![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/kmallory-500x401.jpg\")
In 2018, William Evanina, then America\u2019s top spycatcher, said China was running a \u201csuper aggressive<\/a>\u201d effort on LinkedIn to recruit spies. Evanina, then the director of the U.S. Counterintelligence and Security Center, told Reuters that LinkedIn\u2019s website was the \u201cultimate playground for collection\u201d of intelligence because government officials frequently post about their security clearance status, making it easy for Beijing\u2019s spooks to spot targets.<\/p>\n At the time of the Mallory case, LinkedIn Vice President of Trust and Safety Paul Rockwell said that the company was talking with U.S. law enforcement and doing \u201ceverything we can to identify and stop this activity.\u201d<\/p>\n The U.S. is not the only nation being targeted on LinkedIn. A French report<\/a> claimed that Chinese spooks approached 4,000 members of the French government and business elite on LinkedIn. German security services<\/a> concluded that at least 10,000 German citizens were contacted by Chinese spies on the social network, warning the number was probably a significant undercount. In 2021, the British government warned that spies had tried to contact more than 10,000 U.K. nationals<\/a> to lure them to spy. This last report did not point the finger at China, but the recruitment efforts sounded similar to those in the U.S., France, and Germany.<\/p>\n LinkedIn declined to comment for this article.<\/p>\n In the spring of 2023, Chinese spying is having a moment thanks to a series of events that have further exposed American fears about the rising power across the Pacific.<\/p>\n In March, the world tracked a Chinese spy balloon floating across the width of the U.S. and watched as a bipartisan committee in Congress grilled TikTok\u2019s CEO about the ways the Chinese social media platform famous for teenage dance videos might be threatening American Democracy.<\/p>\n Then, in April, a national security leak by a young Massachusetts Air National Guardsman touched on China<\/a>, amplifying fear of Chinese spying and once again making Beijing into a political football for U.S. policymakers heading into an election season. Also in April, New York lawmakers exposed that Chinese police had set up an office in Manhattan\u2019s Chinatown from which they ran intimidation campaigns against ethnic Chinese who hold views divergent from those of the Chinese Communist Party. On April 26, Charles Lieber, the former Harvard chemist, was sentenced by a court in Boston for lying about his ties to China<\/a> in a case of economic espionage.<\/p>\n As the U.S. Republican and Democratic parties jockey for position as inflation soars and Russia wages war in Ukraine, Chinese infiltration of the U.S. completed the American fear sandwich best described in a comment by Florida Republican Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, who called TikTok \u201cA Chinese Communist Party balloon in everybody\u2019s home.\u201d<\/p>\n Lawmakers across the country in another red state, Montana \u2014 where the Chinese spy balloon was first spotted in U.S. airspace \u2014 quickly became the first to approve a full ban of TikTok<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yang Zeyi, a journalist at MIT Technology Review who works on issues related to Chinese tech, wonders about America\u2019s reaction to TikTok in the current political climate.<\/p>\n “Nationalism is a part of it,\u201d said Yang, who grew up in Wuhan before studying at Columbia University in New York.<\/p>\n \u201cTiktok is not significantly different from other social media apps, according to experts. It is under attack because it is a Chinese company, probably. They have privacy protection issues, but these are the same that that all social media have.”<\/p>\n American politicians and the spooks meant to guard them, and all U.S. citizens, warn that TikTok is a spy threat, but offer little evidence to back their claim.<\/p>\n Researchers at the Citizen Lab, an independent outfit that studies internet openness and security at the University of Toronto, did an analysis of TikTok and Douyin, a sister app for China\u2019s intranet. Their 2021 study found no evidence<\/a> that the apps, both created by Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, collected contact lists, recorded photos, videos, or audio, or sent geolocation data to anybody (let alone the Chinese Communist Party) without user permission.<\/p>\n If espionage in social media is such a threat, why are U.S. politicians not also clamoring to ban LinkedIn, where, unlike on TikTok, there appears to be ample evidence of Chinese agents fishing for classified information?