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Dagbladet was able to reveal on Monday that a Chinese company has mapped more than 700 Norwegians, including several Norwegian community leaders.
The company will have ties with China’s security services, Dagbladet was told.
The publicly available information is compiled into a database, with more than two million entries from across the western world. Dagbladet has gained access to the database containing the Norwegians.
Among them are several of Norway’s most prominent politicians, several well-known social leaders and criminals, but also other unknown individuals.
Norwegian Community Leaders in the Chinese Database
Ap-Jonas on the list
Among the politicians on the list is Labor Party leader and former Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.
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The same goes for Liberal Party leader and minister Guri Melby, FRP parliamentary leader Harald Tom Nesvik, Storting representative Roy Steffensen, and former FRP vice president Ketil Solvik-Olsen.
Rita Ottervik, the mayor of the Labor Party in Trondheim, former LO leader Gerd Kristiansen and Foreign Ministry communications manager Trude Måseide are also on the list. Everyone is informed about Dagbladet coverage.
– It’s completely unknown to me. I suppose this is a consequence of my time as a minister, where I had several meetings and visits with Chinese authorities. Of course, he will verify the case, writes Nesvik in an SMS to Dagbladet.
– It is not surprising that these lists are made where information is collected, and this is probably not the only one that exists, says the representative of FRP Steffensen.
Police and industry
Other names on the list also include several leaders in the Norwegian Police, including the head of the PST, Hans Sverre Sjøvold, and the chief of police in the Oslo police district, Beate Gangås. But Norway’s chief of police, Police Director Benedicte Bjørnland at the Police Directorate, is no listed in the database.
The Oslo Police District does not want to comment on the case.
Equinor’s new CEO, Anders Opedal, is also on the list, but neither he nor the company want to comment.
PST: – Cheats to recruit Norwegians
Criminals mapped
29 of the people on the list are listed in the column “Person of special interest”, or persons of special interest.
All of them have been previously convicted of, among other things, corruption, terrorism, fraud and drug-related crimes.
Some of the names are mentioned multiple times, but the only difference in the entries is in a column that describes the type of crime for which they have been convicted.
The profile texts appear to be summaries of various news articles about the convicted Norwegians. Dagbladet has used various wordings in Internet searches, but has not been able to find similar compilations of words.
This may indicate that the profile text has been edited or written specifically for the list.
This is how China uses DNA mapping
– Not seen
One of the names on the organized crime tab of the Chinese list is Shahid Rasool. Today, Rasool runs a gym on Mortensrud in Oslo and spends much of his time helping young people emerge from a criminal career.
The information collected on Rasool is based on a 1999 conviction in which he was punished for several episodes of violence, robbery and extortion. The authors of the database have classified the former leader of a criminal gang in the organized crime tab.
When Dagbladet tells him he’s on the list, he says he’s surprised his name is among the 700 Norwegians mentioned.
The ex-gangster despairs
– I have not seen or heard of this, says Rasool.
Blackmail appears as a keyword in a short profile associated with your name.
– Have you received any inquiries that can be traced to this list?
– I have not received any offers from the Chinese mafia, he says and laughs.
– But I often get calls from unknown numbers. So I don’t answer. I don’t want to be ripped off, says Rasool, who has left his criminal life behind.
He believes that all the information about him on the list is publicly available through Google.
– They are facts that go back 30 years. That’s the stupid thing about Google. The past never goes away, says Shahid Rasool.
The massive attack marked “none”
– Commercial Operation
– They have collected personal information about people with influence and their loved ones. Through the list, they can track community leaders and their families, says David Robinson, from cybersecurity company Internet 2.0 to Dagbladet.
Internet 2.0 is a cybersecurity company based in Canberra, Australia, and claims to have managed to recover the information of some 25,000 people from the database.
The list that Dagbladet has received contains, among other things, public information about various social leaders and the type of position they hold. It also contains links to open websites where it is written about people.
The Guardian has contacted a representative for Zhenhua Data who is said to have stated that “the report is very false.”
According to Robinson on Internet 2.0. The Zhenhua data should have mainly had business reasons behind the database.
– It seems that it is a commercial operation to build a platform to sell information to the Chinese security service, he tells Dagbladet.
– Exercise pressure
IT expert Torgeir Waterhouse is aware of the Chinese leak.
– Who may be interested in this type of information?
– I think there are many who may be interested in such a broad view of people, says Waterhouse and continues:
– It is no secret that many states collect information they believe they can later benefit from about people in many countries, and it is naive to think that this is the only example of such collection, but it is on a large scale.
According to Waterhouse, the people mentioned in the database appear as people with power or proximity to power, or influence in society and its environment.
PST: – Can be mapping
In a comment to Dagbladet, PST puts the list in potential context with its own national threat assessment from earlier this year.
– PST has previously said that China is one of several countries conducting intelligence activities against Norway. We are also aware that foreign intelligence services cooperate with commercial actors to obtain the information they need. As we have written in our 2020 national threat assessment, intelligence services in foreign states will conduct surveys and collect contact information on employees of Norwegian companies, Annett Aamodt, PST Senior Advisor, tells Dagbladet.
She adds:
– Contact information, such as phone numbers and emails, could be a starting point for a more specific technical compilation later. Examples of technical acquisition can be infiltrations into the network or eavesdropping. This list may appear as a kind of survey, says Aamodt on PST.
Reminder
Waterhouse believes this leak is a reminder that we must think about safety and preparedness at all levels.
– We must be aware that there may be some outside the country who want to misuse the information to achieve their objectives, he says.
– Does this leak pose a threat?
– I would assume that in principle it is not necessarily a threat in itself, but it can be uncomfortable to know or speculate if you are standing there, and the use of the data can be part of a threatening activity, answers Waterhouse.
