#THREAD: #Chinese tech firm has compiled a database on tens of thousands of #British figures & their families for #China's intelligence agencies

Files on senior politicians & their families included in the database.

35,000 #Australians are in it. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/13/chinese-tech-firm-compiles-database-tens-thousands-british-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.

Of the 250,000 records recovered, there are 52,000 on Americans, 35,000 Australians, 10,000 Indian, 9,700 British, 5,000 Canadians, 2,100 Indonesians, 1,400 Malaysia.

There are 793 New Zealanders in the database, of whom 734 are tagged of special interest or politically exposed.

The Information includes birth dates, addresses, marital status, photographs, political associations, relatives & social media IDs.

It collates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram & 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 database was leaked to a US academic based in Vietnam, Professor Chris Balding, who until 2018 had worked at the elite Peking University before leaving China citing fears for his physical safety.

"China is absolutely building a massive surveillance state both domestically & internationally," Professor Balding said.

"They use a wide variety of tools — this one is taken primarily from public sources, there is non-public data in here, but it's mainly from public sources.

"If you're a 14-year-old daughter of a politician, then we now know that China's intelligence service is monitoring your social media commentary, and recording pieces of information that are of interest or may be of interest in the future."

One intelligence analyst said the database was "Cambridge Analytica on steroids", referring to the trove of personal information sourced from Facebook profiles in the lead up to the 2016 US election campaign.

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.