How China’s cyber operations – and contractors behind them – target critics abroad

Natto Thoughts: Physical distance was once a meaningful form of protection. Dissidents who fled beyond China’s borders could not be easily watched, pressured, or silenced without significant investment in human networks and physical infrastructure. Cyber capabilities have steadily worn away that protection, across the full range of repressive activity: identifying and locating targets, building profiles, infiltrating communities, spreading disinformation, disrupting platforms, and applying pressure on individuals and their networks. Much of this can now be conducted remotely, at scale, and with limited visibility. This piece examines how, tracing both the Chinese government’s covert efforts to locate and monitor targets and its more overt campaigns of harassment and intimidation, while highlighting the ecosystem of private contractors and tools that underpin these activities…