China?s ?democracy? includes mandatory apps, mass chat surveillance

That's because authorities have been tapping directly into Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members' and other Chinese citizens' online activities and social media profiles.The China Media Project reports that the CPP has mandated party members download a new smartphone application called "Xi Study (Xue Xi) Strong Nation" (学习强国)—an application that provides a library of articles and videos carrying the teachings of Chinese President Xi Jinping. While performing scans with the Shodan vulnerability search engine, researchers at the GDI Foundation discovered components of a large-scale social media surveillance platform inadvertently exposed to the Internet.A February 22 China National Computer Emergency Response Team (CNCERT) alert warned that 486 MongoDB database servers out of approximately 25,000 such servers connected to the Internet had "information leakage risks." Apparently, some of those MongoDB servers were part of a social media and messaging collection and processing system used by Chinese law enforcement and security personnel to monitor and investigate citizens' communications.GDI Foundation, a Netherlands-based non-profit organization, is in the process of building a Global CERT. He adds that the infrastructure pulls in approximately 364 million profiles along with their private chat messages and file transfers daily.The exposed databases revealed not only the collection of the data from social media accounts on services such as TenCent's QQ and WeChat platforms, Alibaba Group's WangWang, and the YY video and streaming platform, but also the workflow behind the collection.