The Chinese Companies Doing Mass Surveillance For Hire (with Brett Benson)

And top line, what did you really find from these papers?

So the top line, we found that Golaxi purports to have the capacity to mass harvest data from open source environment on individuals that are using social media and other types of open source platforms.

in various different places, including the United States.

Taiwan, Hong Kong, United States.

And so- They're doing this in America? They're doing this in America,

yeah, that's right.

The papers are, I mean, we examined them last year, but the leak was from like two years before that.

And so this technology is already now, at this point, three years old.

And at that time, they claimed to have profiles and dossiers on lots of Americans, people in Taiwan, people in Hong Kong.

And so at this point, you can only imagine that it's accelerated significantly more.

So the top line, gather lots of data on people who are sharing their information online, and then design fake personas, social media personas, to engage with those individuals in adaptive ways for the purpose of spreading particular narratives that advance the CCP objectives.

So let's say in Taiwan, you'd have a politician who has this persona that Golexi has analyzed, and they are going to build fake accounts, which are going to spread or even criticize the particular kind of political activity messaging of those figures in Taiwan.

Is that what the concern is? Knowing them better allows you to, if you're a malign actor, allows you to better kind of undermine them or if they are potentially favorable to China, maybe amplify them.

Yeah, so the goals that are laid out in the documents are a little bit mixed.

The first document that I read about psychological warfare is specifically designed.

The motivation is to target for the purpose of moving narratives, to move public opinion.

And so if the target is a politician, it's kind of hard to see how that would really work, unless it's the case that the politician is really active online.

Of course, most politicians have an online presence, but it's controlled.

And so to really fully understand how a politician might be swayed by an information campaign like this, it's a little bit harder.

Probably the target audience is a voter or a group of voters.

And then if that's the case, then the objective is either to generate narratives that could sway public opinion and therefore votes in a particular direction, or to generate so much bad information that it lowers civil discourse and lowers civil trust in ways that might affect elections.

That's my takeaway.

I suppose if you know what everybody is saying who has a certain level of influence in a country, well, that's very useful if you want to help try to shape that discourse or interfere in that discourse.

So is Golaxi still operational?

Yeah, so as part of when we, I mean, we wrote a New York Times guest essay about this.