A Huge Data Leak of 1 Billion Records Exposes China’s Vast Surveillance State

A massive store of data containing information on about one billion Chinese residents could be one of the biggest breaches of personal information in history.

Portions of the leaked data appeared last week on a known cybercrime forum from someone selling the cache for 10 bitcoins, or about $200,000, and was allegedly siphoned from a Shanghai police database stored in Alibaba’s cloud.

Although details of the breach remain scarce, portions of the data have been verified as authentic, suggesting at least some of the data is real. The origins of the data and how it came to be in the hands of an underground seller, whose motives aren’t known, is still unclear.

News of the alleged breach has gone largely unreported in mainland China where restrictions on speech and expression are tightly controlled, and internet access is censored and strictly restricted.

The breach, if authentic, raises questions about the vast scale of China’s surveillance state, the largest and most expansive in the world, and Beijing’s ability to keep that data secure. (Read more from “A Huge Data Leak of 1 Billion Records Exposes China’s Vast Surveillance State” HERE)

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