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The Washington PostChina harvests masses of data on Western targets, documents showCate Cadell - Yesterday 5:13 PMChina is turning a major part of its internal Internet data surveillance network outward, mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings.China maintains a countrywide network of government data surveillance services ? called public opinion analysis software ? that were developed over the past decade and are used domestically to warn officials of politically sensitive information online.The software primarily targets China?s domestic Internet users and media, but a Washington Post review of bidding documents and contracts for over 300 Chinese government projects since the beginning of 2020 include orders for software designed to collect data on foreign targets from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other Western social media.The documents, publicly accessible through domestic government bidding platforms, also show that agencies including state media, propaganda departments, police, military and cyber regulators are purchasing new or more sophisticated systems to gather data.These include a $320,000 Chinese state media software program that mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics; a $216,000 Beijing police intelligence program that analyses Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan; and a Xinjiang cybercenter cataloguing Uyghur language content abroad.?Now we can better understand the underground network of anti-China personnel,? said a Beijing-based analyst who works for a unit reporting to China?s Central Propaganda Department. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their work, said they were once tasked with producing a data report on how negative content relating to Beijing?s senior leadership is spread on Twitter, including profiles of individual academics, politicians and journalists.These surveillance dragnets are part of a wider drive by Beijing to refine its foreign propaganda efforts through big data and artificial intelligence.They also form a network of warning systems designed to sound real-time alarms for trends that undermine Beijing?s interests.[Biden administration concerned about U.S. investments in Chinese tech companies with military or surveillance ties]?They are now reorienting part of that effort outward, and I think that?s frankly terrifying, looking at the sheer numbers and sheer scale that this has taken inside China,? said Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund who has conducted extensive research on China?s domestic public opinion network.?It really shows that they now feel it?s their responsibility to defend China overseas and fight the public opinion war overseas,? she said.Some of the Chinese government?s budgeting includes buying and maintaining foreign social media accounts on behalf of police and propaganda departments. Yet others describe using the targeted analysis to refine Beijing?s state media coverage abroad.The purchases range in size from small, automated programs to projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars that are staffed 24 hours a day by teams including English speakers and foreign policy specialists.The documents describe highly customizable programs that can collect real-time social media data from individual social media users. Some describe tracking broad trends on issues including U.S. elections.The Post was not able to review data collected by the systems but spoke to four people based in Beijing who are directly involved in government public opinion analysis and described separate software systems that automatically collect and store Facebook and Twitter data in real time on domestic Chinese servers for analysis.Twitter and Facebook both ban automated collection of data on their services without prior authorization. Twitter?s policy also expressly bars developers from gathering data used to infer a user?s political affiliation or ethnic and racial origin.?Our API provides real-time access to public data and Tweets only, not private information. We prohibit use of our API for surveillance purposes, as per our developer policy and terms,? said Katie Rosborough, a Twitter spokesperson, referring to the company?s Application Programming Interface (API), which allows developers to retrieve public data from the platform among other functions.Facebook did not respond to requests for comment about whether it is aware of the monitoring or whether several companies, universities and state media firms listed as supplying the software were authorized to collect data on its platform.China?s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
