The Chinese government in Beijing has amassed enough stolen data from the United States to effectively create “dossiers” on every American citizen, a U.S. Senate panel was told last week.
Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday was Matthew Pottinger, who served as a deputy national security adviser during the Trump administration.
“Assembling dossiers on people has always been a feature of Leninist regimes, but Beijing’s penetration of digital networks worldwide, including using 5G networks … has really taken this to a new level,” Pottinger told panel members, according to the Washington Examiner.
“So, the Party now compiles dossiers on millions of foreign citizens around the world, using the material that it gathers to influence, target, intimidate, reward, blackmail, flatter, humiliate, and ultimately divide and conquer,” he said.
He added: “Beijing’s stolen sensitive data 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.”
In July, the U.S. and its allies blamed China for a massive cyberattack against Microsoft. The U.S. Justice Department also alleged that Chinese spies waged a separate hacking campaign, the Examiner reported.
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The Biden administration expressed concerns to Chinese officials about “malicious cyber activity,” but stopped short of imposing the same type of sanctions that Russian hackers faced from the U.S. earlier this year over the SolarWinds cyberattack against that tech company’s customers, the Examiner reported.