Since its establishment in 1899 (it was originally named Retail Credit), Equifax has prompted concerns over the sheer volume of data it amasses. Those fears increased as the company entered the digital age. In a March 1970 Times article about the company, Alan Westin, a professor at Columbia University, offered this warning: “Almost inevitably, transferring information from a manual file to a computer triggers a threat to civil liberties, to privacy, to a man’s very humanity … because access is so simple.”

Five decades on, that statement rings especially true. Moreover, it’s a useful frame to understand why, in a world where everything can be hacked, bloated data brokers like Equifax present an untenable risk to our personal and national security.

It’s helpful to think about a hack like what happened to Equifax as part of a chain of events where, the further down the chain you go, the more intrusive and potentially damaging the results. The Equifax data we know was stolen is a perfect example of what’s known as Personally Identifiable Information. Obtaining the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of almost half of all Americans is troubling on its own, but that basic information can then be used to procure even more personal information, including medical or financial records.

That more sensitive information can then be used to target vulnerable Americans for blackmail or simply to glean detailed information about the country by analyzing the metadata of its citizens. And so the revelations in the indictment in the Equifax case are alarming. The theft is one in a string of successful hacks, including of the federal Office of Personnel Management, Marriott International and the insurance company Anthem. Given the volume and granularity of the data and the ability of attackers to use the information to gain even more data, it’s not unreasonable to ask, Does China now know as much about American citizens as our own government does?