Among the apparent targets of tools provided by the impacted company, I-Soon, are ethnicities and dissidents in parts of China that have seen significant anti-government protests like Hong Kong or Xinjiang.

Chinese police are investigating an unauthorized and highly unusual online dump of documents from a private security contractor linked to the nation’s top policing agency and other parts of its government — a trove that catalogs apparent hacking activity and tools to spy on both Chinese and foreigners.

Among the apparent targets of tools provided by the impacted company, I-Soon: ethnicities and dissidents in parts of China that have seen significant anti-government protests, such as Hong Kong or the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang in China’s far west.

The dump of scores of documents late last week and subsequent investigation were confirmed by two employees of I-Soon, known as Anxun in Mandarin, which has ties to the powerful Ministry of Public Security. The dump, which analysts consider highly significant even if it does not reveal any especially novel or potent tools, includes hundreds of pages of contracts, marketing presentations, product manuals, and client and employee lists.

  • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    132·
    9 months ago

    I’m frankly surprised if you’ve been on lemmy any significant amount of time and haven’t seen people expressing privacy concerns regarding the US or other western governments (most recently the UK with their bullshit), and western private companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.

    The reason you come off as some crazed lemmygrad sinophile when people decry China’s spying is because you reply “but whattabout muh westernz” while this site (or rather group thereof that constitutes “lemmy,” and frankly the entire fediverse,) is also constantly complaining about the western governments and companies that pushed us to be on places like lemmy to begin with, but we aren’t talking about them in this article/comment section, we’re talking about China. It’s frankly just an off-topic whataboutism. Go to c/privacy and see just how wrong you are that western based spying isn’t a concern of people on lemmy.

    • fastandcurious@lemmy.world
      68·
      9 months ago

      You are right, but also a lot of people here blindly support what the US is doing while shitting on countries like China, middle east and some south Asian countries (specifically about immigrants from there), ig I have been riding waves of emotions lately just seeing peoples blind support for the US, even if not directly done (instead by shooting down any criticism of the US)

      You are right about me being off-topic though, I think this entire discussion doesn’t belong here, it is neither about digital privacy nor about China