Once harvested, the data can be useful to glean details about key government personnel and potential spy recruits, or information useful for counterintelligence. Records in OPM's database of background investigations, for instance, could contain a complete history of where an individual has lived, and all of his or her foreign contacts in, say, China. "So now the Chinese counterintelligence authorities know which American officials are meeting with which Chinese," a China cyber and intelligence expert said.