-Analysis-
PARIS — We’re all familiar with Edward Snowden’s revelations on U.S. surveillance, or the “Panama Papers” exposing data from tax havens. What we weren’t used to seeing were leaked documents from China landing on the Internet!
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But it’s there now, and very telling.
The documents, deemed credible by experts, come from a private company based in Shanghai, i-Soon, which offers data hacking services to public and private clients. The company operates in about 20 countries worldwide, particularly in Asian neighbors South Korea, India, and Taiwan.
Among the documents pirated by the hackers is a meticulous census of all roads and paths in Taiwan, the island living under threat of an invasion order by Beijing; data from foreign governments, technology companies, surveillance records of Chinese ethnic minorities or exiled opponents, or cyberattacks. It’s all for services billed at a premium, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Hacking from the state
i-Soon’s customers include the Chinese Ministry of State Security, the Chinese army, and the police: the state therefore calls on private subcontractors for certain actions — all of which is obviously illegal and officially denied. But in China, the private sector is never totally private, and is obliged by law to serve the security needs of the state when necessary.
We don’t know who leaked these documents, whether it was a “whistleblower” like Snowden, or an outside hacker, private or from an official state service.
The revelations in these documents are no real surprise to anyone who closely follows cyber warfare and public or private hacking. China is a major player, but it’s rare to have such an opportunity to see such evidence.
Quest for influence
Of course, all major nations are engaged in operations of surveillance, espionage, intelligence and influence. Cyber tactics have become one of the major fields of modern conflict.
China has evolved its model in recent years and has proceeded to what French researchers describe as a “Russianization” of its quest for influence. For Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a model in this respect, if you like, with a longstanding experience that the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group long embodied, with its Saint Petersburg “troll farms.”
In their newly published report by IRSEM, the research center of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces, Paul Charon and Jean-Jacques Jeangène-Vilmer explore Chinese “influence operations,” and rightly point out that “both public and private companies in China play an important role in collecting the data on which the effectiveness of influence operations depends.”
This is what the documents of i-Soon, a company caught in its own trap, have just demonstrated. A symbol of the new world in which digital spaces are a new frontline of geopolitics.
