Zhenhua data leak: A Chinese military contractor collects data from hundreds of Czechs

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The Chinese company, which has close ties to the local People's Liberation Army, has collected profiles of hundreds of prominent Czechs. From ministers to their children to police officers. It is part of a leaked massive database of Western officials, to which Aktuálně.cz has gained access. The company claims the data will help lead to a great revival of the Chinese nation and advertises the spread of misinformation and conflict in the West. While former Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka (CSSD) went to deepen economic cooperation with communist China at the summit in Budapest in 2017, the small Chinese company Zhenhua Data Technology from Shenzhen set out to compile a list of hundreds of prominent Czechs and their children and others that year. relatives.

Automated systems, even under the supervision of operators assign photographs, links to profiles on social networks, analyze contributions published by interested parties media mentions and their family relationships to the names of politicians, security staff or entrepreneurs. This is how the Chinese were interested in, for example, members of the British royal family or the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the leader of the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson.

Among the monitored Czechs are BIS director Michal Koudelka, Minister of Defense Lubomír Metnar, former Minister of Justice Robert Pelikán, number two of the ANO movement Jaroslav Faltýnek and President Miloš Zeman. And many others.

Zhenhua, which ranks the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Liberation Army among its main customers, makes no secret of the fact that it does not collect data for normal marketing purposes, but for the needs of the Chinese government and secret services.

On her now-shut down website, she described herself as a pioneer in using large amounts of data for hybrid warfare. At the same time, she stated that she was aiming to transfer the conflicts that take place on social media to the "real environment". According to her, this will lead to struggles in the West between the state and society or between individual social groups.

Until now, Zhenhua has done so unnoticed by the world. But now it is becoming the center of an international scandal. Her dataset called Overseas Key Individuals Database (OKIDB) leaked out of her servers through a source. A Chinese whistleblower approached American academic Chris Balding, who had previously worked at Peking University, then left China for fear of his safety.

Whistleblower, in the past, has focused on the Chinese technology giant Huawei, which is suspected of spying for the Chinese government in the West. The database is now shared by a group of media, including the Australian Financial Review , the British Daily Telegraph, the Canadian Globe and Mail , the Indian Express and the American Washington Post . Aktuálně.cz analyzes Czech records.

In the part of the leaked database, which Aktuálně.cz acquired, are the names of seven hundred Czechs. Most likely, this is just a fragment of what the Chinese military contractor collected. Experts from the cybersecurity company Internet 2.0 , to whom Balding passed the data, managed to restore about a quarter of a million records from a database that contained data for a total of 2.4 million people.

Thus, the identity of approximately one tenth of the observed is known. In the Czech Republic, among them are diplomats, employees of security institutions and politicians. Both opponents and supporters of rapprochement with the communist power. The director of the BIS, Michal Koudelka, who is himself on the monitored list, told Aktuálně.cz that counterintelligence is dealing with the case.

Koudelka said, at the moment, we are analyzing the data obtained, so it would be premature to comment on its content. If China is creating data from people who are interested in the Czech Republic, it would be logical for my name to be among them. This is just another proof that Chinese intelligence The services try to obtain any information and in any form. This is a risk that we have been drawing attention to for a long time.

Ivan Langer said in response to the Chinese company's activities that it fits into the picture, which included a warning from the National Office for Cyber ​​and Information Security of December 2018. The office pointed out the threat that the Chinese company Huawei may be involved in the state's critical infrastructure.

Langer told Aktuálně.cz, if your information is valid, it can undoubtedly be taken as another argument why protect the critical infrastructure of the state from technologies originating from Chinese IT companies. It is another raised warning finger. He comments soberly on the practices of the company. It's part of a widespread trend where such information is used not only for commercial purposes, but also for strategic security.

Aktuálně.cz also identified in the records a relative of a high ranking Czech diplomat in Hanoi, Vietnam, as well as the names of several other relatives of diplomats who represent the Czech Republic in the world.

Chinese interest in the children of influential Czechs

Individuals are divided into groups. In the lists, the Chinese paid great attention not only to members of the Czech political or academic elite, but also to their children. They were labeled "Relative or Close Associate (RCA)" or a relative or close associate.

