Cloud Hosting

Chinas near total access to Americans personal data poses a clear and present national security risk

Commentary

Could the CCP virus and its impact on Western economies and societies have actually been planned to facilitate Chinas ongoing bid to rule the world through the capture and manipulation of billions of peoples individual data?

If that sounds like an exaggeration, thats understandable.

Unfortunately, to deny the reality of whats truly going on is wishful thinking. The reality is that the Chinese regimes data theft operations have put U.S. national security and position of global leadership at risk.

To accomplish such a feat, China has been incredibly forward-looking in its data theft operations, which it has been perpetrating against its trading partners for decades. Americans remain their top target, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been successful in its efforts.

It is estimated that 80 percent of American adults have had all of their personal data stolen by the CCP, and the other 20 percent most of their personal data, saidBill Evanina, former director of theU.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center.

That data would potentially include financial information, medical records, political preferences, buying habits, passwords to various accounts, and much more. Let that sink in for a moment.

It should put the last three years in a new and quite disturbing lightor darkness, if you will.

When one accounts for how much the world has changedand continues to changein the wake of the CCP virus and the COVID-19 pandemic, its impossible to ignore just how much Beijing has leveraged those events to its strategic advantage.

Since the very beginning, its apparent that Beijing has been accessing and harvesting personal data by processing COVID tests in a Google-like fashionon a global scale.

As I mentioned in a previous post, China is the main source of viral tests and analysis. Its offer to provide testing labs and facilities seems to have been nothing less than a massive operation to gather Americans data in order to mine it and gain strategically important information on as many of us as possible.

In a 60 Minutes interview, Evanina said the labs were modern-day Trojan horses. Their true purpose was to help the Chinese regime gain a foothold to bring in equipment, collect DNA, and start mining your data.

Thats quite a statement. In essence, no such testing equipment and subsequent data mining would be possible on such a scale without a pandemic to justify it.

But, of course, the CCPs data theft efforts didnt begin or end with harvesting data from COVID tests. The regime has been using networking equipment and social media technology to spy and steal data for decades. Huawei and TikTok are just two of many examples of that practice. The net result is a tremendous strategic advantage for China. The CCP knows much more about Americans and the United Stateswhich the CCP considers its adversary in every sense of the wordthan Americans know about the Chinese.

Again, this isnt hyperbole. Its not just personal data but critical technological information that China is capturing at an unprecedented rate. The U.S. National Counterintelligence fears that China is vacuuming up data about the U.S. and its citizens not just to steal secrets from U.S. companies or to influence citizens but also to build the foundation of technological hegemony in the not-too-distant future.

But the CCP isnt just capturing massive amounts of data on and from Western nations, which is bad enough. With no legal, moral, or ethical restraints, Beijing has likely weaponized artificial intelligence (AI) to gain strategic advantages from its data theft operations.

According to Stephen Yates, chief executive of consultancy firm DC International Advisory, with regard to the CCPs abuse of the rest of the worlds data, China has weaponized artificial intelligence and a lot of other studies of the human process in ways that civilized countries wouldnt even allow, so we dont have any way to really know what this dark window of the future might be.

As noted in my Dec. 21, 2021,post, Just as AI and genomics enable DNA manipulation to help the human body fight all kinds of diseases, this same technology can also be used to create unique pathogens that only impact specific people. DNA-specific weapons can target a race, a gender, or even a family or individual with a specific DNA structure. This isnt just a possibilityits a probability, if not already a reality.

In recent months, some national security authorities have also warned of the increasing likelihood of just such a reality coming to the fore. They point to the escalation by the CCP in its efforts to capture and control every bit of data that enters the country, no matter the source. The CCP is deadly serious in those efforts, particularly regarding data from American and other Western firms that have a presence in China.

Thinking otherwise is simply not justified. The CCPs pandemic behavior showed the world just what kind of inhumanity its capable of in incontrovertible terms.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Follow

James R. Gorrie is the author of The China Crisis (Wiley, 2013) and writes on his blog, TheBananaRepublican.com. He is based in Southern California.

See original here:

Did Beijing Plan to Use the Pandemic to Steal Data on a Global Scale? - The Epoch Times