The problem with surveillance states is that they’re not very good at safeguarding information
The theft and sale of a huge police database with very detailed records of over a billion Chinese citizens highlights the intrinsic weakness of regimes based on surveillance of their populations: if you are going to engage in massive and systematic spying on everybody, you are not only going to have to develop bomb-proof cybersecurity protocols, you’re also going to have to pay the bureaucrats responsible for them very well.
In the case of China, neither seems to be the case. On the one hand, Beijing’s cybersecurity appears to be about the same as the vast majority of governments around the world. On the other, there is an abundance of underpaid and easily bribable civil servants with access to these databases.
How has the Chinese government reacted to the news that anyone willing to pay ten bitcoins can get their hands on a 23 terabyte database of information on the country’s citizens with their names, addresses, ID card numbers, phone numbers and possible criminal records? As it always does: by trying to censor the news from circulating within China on networks such as Weibo, WeChat or search engines such as Baidu, which have begun to censor terms referring to the information leak.