<\/p>\n \u201cThe potential for economic espionage is bigger for LinkedIn,\u201d said Robert D. Atkinson<\/a>, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington, D.C. think tank. \u201cIt is a way to connect with business people, people involved with technology. TikTok is not.\u201d<\/p>\n When The China Project asked if the average American should be worried about TikTok, Bruce Schneier, Harvard expert on cybersecurity, emphasized that TikTok was not all that different from American internet companies.<\/p>\n \u201cNah, Facebook and Google are probably worse. We built an internet with surveillance at its core. That is what the internet does. We cannot just say, \u2018They can\u2019t do that.\u2019 Everybody spies.\u201d<\/p>\n Sure. Spies are gonna spy, but cooler heads say the U.S. has less reason to fear than the current Balloongate-TikTok bomb threat suggests.<\/p>\n The MSS and other Chinese spy agencies are collecting vast amounts of secret data, but their spies are sloppy. With good counterintelligence the China threat can be managed.<\/p>\n Ed Peng (\u5f6d\u96ea\u83ef P\u00e9ng Xu\u011bhu\u00e1) was typical of the threat posed. He was an ethnic Chinese who was very bad at spying.<\/p>\n In March 2015, Peng, a naturalized U.S. citizen, began working for the MSS as a cut-out, spy jargon for a go-between who carries money and messages between an intelligence officer and his or her asset. For four years, Peng\u2019s spying typically involved him booking a hotel room in the San Francisco Bay Area or Columbus, GA, leaving $20,000 in a drawer in the room, then disappearing after having asked the desk to let a friend into the room. When Peng returned, the friend had come and gone, taking the $20,000 and leaving a secure digital memory card full of what Peng thought were U.S. military secrets. Peng would then jet off to China, taking the SD card to his MSS handlers.<\/p>\n What neither Peng nor intelligence officers at the MSS realized was that, for four years, they were being fooled by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose agents had sent Peng the \u201cfriend,\u201d who was really a double agent, slipping Peng and his MSS contacts what intelligence specialists call chicken feed, worthless secrets they are willing to give away to fool their mark into returning for more.<\/p>\n Peng also never noticed that he was being followed by the FBI, whose agents filmed him in each of his hotel rooms. Peng didn\u2019t practice even basic tradecraft, the sneaky techniques of intelligence gathering and evasion that spies use to make sure that they are not caught spying. More surprising was that MSS officers reading through the SD cards never realized that they were being strung along by the FBI. In the realm of human intelligence, or humint, China\u2019s spies are more Keystone Cops than Jason Bournes.<\/p>\n \u201cMSS officers used to not be very well regarded by intelligence officials in other countries, including the U.S., France, Britain and Canada,\u201d James Olson, a former CIA officer said. \u201cWe\u2019ve not seen overly sophisticated tradecraft from Chinese spies,\u201d Olson said, adding the caution that their skills may be improving and he still considers China \u201cthe greatest counter espionage threat\u201d in the world.<\/p>\n In his book, Chinese Espionage: Strategies and Tactics<\/a>, Nicholas Eftimiades, another ex-CIA officer, collected 595 cases of known Chinese espionage. In his database, Eftimiades found that 80 percent of those caught spying for China are ethnically Chinese and 90 percent are men. Many of the cases he looked at were carried out by low-level operatives like Peng. Two-hundred-eighteen, or 37%, showed no tradecraft. Of the 96 cases involving MSS officers \u2014 China\u2019s top spies \u2014 25% were caught showing no use of tradecraft, and another 14% used only limited tradecraft, a fact Eftimiades called \u201castounding.\u201d<\/p>\n By comparison, \u201cthe tradecraft of [Russian] KGB, [East German] Stasi and CIA officers was generally good,\u201d Paul Maddrell, editor of The Image of the Enemy: Intelligence Analysis of Adversaries Since 1945<\/a><\/em>, told The China Project. \u201cI know of no case when they showed little or no tradecraft.\u201d<\/p>\n Another case of a bumbling Chinese spook with little training is Christine Fang, who posed as a college student but actually was sent to California by the MSS to spy on politicians. When Fang met out in the open with her handler, an MSS officer working undercover in the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, it was easy for the FBI to surveil the pair.