The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.
From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."
Monday, September 12, 2022
National Security Threat: China's Eyes in America - Peter Schweizer
by Peter Schweizer
Every DJI drone in the skies above America is as good as a hovering Chinese spy.
The Chinese company DJI controls nearly 90% of the world market for consumer and commercial grade drones.
The excellent reporting on DJI by Kitchen tracks efforts by the
company to lobby against passage of a bill called the American Security
Drone Act (ASDA), now before Congress, to outlaw federal government use
of DJI products entirely. What is the risk? Not only the data gathered
by the drones themselves, but everything collected by the mobile app
with which users control their drones and manage their DJI accounts.
Like many other mobile applications, this includes a user's contacts,
photos, GPS location, and online activities.
Every DJI drone in the skies above America is as good as a hovering Chinese spy.
DJI is engaged in a fierce lobbying effort to prevent passage of
the ASDA bill. So fierce that they have enlisted police officers from
local jurisdictions to come to Washington and lobby congressional
staffers about how great DJI drones are for their cash-strapped local
forces.... DJI lobbyists from firms like Squire Patton Boggs, Cassidy
& Associates, and CLS Strategies are taking no chances. The company
spent $2.2 million in lobbying efforts in 2020 and $1.4 million last
year on lobbying activities, according to OpenSecrets.org.
Much as they are doing with products such as solar panels, the
Chinese realize that cornering the market in an area where reach equals
access is critical to their long-term plans to dominate. Their pattern
includes stealing technology they cannot create themselves and using any
means available to aid in that theft. Therefore, every bit of access to
information they can scour is of more value to them than the product
used to get it.
Understanding these patterns is central to recognizing that the
Chinese do this to their own people as well.... [through] many different
forms of what we may baldly call blackmail.
The Wilson Center, a bipartisan think tank in Washington,
reported in 2017 that a small community of PRC students and diplomats
have engaged in intimidation tactics ranging from intelligence gathering
to financial retaliation... It was just those sorts of concerns that
led the Trump administration to create the "China Initiative" within the
Justice Department in 2018. This effort generated plenty of convictions
of Chinese nationals in the US for technology theft and other forms of
industrial espionage. The Biden administration ended the program this
year....
China's strategy has for years hinged on infiltration by some
Chinese scientists and researchers working abroad in the US and other
western nations, with threats against their Chinese relatives as
leverage for them to do so.
The consumer and commercial grade drones made by the Chinese
company DJI account for nearly 90% of the market. These popular
products are cost-effective, easy to fly and operate, and send every
byte of data they gather to servers in China. Every DJI drone in the sky
is as good as a hovering Chinese spy. Pictured: A police sergeant in
Exeter, England pilots a DJI drone on May 25, 2021, as part of security
preparations for the G7 Summit that was attended by US President Joe
Biden and leaders of the other G7 countries. (Photo by Geoff Caddick/AFP
via Getty Images)
Chinese intelligence gathering in the US takes many forms and has
different purposes. Most Americans are familiar with some of their means
and tactics, but not with how widespread and persistent they are.
Americans may know about the malware
contained in that infernal TikTok app that their children use. They may
know the Chinese military's cyber-intelligence service was likely behind many of the largest hacks
of Americans' personal data that have ever occurred. They may know from
the news how US defense and intelligence policy have sanctioned Chinese
telecom giant Huawei, and counseled America's allies to reject
Chinese-architected implementations of 5G networking, due to evidence
that China has planted backdoors in commercial networking equipment
designed to allow the Communist regime in Beijing to conduct
surveillance and cyber-espionage anywhere in the world.
Do they know it extends to consumer-level drones?
Cybersecurity expert Klon Kitchen, writing for The Dispatch, recently detailed
the problem with DJI, the Chinese company whose consumer and commercial
grade drones control nearly 90% of the market. These popular products
are cost-effective, easy to fly and operate, and send
every byte of data they gather to servers in China. For this reason,
they are banned by the US military and Department of Homeland Security,
though still used by the FBI and increasingly by local police as "eyes
in the sky" during crime events. FBI use of DJI drones is especially
ironic considering bureau director Christopher Wray has warned often of
the dangers to western commerce posed by the Chinese, most recently in London.