In 2017, for example, they now registered the only four-year-old son of the now former Minister of Agriculture Marian Jurečka (KDU-ČSL). A year earlier, he had stood up for his People's Fellow Daniel Herman, who had received the Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama at the Ministry of Culture.

This is just another proof that the Chinese intelligence services are trying to obtain any information and in any form. This is a risk that we have been drawing attention to for a long time. -BIS Director Michal Koudelka

Jurečka said, I want to ask the Office for Personal Data Protection and I am ready to contact the representatives of the security forces if this procedure is legal and how it can be responded to.

At the same time, he noted that as a man who, as a minister and member of the State Security Council, had access to information from the secret services, he is not surprised by the activity of a Chinese company. It fits the mosaic that the Chinese government is paying significant attention to the Czech Republic so that it can use its influence and use us to destabilize the European Union and NATO.

In the same way, Zhenhua entered in her database the son of the Prague expressor Pavel Bém, who is a supporter of Tibet and a critic of China. Ex-deputy Kateřina Jacques, who formed a group of friends of Tibet during her time in the Chamber of Deputies or was a member of a similar club of friends of Taiwan, has her ex-husband and son registered in the database - apart from herself.

According to her, this is far from the first experience of this type, after working at the Office of the Government during the term of Prime Minister Vladimír Špidla, she became the victim of a cyber attack by Czech neo-Nazis. It's an extremely unpleasant affair, but I had to learn to live with these things. But it's not a reason to stop getting involved.

However, the Chinese professing a hybrid war and the security forces of the communist state also lead in their database the adult son Vladimír Mlynář, the head of communication of the PPF group, which has 300 billion crowns in lending in China. The miller declined to comment. As Aktuálně.cz pointed out, the credit company Home Credit, which falls under the PPF of the richest Czech Petr Kellner, last year financed a secret campaign trying to influence public opinion in favor of China in the Czech Republic.

The list also includes the daughter of Jiří Šlégr, a former deputy for the CSSD, Jessica, the mother of former Minister of the Interior Ivan Langer Marie or the wife of an exposition for the CSSD and a member of the Czech Radio Council Vítězslav Jandák. The company also included in its inventory the wife of the communist MP Miroslav Grebeníček, who sits in the Czech Republic China group in the Chamber of Deputies.

Monitoring of tens of thousands of prominent Americans and Australians

Of course, the Czechs are not alone in this. An international consortium of journalists has so far identified 51,000 prominent Americans, 35,000 Australians, 10,000 Indians, the same number of Britons and 5,000 Canadians in the Chinese database. According to experts who analyzed these parts of the leaked data, most of the data comes from public sources. Nevertheless, they declare the activity risky. Just because data is open to everyone doesn't mean its owners want it to be collected and linked in bulk.

Concerns about the misuse of so-called big data are increasingly being discussed among experts, even in the case of Western companies such as Facebook. While in democratic countries, companies must operate within the boundaries of local law, in this case, a company that massively collects personal data openly admits that it will offer it to Chinese security forces to disrupt Western democracies and wage hybrid warfare.

The Zhenhua company itself boasts in its promotional materials, which Aktuálně.cz had the opportunity to get acquainted with, that it has twenty centers around the world, which automatically send the collected personal data to China using robots. Paradoxically, they often use the systems of giant Western companies. According to them, they can pump and connect data from many social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube.

Facebook spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois has already announced that the social network has blocked Zhenhua. "Massing public data, which seems to be what this company has done on a number of services, including Facebook, is against our rules, Bourgeois said. Representatives of Twitter and Linkedin also expressed a similar opinion.

Robert Potter, co-founder of the Australian cybersecurity company Internet 2.0, which processed the leaked data and provided it to a consortium of journalists, said such massively linked open source data on millions of people could be extremely valuable to intelligence services.

Internet 2.0 works for US and Australian security forces. He likens the leak to a scandal surrounding the British company Cambridge Analytica, which in 2018 turned out to be using the data of millions of people obtained from the social network Facebook to influence elections in the USA and elsewhere.