<\/p>\n \u201cHer controller did not seem to realize that the FBI would be all over him if he was meeting with her in public,\u201d said Matthew Brazil, co-author of Chinese Communist Espionage: An Intelligence Primer.<\/a><\/em> \u201cThat is definitely a training problem.\u201d Other spies working for China \u2014 Candance Marie Claiborne, Ron Rockwell Hansen, and Jerry Chun Shing Lee (\u674e\u632f\u6210 L\u01d0 Zh\u00e8nch\u00e9ng)\u2014 all showed signs of slapdash tradecraft.<\/p>\n The MSS appears to be aware of this training problem. It does not send its ranking spies into the U.S. unless they have diplomatic immunity. So, while Fang\u2019s handler was protected, she, as a low-level recruit, was not. She was expendable, but also a liability to the MSS.<\/p>\n Evidence of China\u2019s intelligence higher-ups\u2019 willingness to sacrifice operatives better trained than Fang is seen in the case of Chi Mak (\u9ea5\u5927\u5fd7 D\u00e0i D\u00e0zh\u00ec), one of the most productive Chinese intelligence officers ever caught in the U.S, a man who helped the P.R.C. steal the designs of NASA\u2019s Space Shuttle, a crime for which the recruit he ran, Dongfan Chung (\u949f\u4e1c\u8543 Zh\u014dng D\u014dngf\u00e1n), was convicted in 2010.<\/p>\n Beijing did nothing to get Chi Mak out of his 24-year sentence in a federal prison. Rather than trade him for one of the CIA spies Beijing caught in the early 2010\u2019s, they executed the American agents<\/a> leaving Chi Mak to die in the Federal Correctional Institute at Lompoc, CA, on Halloween 2022.<\/p>\n \u201cThey don\u2019t seem to care very much about their operatives,\u201d Brazil said.<\/p>\n Beijing appears to have adopted a flood-the-zone strategy whose danger is hard to downplay.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Chinese make up for their unsophistication with hard work,\u201d Eftimiades said. \u201cThey are just throwing numbers at the problem. The MSS has bad tradecraft. It doesn\u2019t matter. They are going after so many people, and an intelligence service can be crippled by just a single spy within it.\u201d<\/p>\n Historically, non-democratic, centrally-planned governments have excelled at gathering information but fallen short when knowing what to do with it because analysts tasked with making sense of the collected data don\u2019t feel free to speak their minds.<\/p>\n \u201cBad analysis is inherent to communist regimes. In communism, politicization is particularly severe. Intelligence officials could not say Marxism is failing,\u201d Maddrell said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat the Cold War shows is that the open societies did better, but only because they did better at analysis. Open societies won the Cold War because they were better at analysis\u2026hands down, the Communists won the human intelligence and technical intelligence war. The West won only because they understood the intelligence better.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of the recent concern over Chinese intelligence has revolved around influence operations, particularly the idea that TikTok ultimately answers to the CCP. Donald Trump\u2019s order banning the app vaguely cited influence as his reason, a line of thinking that has been largely preserved by the U.S. intelligence community under the administration of his successor, President Joseph Biden.<\/p>\n \u201cBeijing is intensifying efforts to mold U.S. public discourse \u2014 particularly by trying to shape U.S. views of sensitive or core sovereignty issues, such as Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong \u2014 and pressure perceived political opponents,\u201d said the February 2023 Annual Threat Assessment <\/a>from the office of the Director of National Intelligence.<\/p>\n Paul Heer, a former U.S. intelligence official working on China as a fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said that there are few signs that Beijing\u2019s influence operations in the U.S. are worth worrying over.<\/p>\n \u201cI am not that concerned with their influence\u2026it is not that effective,\u201d Heer told The China Project.<\/p>\n One does not need to be an expert to realize that China\u2019s influence operations show little sign of threatening the U.S. Over the last decade, since X\u00ed J\u00ecnp\u00edng\u2019s \u4e60\u8fd1\u5e73 rise to the role of China\u2019s paramount leader in 2012, American public opinion of China has grown significantly more negative. An April study by the Pew Research Center shows that the number of Americans with an \u201cunfavorable\u201d view of China rose from 36% in 2011 to 83% today<\/a>.