This month NPR reported on Chinese hacking of US data sources [2].  Reports of major data breaches are hardly news, nor are links to Chinese hackers.

The interesting part is speculation on what the goal of all this activity might be.

The article makes the case that Chinese hackers have and continue to accumulate massive amounts of data about Americans (they also have massive amounts of data about their own citizens, of course). 

But what is it for?  While sanctioned countries might need cash, the Chinese government doesn't need to fiddle around with credit card fraud or identity theft.  And, frankly, even if you monetized all of this stuff, it's hardly a drop in the bucket for the Chinese government. 

The NPR report suggests that all this data is fodder for large AI analyses.  The Chinese government collects and collates vast amounts of data on its own people.  It isn't far fetched to imagine using stolen data to create a similar effort to monitor the US and other countries.

And from what we know has been stolen, they have extensive data about almost all of the US.

I'll also note that businesses in China have also developed extremely powerful data analytic capabilities as a part of the global supply chain [1].  Manufacturers and distributors in China can tell you in detail what is going on in the US based on orders from US companies.  In many cases, they know more than the American companies do.  (Chinese businesses can watch Fox news all they want, but have no access to other US outlets, so their vision is rather skewed from that fact.)

While the US and other countries are open for China to read and analyzed, outside knowledge of China has rapidly closed off [1].  The pandemic accelerated the process, to the point that we have no reporting or contact with what is going on in China. 

So, we are blind and they can see everything.  In the Information Age, this is pretty much total dominance by China.

What could they do with this stuff?

For one thing, they almost certainly know everyone who works for the US government, and what they do.  Bad news for secret agents.  They also know all the key people in any organization of interest, and what they do.  Who has keys to the vault as the bank?  Chinese intelligence probably knows. Heck, they may know the combination already, but certainly know who to spy on to find out.

But what I would try to do, and what I think they are going to try to do, is make a complete, detailed model of the US.  Everyone and everything.  This model will, of course, reveal US military and strategic capabilities, and likely reveal "secret" plans before they have even started.  It will also predict decision making at all levels, from local school boards to the White House.

The ultimate goal, I say, would be to be able to manipulate such a model to influence and control the behavior of the US.  We have already seen how well-informed information war can influence big elections.  A more complete model could influence every decision-making process.  This would constitute complete control of the infosphere, and near complete control of the US.

Sigh.

I haven't got a conclusion.  Data breaches can't be undone, and likely won't stop. The horses have already been stolen, and the barn has no door to close anyway, because so much of the US is open. 

It is worth noting that the optimists who believed that the Internet could never be censored, nor blockaded at the border are being proved wrong.  China, especially, is succeeding in creating a separate infosphere that they control and we can't see.

From this perspective, all the paranoid ranting about Silicon Valley kind of misses the point.  Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, et al are annoying.  But they are basically in it for the money.  Great powers are in it for power.

Honestly, I can't blame China or any other state for wanting to protect themselves from other states, including the US. It's what I would want to do in their place.

And I'm sure that many Chinese strategists, along with their Russian counterparts, consider this fair turnabout.  The US lorded it over much of the world for many decades, including through data collection and social manipulation.

  1. Peter Hessler, The Peace Corps Breaks Ties with China, in The New HYorker. 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/16/the-peace-corps-breaks-ties-with-china
  2. Dina Temple-Raston, China's Microsoft Hack May Have Had A Bigger Purpose Than Just Spying, in NPR - Investigations, August 26, 2021. https://www.npr.org/2021/08/26/1013501080/chinas-microsoft-hack-may-have-had-a-bigger-purpose-than-just-spying