After a massive Chinese security breach that rendered the details of over 21.5 million Americans compromised, Beijing is now compiling a “Facebook” of U.S. public service officials to be used in espionage and blackmail.
The breach of privacy and security laws by the Chinese administration has left many Americans and their immediate family members vulnerable to blackmail by China.
Private security firm CrowdStrike’s founder Dmitri Alperovitch said the Chinese were using Americans’ data to create a Facebook like network for all U.S public employees. The data was obtained after high profile attacks on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Anthem, Carefirst, BlueCross and BlueShield health insurers.
According to Fox News, the most sensitive information lifted from the OPM reach was stolen from its Standard Form 86 (SF-86). The 127 page form is a security clearance application that is basically the roadmap to an individual’s life. Details such as where the individual lived, where they worked, personal references, family, friends, associates, drug history, criminal records and health information were all contained in the forms now being analyzed in mainland China.
Alpetrovitch said the details “Can now be used to embarrass you publicly and force you to work for the Chinese government. It’s, in effect, a private version of Facebook with much more detail about your life than even Facebook has that the Chinese now have access to.” Current and former intelligence officials echoed the assessment.
So expansive is the extent of the breach that high level government employees including the Director of the FBI, James Comey, had their personal details compromised. Comey even recently joked about the breach at a security summit held last week that if his SF-86 form had been protected by an encrypted database, then “maybe someone wouldn’t be reading it today.”
More shocking was news that the breach was a “generational problem”, meaning the Chinese intended to use the data to blackmail the children of the public service officials.
Alpetrovitch said this would be done “to try to get them to reveal some information about their parent’s work and use that, eventually, for espionage activities. Information that has been collected about them may be used decades later.”
Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook, acknowledging the severity of the breach, told an agitated public service on Tuesday that the government was doing all it could to mend the breach.
Cook said, “This is going to be a wide-ranging effort on the part of the federal government to try and address this.”
The breach of personnel information has rendered America vulnerable to foreign influence and espionage. Generations of American children will be paying for the misdeeds of their parents through surrendering confidential national data to the Chinese. In the end, America will be on the losing side.
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