Elisabeth Braw directs the Modern Deterrence project at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies.
LONDON — It’s time to revive Britain’s Word War II-era warning: “You never know who’s listening. Careless talks costs lives.”
It’s a slogan that has regained currency in the age of social media. Our careless online talk may not necessarily cost lives, but it nonetheless has the potential to undermine our national security. When it comes to the social media profiles of millions of Westerners, China is listening in.
In the Facebook era, we’ve grown accustomed to posting intimate details of our lives online. We share photos of our children, our spouses, ourselves. Even Ivanka Trump, a U.S. presidential adviser with top-security clearance who really should know better, cheerfully posted on a picture of her family on social media to wish Americans a happy thanksgiving last year.
So it’s important to remember that our information-sharing is not as harmless as we like to think. Earlier this month, Chris Balding, an American professor who until 2018 taught at Peking University, revealed a frightening collection of data held by a Chinese firm with extensive links to the Chinese Communist Party. The company, Zhenhua Data, is hoovering the internet for information about sundry interesting individuals, collecting data on at least 2.4 million to date.
Western firms collect information about our internet use all the time (that’s what cookies are for). The difference is that they don’t, usually, feed it to oppressive governments.
Balding received the mega data-dump from a brave contact with access to Zhenhua Data’s systems. The depository — taken from a database called the Overseas Key Individuals Database (OKIDB) — includes famous, semi-famous and not-very-famous names: Boris Johnson, Prime Minister Modi of India and other politicians from around the world along with their families, business leaders, the singer Natalie Imbruglia, military officers, diplomats, academics, journalists and lawyers.
It features “biographies and service records of aircraft carrier captains and up-and-coming officers in the U.S. Navy, family charts of foreign leaders, including relatives and children,” the Washington Post reported.
Using primarily open-source material, Zhenhua Data was able to collect the birth dates, addresses, marital status and political affiliations of countless Westerners, along with information about their children and other relatives.
Not surprisingly, alarm is spreading. In Italy, for example, where some 4,500 people have been catalogued by Zhenhua Data, parliament has launched an investigation.
To be sure, Western firms collect information about our internet use all the time (that’s what cookies are for). The difference is that they don’t, usually, feed it to oppressive governments.
Zhenhua Data, by contrast, counts among its largest customers the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party. Experts say Beijing has essentially outsourced big data collection.
The details contained in the mass database could be used to blackmail individuals on it. Like all intelligence, it could be used to better understand how Westerners in all walks of life make decisions. And it could be used to build a sophisticated picture of civic life in our societies — including its weak points. An Australian intelligence officer told the country’s Financial Review newspaper that the database “represents a global mass surveillance system on an unprecedented scale.”
Unfortunately, we’re making Beijing’s work exceptionally easy. One of the pillars of liberal democracy is freedom of speech, but we seem to treat it as freedom to chatter. No detail, no thought is too insignificant to share in cyberspace. Last year, people spent an average of 144 minutes per day on social media worldwide, up from 90 minutes as recently as 2012.
As I documented in my book “God’s Spies,” about the Stasi’s subversion of East Germany’s churches during the Cold War, East German authorities expended considerable effort recruiting and running agents who could get information about their countrymen’s opinions and habits, or the travails of their children.
Today, we just put the information online for everyone to see. With such generous sharing, our adversaries don’t need armies of in-person snoopers.
Zhenhua Data’s CEO, Wang Xuefeng, has endorsed the idea of manipulating public opinion as a form of hybrid warfare. Beijing already engages in non-conventional aggression, intended to undermine our societies: It conducts cyberattacks, disinformation and predatory business practices where it, for example, subsidizes Chinese firms to help them defeat Western competitors.
Our careless online talk has the potential to undermine our national security | Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images
If we’re to protect our way of life, we have to make it harder for our adversaries to undermine it.
In decades past, generations of young men were asked to serve their countries through military service. Today most Western governments place no such demands on their young people or anybody else. That’s because the threat of territorial conquest has decreased.
But with other countries still trying to do us harm, there are things we can do to help keep our countries safe — and these are much less onerous than what previous generations did for theirs.
These things include educating ourselves about what to do in case of, say, a cyberattack on the electric grid, or learning to distinguish real news from disinformation. It also includes not being careless about our social media behavior. Don’t post about your kids or your romantic adventures; treat your friends to the information in person. Don’t let the whole world know where you are, or what policies you support.
The people on your social networks probably don’t care about what you’re doing as much as you think. But Wang Xuefeng and the Chinese government may be far more interested than you can imagine.