The Chinese government has amassed enough stolen data from the United States to effectively create dossiers on every American citizen, a US Senate panel was told.
Mathew Pottinger who served as a deputy national security adviser during the Trump administration, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday last week, Fox News reported.
"Assembling dossiers on people has always been a feature of Leninist regimes, but Beijing's penetration of digital networks worldwide, including using 5G networks ... has really taken this to a new level," Pottinger told panel members, according to the Washington Examiner.
"So, the Party now compiles dossiers on millions of foreign citizens around the world, using the material that it gathers to influence, target, intimidate, reward, blackmail, flatter, humiliate, and ultimately divide and conquer," he said.
He added: "Beijing's stolen sensitive data is sufficient to build a dossier on every single American adult and on many of our children too, who are fair game under Beijing's rules of political warfare."
Last month, the US and its allies had accused China of a massive hack of Microsoft Exchange email server software and asserted that criminal hackers associated with the Chinese government have carried out ransomware and other illicit cyber operations.
( With inputs from ANI )
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