<\/p>\n What positive influence Beijing did have in Washington has largely been squandered. American business used to temper Washington’s mistrust of Beijing, said a source close to the U.S. business community in China. Despite frictions such as trade imbalances, intellectual property theft, and human rights violations throughout the 2000s and into the early 2010s, large American corporations \u201casked D.C. to give China some space.\u201d<\/p>\n But Beijing\u2019s spies hacking into the computers of those very companies that asked Washington to cut China some slack, soured them on China. Now, the source said, American businesses are quietly cheering on officials bashing Beijing. \u201cChina went too far. China earned this, China is responsible for this.\u201d<\/p>\n China\u2019s spies who have made cyberhacking their primary modus operandi have been a much greater threat to American security than TikTok and spy balloons combined.<\/p>\n In what is arguably the worst security breach in history, the Chinese hacked the U.S. government\u2019s human resources department, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).<\/p>\n In November 2013, Chinese hackers began snooping around OPM systems. By March 2014, the OPM realized that Chinese hackers were inside , but the OPM thought the hack was contained. On May 27, 2014, the OPM conducted what it called the \u201cBig Bang,\u201d a major reset of their system to clean out attackers. But it was too late. Chinese hackers had already installed malware to create a backdoor into the OPM system.<\/p>\n It was not until almost a year later, on April 15, 2015, that OPM security officials realized they were still being hacked. By that point, the attackers had stolen data on 22.1 million people, targeting those whose applications for U.S. government security clearance made them prime targets and potential assets for recruitment by Beijing.<\/p>\n Each security clearance applicant\u2019s required SF-86 form detailed sensitive information, including health, financial, and criminal records, histories of gambling, sexual partners, and drug and alcohol use \u2014 all information that could be used as leverage in blackmail. Also included in what the hackers stole from the OPM were usernames and passwords that could compromise a targets\u2019 other protected log-ins elsewhere on the internet. The hackers even obtained 1.1 million sets of fingerprints.<\/p>\n After the breach was exposed, U.S. officials concluded it was \u201chighly likely\u201d that every file associated with an OPM-managed security clearance application since the year 2000 had data lost to these hackers, data that could easily have helped Beijing target spies such as Kevin Mallory, who they reached out to through LinkedIn.<\/p>\n The OPM hack was only one in a series of damaging hacks begun early in the 21st century, when China realized that, because of changes in technology, they had an opportunity to level the espionage playing field.<\/p>\n \u201cThey realized correctly that breaking into someone\u2019s computer system can be a million times more productive \u2014 and I say that literally \u2014 than breaking into the embassy safe,\u201d Brazil said.<\/p>\n The rise in China\u2019s cyberespionage began in 2003 with Titan Rain, an operation that over two years targeted computer networks in the U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Energy. Following Titan Rain, there were numerous other Chinese cyber attacks with names like Aurora, which, in 2009, targeted the U.S. high-tech industry, stealing data from Silicon Valley software giant Adobe Systems and Cambridge, MA cloud computing leader Akamai Technologies. Beginning in 2014, Chinese hackers tapped hotel chain Marriott for gigabytes of data<\/a>, including 327 million passport numbers.<\/p>\n Despite a 2015 agreement between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping<\/a> to take steps to stem the tide of cyber espionage, after which hacking dropped off for nine months, Chinese hacking continued unabated. In 2017, credit reporting agency Equifax lost the sensitive financial data of about 145 million Americans, a crime for which the U.S. government, by this time embarrassed and fed up, publicly charged ranking members of the People\u2019s Liberation Army, citing a trove of evidence. China denied any involvement.<\/p>\n Though China\u2019s cyber spies are excellent at breaking into American computer systems and stealing massive amounts of data, as with their humint gathering, they seem not to care about covering their tracks.<\/p>\n \u201cChina\u2019s hacking is often sloppier and easier to spot,\u201d author Gordon Corera wrote in his book Cyberspies<\/a>. \u201cRussia\u2019s hackers are more expert and operate below the radar.