The excellent reporting on DJI by Kitchen tracks efforts by the
company to lobby against passage of a bill called the American Security
Drone Act (ASDA), now before Congress, to outlaw federal government use
of DJI products entirely. What is the risk? Not only the data gathered
by the drones themselves, but everything collected by the mobile app
with which users control their drones and manage their DJI accounts.
Like many other mobile applications, this includes a user's contacts,
photos, GPS location, and online activities.
To repeat: Every DJI drone in the skies above America is as good as a hovering Chinese spy.
Like other Chinese government-controlled companies such as Huawei and
Hikvision, makers of the artificial intelligence systems used in facial
recognition and in the repression of China's Uyghur minority, DJI is
adept at playing the Washington game. The company is engaged in a fierce
lobbying effort to prevent passage of the ASDA bill. So fierce that
they have enlisted police officers from local jurisdictions to come to
Washington and lobby congressional staffers about how great DJI drones
are for their cash-strapped local forces. As Kitchen points out, the
ASDA bill is directed only towards a federal ban on these drones, but
DJI lobbyists from firms like Squire Patton Boggs, Cassidy &
Associates, and CLS Strategies are taking no chances. The company spent
$2.2 million in lobbying efforts in 2020 and $1.4 million last year on
lobbying activities, according to OpenSecrets.org.
These lobbyists are using the classic argument that it would be wrong
to ban the federal government's use of our product because so many other people are using it.
This is doubtless the dilemma currently facing the app stores of Apple
and Google regarding the TikTok app, another Chinese product. The TikTok
app has been identified by cybersecurity professionals as containing a keystroke logger, and both Apple and Google have been pressured
by the Federal Communications Commission to remove it from their app
stores. "Can we really ban something that so many people are happily
using?" they must be asking themselves.
Therein lies the heart of the Chinese approach. TikTok was a mobile device application that no one
was asking for, yet it became an overnight sensation in most western
countries. We really must acknowledge, and grudgingly admire, the
brilliant insight shown by the app's creator company,
Chinese-government-controlled ByteDance, into the psyche of large
numbers of young, western people. The TikTok app, pitched initially as a
way to share and watch silly dance video clips, has been adopted by
younger "woke" schoolteachers to "out" themselves as scheming,
haranguing social justice warriors intent on smuggling sexual ideology
into their classrooms and bragging about it.
This adds some context to Republican Sen. Rob Portman's (R-OH)
exasperation at a Senate hearing about the ASDA legislation, where he said:
"Again, given what the FBI has told us, what the Commerce
Department has told us, what we know from reports, I can't believe we
have to write legislation to force US agencies to ban the use of
Chinese-made drones, particularly where the servers are in China, where
the Chinese government is a part owner and a supporter of this
particular company."
The Chinese approach is to "capture" elite institutions and
individuals in the US: politicians, leading universities, large pension
funds, social media, and Hollywood among them. My latest book, Red Handed,
documents this capture in the areas of politics, diplomatic and
business consulting, Big Tech, academia, and on Wall Street. There is
insight in the Soviet-era statement, attributed to Lenin, about
capitalists "selling us the rope with which to hang them." Yet, it is
the Chinese that understood how to sell the rope at a good price.
Much as they are doing with products such as solar panels, the
Chinese realize that cornering the market in an area where reach equals
access is critical to their long-term plans to dominate. Their pattern
includes stealing technology they cannot create themselves and using any
means available to aid in that theft. Therefore, every bit of access to
information they can scour is of more value to them than the product
used to get it.
