A Chinese company with links to Beijing’s military and intelligence networks has been amassing a vast database of detailed personal information on thousands of Australians, including prominent and influential figures.

A database of 2.4 million people, including more than 35,000 Australians, has been leaked from the Shenzhen company Zhenhua Data which is believed to be used by China’s intelligence service, the Ministry of State Security.

Zhenhua has the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party among its main clients.

Information collected includes dates of birth, addresses, marital status, along with photographs, political associations, relatives and social media IDs.

It collates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and even TikTok accounts, as well as news stories, criminal records and corporate misdemeanours.

While much of the information has been “scraped” from open-source material, some profiles have information which appears to have been sourced from confidential bank records, job applications and psychological profiles.

The company is believed to have sourced some of its information from the so-called “dark web”.

One intelligence analyst said the database was “Cambridge Analytica on steroids”, referring to the trove of personal information sourced from Facebook profiles in the lead up to the 2016 US election campaign.

But this data dump goes much further, suggesting a complex global operation using artificial intelligence to trawl publicly available data to create intricate profiles of individuals and organisations, potentially probing for compromise opportunities.

The database has been shared with an international consortium of media outlets in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Australia, comprising the Australian Financial Review and the ABC.

The media consortium sought comment from Zhenhua, but received no reply.

The company’s chief executive Wang Xuefeng, a former IBM employee, has used Chinese social media app WeChat to endorse waging “hybrid warfare” through manipulation of public opinion and “psychological warfare”.

Of the 35,558 Australians on the database, there are state and federal politicians, military officers, diplomats, academics, civil servants, business executives, engineers, journalists, lawyers and accountants.

They range from the current and former prime ministers, to Atlassian billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, and business figures David Gonski and Jennifer Westacott.

But there are 656 of the Australians featured on the list as being of “special interest” or “politically exposed”. Exactly what the company means by either of these terms is unexplained, but the people on the list are disparate in occupation and background, and there seems little to no explanation in who has made the list.

The list includes current Victorian Supreme Court Judge Anthony Cavanough, retired Navy Admiral and former Lockheed Martin chief executive Raydon Gates, former ambassador to China Geoff Raby, ex Tasmanian Premier Tony Rundle and former foreign minister Bob Carr.

Singer Natalie Imbruglia features in this list, along with One Nation co-founder David Oldfield, National Party President Larry Anthony, former treasurer Peter Costello’s son Sebastian, ex-Labor MP Emma Husar, News Corp journalist Ellen Whinnett and rural businesswoman and ABC director Georgie Somerset.

But it also has some Australians with a criminal past, including self-proclaimed Perth sheikh Junaid Thorne, Geelong accountant and fraudster Robert Andrew Kirsopp and ex-TEAC boss Gavin Muir who died in 2007 just weeks before he faced court for dishonesty offences.

The database was leaked to a US academic based in Vietnam, Professor Chris Balding, who until 2018 had worked at the elite Peking University before leaving China citing fears for his physical safety.

“China is absolutely building out a massive surveillance state both domestically and internationally,” Professor Balding told the ABC.

“They’re using a wide variety of tools — this one is taken primarily from public sources, there is non-public data in here, but it is taken primarily from public sources.

which has an association with the University of Technology Sydney.

Source: news.google.com