\u201d<\/p>\n However, James Lewis, senior vice president of CSIS, a Washington think tank, cautions that the Chinese may have been sloppy but they are improving. \u201cThey were clumsy and noisy a decade ago. Today, they are almost as good as the U.S. They are still catching up, but they have gotten a lot better.\u201d<\/p>\n Prime among China\u2019s cyberhacking targets are U.S. military technology companies.<\/p>\n The case of S\u016b B\u012bn \u82cf\u658c is typical of the economic espionage China conducts against the U.S. Su was a Chinese national living in British Columbia running a successful aerospace company called Lode Tech, living a comfortable Canadian lifestyle and helping his wife raise their two Canadian-born children. Two hackers in China who breached the computer systems of nearby aerospace giant Boeing, in Seattle, worked closely with Su to steal the plans for Boeing\u2019s C-17 Globemaster transport plane. Once the hackers entered Boeing\u2019s system, Su employed his engineering knowledge to guide them as to what they should steal.<\/p>\n In an email bluntly subject-lined \u201cRe: C-17_2,\u201d Su wrote to the spies, \u201cThere are many picture documents. The useful ones are marked in yellow. Many documents are for application. They should be the computer documents of a person who uses airplane [sic], not the computer documents of a designer.\u201d<\/p>\n After the hackers had stolen 65 gigabytes of Boeing\u2019s data, Su flew to China to help the spies and engineers interpret the stolen materials. In an email between the two hackers working with Su that appeared in court documents in his case, one hacker explained to the other what China liked to steal from the U.S.<\/p>\n \u201cThe focus on the U.S. is primarily on the military technologies, but it also touches other areas\u2026.we still have control on American companies like [expunged] and etc. and the focus is mainly on those American enterprises which belong to the top 50 arms companies in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n Joshua Skule, a former head of an FBI intelligence group who now heads his own technology security company, told Reuters in 2018 that approximately 70% of Chinese espionage against the U.S<\/a>. is aimed at stealing secrets from companies, not the government.<\/p>\n Eftimiades agrees. \u201cThe vast majority of espionage is not directed against the national security apparatus, but against commercial companies and technologies with military applications,\u201d Eftimiades said.<\/p>\n American officials are right to complain that Chinese spies are stealing vast amounts of data from American companies, and often complain that this behavior is unique to China.<\/p>\n Michael Hayden, a former director of the U.S. National Security Agency, told Cyberspies<\/em> author Corera, that while American signals intelligence and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters also intercept foreign company data, they do so with the sole goal of keeping British and American subjects safe and free:<\/p>\n We don\u2019t steal things to make Americans or, in GCHQ\u2019s case, British subjects, rich. The Chinese do. And they do it on a massive scale. That\u2019s the difference between what free people do in terms of signals intelligence and what the Chinese are doing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The free peoples of France<\/a> and Israel<\/a> might disagree. The intelligence services of these two countries are, behind those of China and Russia, among the most prolific at stealing American economic secrets and handing them off to their own countries\u2019 companies, doing exactly what China does.<\/p>\n It is notable that American intelligence does not retaliate in kind, spreading competitive intelligence gathered in the field to American companies, leaving them instead to compete for themselves in the marketplace. \u201cThe U.S. has been unusual in that regard,\u201d said Loch Johnson, an editorial board member of the Journal of Intelligence History.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201dWhat makes China\u2019s economic espionage unique is not the fact that they are doing it but the scale at which they\u2019re pulling it off.\u201d<\/p>\n With the rise in attention being paid to U.S.-China relations and Chinese spying, it is prudent to remember that trans-Pacific spy wars are as old as the PRC.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/balloon.jpg\")
America\u2019s spring season of paranoia<\/h3>\n
Full of Hot Air<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thechinaproject.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Alex-Santafe-The-China-Project-23-04-01-46-1-scaled.jpg\")
China\u2019s spies are Keystone Cops<\/h3>\n
Influence<\/h3>\n
HR Nightmare<\/h3>\n
Economic espionage with a military bent<\/h3>\n
Back to the Future<\/h3>\n