Understanding these patterns is crucial to recognizing that the Chinese do this to their own people as well. As Gordon Chang's recent piece
for the Gatestone Institute discusses, the Chinese Communist Party
maintains tight control of Chinese people overseas through many
different forms of what we may baldly call blackmail. The many stories
of intimidation of Chinese students and academics in the US who speak up
about human rights abuses by China, or in support for democracy in Hong
Kong and Taiwanese independence, all demonstrate this.
Universities have put up with this in exchange for foreign funds for
decades. They are only recently being confronted by the costs of this
indulgence. For example, the former chairman of Harvard University's
Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department was convicted
by a federal jury for lying to federal authorities about his
affiliation with the People's Republic of China's Thousand Talents
Program and the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in Wuhan, China, as
well as failing to report income he received from WUT.
It was just those sorts of concerns that led the Trump administration to create the "China Initiative"
within the Justice Department in 2018. This effort generated plenty of
convictions of Chinese nationals in the US for technology theft and
other forms of industrial espionage. The Biden administration ended the
program this year, citing concerns that a broader approach was needed
and in response to lobbying
by Asian American groups that it unfairly targeted scientists with
connections to China. Further, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen
also said he heard concerns from the academic community that
prosecutions of researchers for grant fraud and other charges was having
a "chilling effect."
Be that as it may, China's strategy has for years hinged on
infiltration by some Chinese scientists and researchers working abroad
in the US and other western nations, with threats against their Chinese
relatives as leverage for them to do so. This will remain a
counter-intelligence problem regardless of what the effort to expose it
is called.
It is all part of the pattern. Call it sabotage by remote control.
Peter Schweizer
by Peter Schweizer
--------
The Chinese company DJI controls nearly 90% of the world market for consumer and commercial grade drones.
The excellent reporting on DJI by Kitchen tracks efforts by the
company to lobby against passage of a bill called the American Security
Drone Act (ASDA), now before Congress, to outlaw federal government use
of DJI products entirely. What is the risk? Not only the data gathered
by the drones themselves, but everything collected by the mobile app
with which users control their drones and manage their DJI accounts.
Like many other mobile applications, this includes a user's contacts,
photos, GPS location, and online activities.
Every DJI drone in the skies above America is as good as a hovering Chinese spy.
DJI is engaged in a fierce lobbying effort to prevent passage of
the ASDA bill. So fierce that they have enlisted police officers from
local jurisdictions to come to Washington and lobby congressional
staffers about how great DJI drones are for their cash-strapped local
forces.... DJI lobbyists from firms like Squire Patton Boggs, Cassidy
& Associates, and CLS Strategies are taking no chances. The company
spent $2.2 million in lobbying efforts in 2020 and $1.4 million last
year on lobbying activities, according to OpenSecrets.org.
Much as they are doing with products such as solar panels, the
Chinese realize that cornering the market in an area where reach equals
access is critical to their long-term plans to dominate. Their pattern
includes stealing technology they cannot create themselves and using any
means available to aid in that theft. Therefore, every bit of access to
information they can scour is of more value to them than the product
used to get it.
Understanding these patterns is central to recognizing that the
Chinese do this to their own people as well.... [through] many different
forms of what we may baldly call blackmail.
The Wilson Center, a bipartisan think tank in Washington,
reported in 2017 that a small community of PRC students and diplomats
have engaged in intimidation tactics ranging from intelligence gathering
to financial retaliation... It was just those sorts of concerns that
led the Trump administration to create the "China Initiative" within the
Justice Department in 2018. This effort generated plenty of convictions
of Chinese nationals in the US for technology theft and other forms of
industrial espionage. The Biden administration ended the program this
year....
China's strategy has for years hinged on infiltration by some
Chinese scientists and researchers working abroad in the US and other
western nations, with threats against their Chinese relatives as
leverage for them to do so.
The consumer and commercial grade drones made by the Chinese
company DJI account for nearly 90% of the market. These popular
products are cost-effective, easy to fly and operate, and send every
byte of data they gather to servers in China. Every DJI drone in the sky
is as good as a hovering Chinese spy. Pictured: A police sergeant in
Exeter, England pilots a DJI drone on May 25, 2021, as part of security
preparations for the G7 Summit that was attended by US President Joe
Biden and leaders of the other G7 countries. (Photo by Geoff Caddick/AFP
via Getty Images)
Chinese intelligence gathering in the US takes many forms and has
different purposes. Most Americans are familiar with some of their means
and tactics, but not with how widespread and persistent they are.
