The Bloomberg article suggests that China started gathering first travel records, then health records, Social Security numbers and other personal information on Americans in an attempt to build an increasingly complete picture about huge swathes of the US population. Whether or not that new „collect it all“ approach was directly inspired by the NSA‘s espousal of the idea is a detail: it was certainly brought to prominence by General Alexander‘s statements, and is now part of the common currency of surveillance.

It is made possible by lax security, even for huge datasets, as the OPM fiasco shows. That means it is entirely plausible for the Chinese secret services — and for those of other nations — to try to collect information about every US or EU citizen, as people‘s lives move online, and their most personal data is stored in Internet-accessible databases.