In this picture taken on May 11, 2017, a drone flies in the showroom of the DJI headquarters in Shenzhen, China. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images) Viewpoints

John Mills December 24, 2021 Updated: December 25, 2021 biggersmallerPrint

Commentary

Due to the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) breach, some may think that the Chinese Communist Party is simply collecting intelligence on those Americans associated with the U.S. government. They are, and far more than that.

China’s intelligence services are doing far more than creating the Hollywood stereotype portrayal of a manila folder with all our hard copy biographical information and a paper clipped black and white photo of us, perhaps in a compromising situation. China is establishing comprehensive electronic folders on everyone in the United States.

This can include web searching history, online purchases in totality, complete medical records, all texts, and all other evidence of our being. One component that begins to go beyond the digital are DNA structures of our physical body. How do they get that? Perhaps through unlawfully accessing our medical records, perhaps through our voluntary biological samples given in the innocent pursuit of our family lineage. Dark and disturbing intentions are in play.

Unconstrained by Legal Guardrails

You may say, “So what? Big Deal? Amazon and Google do this already.” Perhaps they do, but what Chinese intelligence is doing for all Americans and for the Chinese and non-Chinese population in the world is establishing a decisive digital dominance to map every single personae, including our DNA. This is done on a scale far beyond what Facebook and others in Big Tech aspire to. There are privacy and civil liberty, legal guardrails in the United States and Europe that constrain even the most adventurist of Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams.

This lack of legal bumper cushions for the CCP, combined with a lack of social mores, feelings, and faith-based values is what sets China apart from even the darkest of Big Tech’s goals and dreams. Although American social media (and the U.S. Intelligence Community) may have set the original framework and tenets of Big Data and Big Data analytics, the Chinese state apparatus has codified, on an exponential scale, how to use the establishment of a digital personae to control and condition behavior of the individual through simple rewards and penalties.

The public manifestation is the blooming, social credit system instituted by the CCP in China. Most human personalities will conform after a few penalties or rewards in such an environment. It’s our innate human nature, but also a slippery slope to more vicious totalitarianism.

A Chinese Digital Silk Road

The key enabler of this digital twin strategy are the vanguards of Chinese Communist Party intentions, their own social media firms such as TikTok, and other companies including DJI (the dominant drone manufacturer), and Huawei.

With the Chinese law and operating strategy, all Chinese Companies are de facto, majority owned by the state and required to always do the bidding of the state. These companies are modeled on the front companies that the United States Intelligence Community established and used sparingly since the 1950s, but in the Chinese resurrection, at a far grander scale, and all Chinese Companies are part of this ploy. It is a legal requirement of their existence.

It is odd, interesting, and amusing that the same CCP system that encouraged the birthing and expansion of these companies is now also showing concern with their growth and influence and their leaders such as Jack Ma. The Trump administration aggressively asserted trade control measures toward many Chinese Companies and so has the Biden administration with its most recent application of the obscure, but very powerful tool of the Entities list.

I have conducted a dialogue with Costco’s front office on the ill-advised corporate decision to carry DJI drones. They have often been open, transparent, and expressed concern, but at the same time have still carried DJI products, but this season have also carried a non-DJI product—a possible expression of a transition of product types on the shelves and a hat-tip of Costco liability concerns over DJI.

But if one looks very closely, the origin of the new, “non-DJI” drone is still Shenzhen, the same city where the dominant drone maker of DJI has its large and unique headquarters building. What do drones have to do with feeding our digital personae?

The DJI drones are now flying endpoints on a worldwide network and share hundreds of live or post-flight data elements with servers in China. We are allowing flying, cyber vacuum cleaners that have the data collection capabilities of modern digital flight recorders on commercial airliners, but these also collect video, audio, signals intelligence, and other sensoring capabilities that are breathtaking.

If you still say, “ho hum, big deal” with this situation, I frankly don’t know what to say. Allowing a foreign power to fly in our airspace with flying intelligence collection vacuum cleaners to map our total environment is a very bad idea. Would China allow us to do this in their airspace? I may be stepping out on a ledge on this one, but the CCP would be unlikely to reciprocate.

To What End?

All this may be true, but again, so what? I had one very senior Intelligence Official recently tell me that the Chinese state behavior makes it easier for the Five Eyes Community to steal back all this information after they collect it. This is one way of looking at the situation and a possible strategy, but not one I’d place money on.

With the fusion of DNA information, could (or has) China been tailoring follow on releases of viruses to target non-Han personalities? As a career planner and strategist, this posit is well within the boundaries of the realistic and possible. In the end, nothing good comes out of a ruthless, totalitarian state, bent on world domination and the elimination of the United States as the world leader establishing digital (and biological) twins of our bodies. Nothing.