The Shanghai PSB database is so odd. Aside from Uyghur tracking, personal info of random Westerners who entered China, there are mundane police blotter reports -- an accident involving a van and a bicycle (see screenshot), theft of old power meters. Why is it all mashed together? 
And why is the _index for all this stuff labelled in English "uighurterrorist" when literally everything else - except for Westerner names who crossed the border - is in Mandarin?
There has been excellent reporting by @seanrubinsztein and @hui_echo about who is in the database. This may be unanswerable, but how does data from at least two Chinese security agencies end up in an open Elasticsearch database on Alibaba's cloud where anyone could find it?
Perhaps there's been a data breach along the line that we don’t explicitly know about affecting Shanghai's Public Security Bureau and the national Ministry of Public Security, and then that data was carelessly dumped into unprotected Elasticsearch.
Mystery solved: It has been renamed as that, so that is not what Shanghai's PSB called it.
The next logical question: How should people in the database -- those who have had passport numbers and birth dates exposed or been flagged by security agencies for monitoring -- be notified? ABC reports Five Eyes has the data. Should governments do this for their citizens?
Not just Five Eyes, though - people from more than 100 countries are affected.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
