Updated: September 14, 2020 1:51:58 am
Through cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns and espionage, hybrid warfare seeks to incite social discord, disrupt economic activities, undermine institutions, and discredit political leaders and the intelligentsia.
Earlier this month, the Chinese-only website of Zhenhua Data Information Technology Co, the company that oversees foreign targets, was shot down shortly after The Indian Express approached him for comment. What kind of data have you collected on the targets, what does it mean when you say you are involved in a hybrid war, what is the cause for concern? Here are the key questions answered:
What does Zhenhua Data do?
It is directed at people and institutions in politics, government, business, technology, the media and civil society. Claiming to work with Chinese intelligence, military and security agencies, Zhenhua monitors the subject’s fingerprint on social media platforms, maintains an “information library”, which includes content not only from news sources, forums, but also from articles, patents and tender documents. , even recruitment positions. It is significant that you build a “relational database”, which records and describes the associations between individuals, institutions, and information. By collecting such massive data and weaving in public or sentiment analysis around these goals, Zhenhua offers “threat intelligence services.”
Not much of this data is publicly available, so what is the concern?
It is not the data itself, but the scope and use that can be put into it that generates red flags. Therefore, the Zhenhua 24 x 7 Clock collects personal information about the target from all social media accounts; keep track of the target’s friends and relationships; analyze posts, likes and comments from friends and followers; It even collects private information about movements such as geographical location through Artificial Intelligence tools.
Domestic security agencies use such data for law enforcement applications such as protest tracking, but in the hands of foreign agencies without supervision or supervision, such data can serve a variety of purposes. Seemingly innocuous granular information can be gathered into a larger framework for deliberate tactical maneuvers. That is the core of what Zhenhua himself flaunts his role in “hybrid warfare.”
So what is hybrid warfare?
As early as 1999, Unrestricted Warfare, a publication of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, drew the contours of hybrid warfare, a shift in the arena of violence from military to political, economic and technological. The new weapons in this war, wrote the authors, Colonel Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui, were those “closely linked to the lives of ordinary people.” And one morning “people will wake up to their surprise that quite a few kind and lovable things have started to have offensive and lethal characteristics.”
In fact, also within countries, political parties target the opposition through these same tools.
“One in two countries is giving hybrid war a chance since the Russian advance in 2014-15 (annexation of Crimea and undeclared conflict in eastern Ukraine). But few match China’s capacity, as we have seen during the Hong Kong protests last year, ”said a cybersecurity expert.
Does this monitoring violate any laws in India?
According to the Information Technology Rules of 2011, according to the Information Technology Act of 2000, personal data is “any information relating to a natural person, which directly or indirectly, in combination with other information available or that may be available … is able to identify that person. “However, this does not include information freely available or accessible in the public domain.
These rules also do not impose any conditions on the use of personal data for direct marketing, etc. Many business entities access and aggregate such information for targeted advertising. When it comes to third-party data collection (like what Zhenhua does), it’s a bit tricky. “The key point here,” said a data privacy expert who helped draft the new personal data protection bill, “is that the company is carrying it out without consent … a third party extracts your geographic location from social networking sites and shares it with a rival country’s intelligence will be considered illegal, at least in some advanced jurisdictions. ” But privacy laws are almost impossible to enforce in a foreign jurisdiction because they differ from country to country. That is unlikely to change anytime soon.
What is Zhinhua’s monitoring concern?
As the outbursts intensified along the Royal Line of Control, India gradually blocked more than 100 Chinese apps since June to engage in activities “detrimental to the sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, state security and public order “. But such moves are unlikely to affect an operation like Zhenhua’s.
There have been a number of recent reports of China’s attempts to cultivate potential assets for sensitive military, intelligence, or economic information in the United States and Europe via social media.
“Why does this company (Zhenhua) need processing centers in so many countries? If you don’t want the attention of the platforms you are scraping in droves, just use proxies, ”said Canberra expert Robert Potter, who helped authenticate the data. “The only plausible purpose is to develop the ability to track actionable data.”
Zhenhua uses the open information environment that liberal democracies take for granted to target individuals and institutions, Potter said. “The threat of surveillance and monitoring of foreign people by an authoritarian China is very real.”
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