Western athletes have been warned about being spied on via their phones and devices at the Beijing Olympics, and the cybersecurity firm China has put in place for the games is not exactly instilling confidence.
China’s Beijing 2022 committee named China’s Qianxin the “Official Cyber Security Service And Anti-Virus Software Sponsor” in December 2019. Like other companies involved in the games, Qianxin is closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party and helps its Ministry of Public Security spy on Chinese citizens. U.S. officials don’t expect Qianxin to protect foreign athletes from the same treatment.
“No guarantees of data privacy or security should be made regardless of the security technology utilized,” the U.S. Olympic Committee warned athletes. “Assume that every device and every communication, transaction, and online activity will be monitored.”
Qianxin openly touts its collaboration with China’s Ministry of Public Security, the country’s internal police force, and says it seeks to advance the goals of the CCP. The company says its services are used by more than 90% of China’s government departments and state-run enterprises.
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The Chinese companies that attendees at the Olympics will likely need to rely upon for telecommunications, translation, and internet services are all linked to China’s military, Uyghur repression, or China’s broader surveillance apparatus. And the daily health app that Olympians must use has been accused of security flaws.
Taken together, the infrastructure put together by Beijing for the games means foreign athletes and other delegation members could be subject to the same mass surveillance that is part of life for Chinese citizens.
Internet 2.0, a cybersecurity firm, warned about “digital surveillance in China” in a January white paper, singling out Qianxin as a possible problem. The firm analyzed Qianxin’s Winter Olympics mobile protection software and its virtual private network, and Internet 2.0 said it “discovered a significant amount of user data being collected by the software.”
“[Qianxin’s Olympics software] provides a limited degree of privacy and security to its users,” the firm said, adding that all users’ “device information and historical network information … could be provided to Chinese authorities, if requested, under the country’s national security laws.”
Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology said in 2021 that Qianxin made the Chinese government’s National Cybersecurity Center its “headquarters in central China.”
“China’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy ensures that the People’s Liberation Army can harvest new tools that come from the NCC,” the center said.
The majority shareholder for Qianxin is Qi Xiangdong, a co-founder of the related Qihoo 360, which was sanctioned by the United States in 2020.
The Treasury Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security said in 2020 that Qihoo 360 was added to a blacklist because it poses a threat to U.S. national security.
Qianxin has numerous close partnerships with Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that has been blacklisted and dubbed a national security threat by the U.S.
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