposed". Exactly what the company means by either of these terms is unexplained, but the people on the list are disparate in occupation and background, and there seems little to no explanation in who has made the list.

The list includes current Victorian Supreme Court Judge Anthony Cavanough, retired Navy Admiral and former Lockheed Martin chief executive Raydon Gates, former ambassador to China Geoff Raby, ex Tasmanian Premier Tony Rundle and former foreign minister Bob Carr.

Singer Natalie Imbruglia features in this list, along with One Nation co-founder David Oldfield, National Party President Larry Anthony, former treasurer Peter Costello's son Sebastian, ex-Labor MP Emma Husar, News Corp journalist Ellen Whinnett and rural businesswoman and ABC director Georgie Somerset.

"China is absolutely building out a massive surveillance state both domestically and internationally," Professor Balding told the ABC.

Source: China's 'hybrid war': Beijing's mass surveillance of Australia and the world for secrets and scandal

No doubt a corresponding database has been created on the Americans, the Brits and the citizens of many other nations of the world. You can bank on that.

The report credits Chinese President Xi Jinping with launching the operation, called the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), in 2014. ProPublica and the Times quote a University of California at Berkeley professor who claims that China’s propaganda and censorship operation is unmatched by any other nation in the world. "This is a huge thing," Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at UC Berkeley’s School of Information told the outlets. "No other country has that."

News about the coronavirus-related death of a Chinese doctor who had warned the public about the virus set off a massive propaganda and censorship effort to help the Chinese government regain control of the narrative inside the country about the rapidly growing crisis, according to a report. The response to the Feb. 7 death of Dr. Li Wenliang and other events during the early days of the virus outbreak are outlined in leaked documents reviewed by ProPublica and the New York Times in a jointly produced article that was published Saturday. Two main objectives of the Chinese government’s effort appeared to be making the virus impact seem less severe and making government officials appear to have a firmer grip on controlling the outbreak than they actually did, the report said.

Chinese officials also may have been concerned about sparking a panic, The Associated Press reported in April. It notes that Chinese leaders failed to act during a six-day stretch in January -- between the day they learned they were facing a pandemic and the day they informed the public -- even though hundreds of infected people were showing up at hospitals during the intervening days. China’s censors were worried that news about Wenliang’s death would set off a "butterfly effect" of subsequent news stories about the virus that could be damaging for the government, so they ordered news outlets not to promote stories about Wenliang and instructed social media sites to remove his name from lists of trending topics, the report said.

The censors also hired internet trolls to post "distracting chatter" on the internet to help influence public opinion as the coronavirus gradually became a bigger news story. The Chinese government also ordered security personnel to silence commentators whose views were not aligned with those of the government, according to the report. The leaked documents suggested a massive deployment of both people and technology – "and, presumably, lots of money" – to control the narrative, the report said. The documents include instructions on which words to avoid using in headlines, such as "incurable," and "fatal," and to avoid using the word "lockdown" in travel articles.

Source: China used internet troll ‘army’ to shape coronavirus narrative

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will soon issue a business advisory cautioning against using data services and equipment from firms linked to China and said it was "reviewing entities such as the Chinese manufacturer TCL," the world’s third-largest manufacturer of TV sets. DHS chief Chad Wolf said it had been discovered this year that the firm had "incorporated backdoors into all its TV sets, exposing users to cyber breaches and data exfiltration."

Source: US imposes additional visa restrictions on Chinese officials