A recent paper by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Dr Samantha Hoffman, titled Engineering global consent: The Chinese Communist Party’s data-driven power expansion, outlines the extent the Chinese government’s tech-enhanced surveillance is expanding globally.
In the report, Dr Hoffman says China’s efforts don’t revolve around obvious technology such as surveillance cameras, in countries outside China, but through useful technologies such as 5G and, potentially, smartphones.
She said these “services are designed to bring efficiency to everyday governance and convenience to everyday life”.
“The problem is that it’s not only the customer deploying these technologies – notably those associated with ‘smart cities’, such as ‘internet of things’ (IoT) devices – that derives benefit from their use. Whoever has the opportunity to access the data a product generates and collects can derive value from the data. How the data is processed, and then used, depends on the intent of the actor processing it,” she says in the report.
In the report, she uses the example of Global Tone Communications Technology Co. (GTCOM) as a case study to illustrate how the global expansion of the party’s tech-enhanced authoritarianism can work.
For starters, GTCOM is a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned enterprise that the Central Propaganda Department directly supervises. It openly co-operates with the state’s intelligence services and strategically co-operates with large Chinese firms such as Huawei and Alibaba Cloud.
According to AustCyber chief executive officer Michelle Price, it would be wise for Australian business to be alert to businesses that have been flagged to having close ties with organisations such as GTCOM.
“There’s enough global competi ..
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