by Eric Lendrum
On Wednesday, a U.S. Senate panel was told by a former national security official that the Chinese government has amassed enough stolen data to be able to create a “dossier” on every American citizen, Fox News reports.
The startling report was made by Matther Pottinger, a deputy national security adviser from the Trump Administration, during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Assembling dossiers on people has always been a feature of Leninist regimes,” Pottinger explained. “But Beijing’s penetration of digital networks worldwide, including using 5G networks…has really taken this to a new level.”
“Beijing’s stolen sensitive data,” Pottinger continued, “is sufficient to build a dossier on every single American adult, and on many of our children too, who are fair game under Beijing’s rules of political warfare.” This information could subsequently be used by China to “influence, target, intimidate, reward, blackmail, flatter, humiliate, and ultimately divide and conquer” its enemies, including the United States itself.
Multiple warnings have been made about the rise of China’s access to digital and electronic information through various means, both covert and overt. One prominent example is the Chinese government’s ownership of the company ByteDance, which owns the social media app TikTok. TikTok, which is most often used to produce short videos of users lip-syncing to famous songs, is extremely popular among the youngest generation of Americans, known as Generation Z or “Zoomers.” As a result, any information used to create an account on TikTok is ultimately vulnerable to being recorded by the Chinese government.
China has also been credibly accused of direct hacking attacks against American assets, including a cyberattack against the company Microsoft in July. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has also tied China to other cyberattacks in recent months. But despite this, Joe Biden has refused to implement any further sanctions or other restrictive measures on China in retaliation, leading to growing accusations of corruption and deeply-vested personal or business ties to China that are actively prohibiting him from taking action.
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Eric Lendrum reports for American Greatness.
