(TheLibertyRevolution.com)- 700 Americans who passed through Shanghai Airport have reportedly been placed on a watch list in China, according to the New York Post. A report reveals how the watchlist of Americans, which included business executives, celebrities, and U.S. government employees, was obtained by an Australian-based cybersecurity company known as Internet 2.0.
It found 697 Americans’ names, which even included children, who passed through the airport between 2018 and 2020.
The names include officials from the finance, medicine, and technology industries, and even included some high-profile names from Big Tech companies like Microsoft and Apple.
Singer Ashanti Shequoiya Douglas was also added to the watch list, revealing just how arbitrary and bizarre the list is. The Post, which has seen the list, said that it marked the singer “as having traveled through the airport in August 2018.”
Also on the list is an employee of the Bureau of International Organization Affairs at the U.S. State Department, a documentarian, and a mother who splits her time between South Korea and California.
They hardly sound like the kind of people who need to be watched, but then again, it appears as though this is some kind of retaliation against the United States.
Many of the people also on the spreadsheet include professors at United States universities, including a high-ranking administrator from New York University Shanghai.
The inclusion of university professors could be connected to China’s ongoing efforts to steal intellectual property and scientific data from the United States.
The Post said that security experts believe the document offers a “glimpse into Beijing’s massive data collection efforts targeting foreigners.”
Robert Potter and David Robinson, the co-CEOs of Internet 2.0, said that the list gives them an insight into China’s ambitions to collect as much data as it can, and to “impose its will within its jurisdiction and to violate norms of privacy and accountability.”
The list doesn’t only list Americans, either. Some 161 Australians are also listed along with 100 Brits. Internet 2.0 also discovered a database that includes thousands of Uyghur Muslims, the ethnic group currently being forced to live in re-education camps – or concentration camps – in China.
“Although this data is showing information from a limited time period, it shows how foreigners could get caught up in China’s surveillance state when they’ve passed through the country, even if that system isn’t fully established yet,” Samantha Hoffman of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
If you’re a Westerner visiting China…don’t expect any privacy.