However, a security expert who analyzed a larger sample than the Czech one - tens of thousands of Americans' records - told the Washington Post that the quality of the data was not high enough to be useful to the military or secret services. Zhenhua Data Technology's statements are "very ambitious," according to an expert working for the US military.

However, in Australia, which has long been facing intense Chinese influence, the findings caused a stir. "If you are a 14-year-old daughter of politics, you now know that the Chinese secret services are monitoring your comments on social media and recording snippets of information that suits them or may be useful in the future," said Chinese influence expert Clive Hamilton of Charles Sturt University in Australia. According to him, China uses artificial intelligence in an extremely sophisticated way.

According to other experts, the revealed operation is just a continuation of the Chinese government's years of efforts to expand the Communist apparatus's ability to collect and analyze massive amounts of data. Although it may not be usable immediately. On its blog on the Chinese social network WeChat, Zhenhua described the Communist government's earlier efforts to conduct open source intelligence activities as very ineffective.

However, the unknown author boasts that this changed when China approved the law on state intelligence in 2017, which, according to him, meant "healthy development of the intelligence industry". The paragraphs then came into force that "according to the law, all organizations and citizens must support national information operations, cooperate in them and coordinate their activities according to them, and guard all secrets about national information operations that are known to them".

Zhenhua Data Technology has not yet answered questions from the news consortium. She responded to the interest by turning off the site. However, a man who first picked up a phone for reporters at the company's Chinese headquarters said when asked about the connection to the Chinese communist security apparatus and the use of data, the questions violate the company's trade secret. "It's not appropriate to detect them," he added without introducing himself.

There is no direct evidence that the Chinese government is using the data collected. However, on the website and in the marketing materials that Aktuálně.cz studied, the company describes itself as a patriotic company supplying mainly to the Chinese army.

The job advertisements on the Chinese website, which attracted new employees, reveal even more. For example, he is looking for a "sales representative for the military industry" who will "manage sales to the army and the (communist) party." Another employee who worked at Zhenhua described his work as "finding out what Western data military customers need," according to the Australian Financial Review.

But Zhenhua doesn't just offer raw data. It also advertises an "intervention in public opinion" modeled on the so-called troll farms operating in Russia and manipulating public opinion through social networks.

"Social networks can manipulate reality and weaken a country's government, social system, military or economy," the company writes in an article on its now-discontinued website, saying it could lead to internal conflict, social polarization and radicalization in the country. . " Zhenhua summarizes his techniques as hybrid warfare and offers them as cheaper than traditional warfare.

Monitored deputies, senators, ministers or governors

In the Czech Republic, it has not yet put together such detailed data on Zhenhua's celebrities. He registers politicians or representatives of influential institutions under the name Politically Exposed Person (PEP). In addition to the already mentioned Czech politicians and top correspondents, this category also includes former Minister of the Interior and current Minister of Defense Lubomír Metnar. His editors also asked for their opinion, but Metnar apologized for his busy schedule.

However, the monitored ones also include the director of the section for radiation protection of the State Office for Nuclear Safety Karla Petrová, the former head of state administration from the Ministry of the Interior Josef Postránecký or now former Minister of Justice Robert Pelikán (ANO), another critic of servile approach to China.

However, Lubomír Zaorálek (ČSSD) is also in the company of his colleagues from the government. There are also other supporters of the warming of Czech-Chinese politics, President Miloš Zeman.

Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (YES) is not in the part of the data that the experts managed to restore. On the other hand, the Chinese register his right hand Jaroslav Faltýnek (YES), for whom they also have a detailed list of companies with which he is associated.

The company also included in the records the former head of the Office of the Government or the analytical department of the Castle, Radek Augustin, the vice-chairman of the Antimonopoly Office, Petr Solský, and the former Minister of Justice, Pavel Němec.

A number of current or former deputies and senators are also present. For example, the chairwoman of the parliamentary committee for defense, Jana Černochová (ODS), who has long warned of the risks associated with China. "It is, of course, disturbing information and proof that China's intelligence activity in the world is very active and that the Chinese regime uses not only standard intelligence services for it, but also private companies," Černochová told Aktuálně.cz.

However, Václav Klučka (ČSSD) is also needed in the database. In 2017, he was in a group of lawmakers who flew for Chinese money to "exchange experiences" to a communist country. The database also includes the former President of the Senate - now his Vice-President - Milan Štěch (ČSSD). In 2016, he was one of the signatories to the criticized statement by the four highest constitutional officials against them against the visit of the Dalai Lama.

However, a private company connected to the Chinese government also collects information about Czechs who are convicted of financial crime or were or are suspected of it in its database for an unknown reason. Lobbyist Ivo Rittig also appeared on the list among people marked as Special Interest Person (SIP). It has a detailed profile in the database, including a list of companies with which it is associated.

The case of the former director of Čep, Tomáš Kadlec, convicted of tax evasion and unfavorable transactions in a state-owned company, or the case of the boss of the alcohol mafia Radek Březina, is also summarized in English. The former chairwoman of the Energy Regulatory Office, Alena Vitásková, now the operator of a private institute, is also included.

According to the Aktuálně.cz analysis, the Czech part of the data is relatively incomplete. The fields reserved for the year and place of birth, address or telephone are in most cases empty. For example, the Washington Post described that, in the case of U.S. Army officers, the database also contains details and personnel about their children or their chances of promotion.

Events at the police academy or ministry

However, the Chinese company does not assign information only to people, but also to institutions. The list examined by Aktuálně.cz includes, in addition to foreign embassies, the police academy, the Ministry of Health, the Office of the Permanent Representative of the Czech Republic to NATO, the Czech Technical University, the Academy of Sciences and the mobile operator O2.

Also included is the CSSD, some of whose representatives have been promoting rapprochement with China in recent years. Each of the subjects is assigned a unique numeric string, which can then be used to pair specific information that Chinese robots capture in public space.

The Washington Post described that similarly, for example, American warships have a unique designation, to which the system assigns contributions that sailors make to social networks.

This is not the first time that the risks of public data on the Internet have been shown. In 2018, it turned out that a mobile application that records and publishes user exercises and running routes revealed the location of secret US military bases where soldiers trained. Similarly, contributions or photographs on social networks often indicate where they were published or where they were taken.

"Ninety percent of the military's usable data can be analyzed by data that is freely available on the Internet," said one of China's partners, Zhenhua Data Technology.

In the last year, this is the several influential operation of China in the Czech territory, which Aktuálně.cz is revealing. Last autumn, it became clear that the Chinese embassy was in charge of the independent-looking conference on China at Charles University, which was sponsored directly by Rector Tomáš Zima. In December, the editors described a secret campaign by Home Credit to improve the image of the communist power in the Czech Republic.

Zhenhua Company alias Department 99

• The private company was founded and apparently co-owned by a Chinese citizen in Shenzhen named Wang Xuefeng, a former engineer of the American company IBM.

• Her mission highlighted on the official website? Help by collecting overseas open data the spectacular revival of the Chinese nation.

• Zhenhua Data is called Bureau 99, or Department 99, on its social blog, which may refer to the numbering of Chinese military divisions.

• On its now deactivated website, it also claims that it started collecting data from Western citizens in September 2017 and in December of the same year started the development of a system for obtaining a massive amount of data from abroad. It launched global data collection in May 2018, and two months later began a project called the Overseas Key Information Database (OKIDB), from which a quarter of a million Western celebrities have now leaked data.

• According to Zhenhua Data, Data is sent to China according to the website by twenty centers, which are distributed all over the world.

• The company mining data from profiles on Facebook or Twitter, also uses a database of patents, media outlets or kinship relationships. But it also offers monitoring of the position of aircraft, ships or satellites, as well as monitoring of specific people.

• The partners Zhenhua Data mentions on its website include a supplier of Chinese security equipment. Beijing TRS boasts clients from the Chinese military and the Ministry of Public Security, for which it manufactures analytical tools capable of connecting people, their electronic communications and vehicles. Global Tone Communication Technology, a subsidiary of a state-owned propaganda department, declares that it can analyze massive amounts of web and social media data for its government and business clients.

Note: This article originally published in Aktuálně.cz. We have done small editing. All credits goes to Aktuálně.cz