Americans may know about the malware
contained in that infernal TikTok app that their children use. They may
know the Chinese military's cyber-intelligence service was likely behind many of the largest hacks
of Americans' personal data that have ever occurred. They may know from
the news how US defense and intelligence policy have sanctioned Chinese
telecom giant Huawei, and counseled America's allies to reject
Chinese-architected implementations of 5G networking, due to evidence
that China has planted backdoors in commercial networking equipment
designed to allow the Communist regime in Beijing to conduct
surveillance and cyber-espionage anywhere in the world.
Do they know it extends to consumer-level drones?
Cybersecurity expert Klon Kitchen, writing for The Dispatch, recently detailed
the problem with DJI, the Chinese company whose consumer and commercial
grade drones control nearly 90% of the market. These popular products
are cost-effective, easy to fly and operate, and send
every byte of data they gather to servers in China. For this reason,
they are banned by the US military and Department of Homeland Security,
though still used by the FBI and increasingly by local police as "eyes
in the sky" during crime events. FBI use of DJI drones is especially
ironic considering bureau director Christopher Wray has warned often of
the dangers to western commerce posed by the Chinese, most recently in London.
The excellent reporting on DJI by Kitchen tracks efforts by the
company to lobby against passage of a bill called the American Security
Drone Act (ASDA), now before Congress, to outlaw federal government use
of DJI products entirely. What is the risk? Not only the data gathered
by the drones themselves, but everything collected by the mobile app
with which users control their drones and manage their DJI accounts.
Like many other mobile applications, this includes a user's contacts,
photos, GPS location, and online activities.
To repeat: Every DJI drone in the skies above America is as good as a hovering Chinese spy.
Like other Chinese government-controlled companies such as Huawei and
Hikvision, makers of the artificial intelligence systems used in facial
recognition and in the repression of China's Uyghur minority, DJI is
adept at playing the Washington game. The company is engaged in a fierce
lobbying effort to prevent passage of the ASDA bill. So fierce that
they have enlisted police officers from local jurisdictions to come to
Washington and lobby congressional staffers about how great DJI drones
are for their cash-strapped local forces. As Kitchen points out, the
ASDA bill is directed only towards a federal ban on these drones, but
DJI lobbyists from firms like Squire Patton Boggs, Cassidy &
Associates, and CLS Strategies are taking no chances. The company spent
$2.2 million in lobbying efforts in 2020 and $1.4 million last year on
lobbying activities, according to OpenSecrets.org.
These lobbyists are using the classic argument that it would be wrong
to ban the federal government's use of our product because so many other people are using it.
This is doubtless the dilemma currently facing the app stores of Apple
and Google regarding the TikTok app, another Chinese product. The TikTok
app has been identified by cybersecurity professionals as containing a keystroke logger, and both Apple and Google have been pressured
by the Federal Communications Commission to remove it from their app
stores. "Can we really ban something that so many people are happily
using?" they must be asking themselves.
Therein lies the heart of the Chinese approach. TikTok was a mobile device application that no one
was asking for, yet it became an overnight sensation in most western
countries. We really must acknowledge, and grudgingly admire, the
brilliant insight shown by the app's creator company,
Chinese-government-controlled ByteDance, into the psyche of large
numbers of young, western people. The TikTok app, pitched initially as a
way to share and watch silly dance video clips, has been adopted by
younger "woke" schoolteachers to "out" themselves as scheming,
haranguing social justice warriors intent on smuggling sexual ideology
into their classrooms and bragging about it.
This adds some context to Republican Sen. Rob Portman's (R-OH)
exasperation at a Senate hearing about the ASDA legislation, where he said:
"Again, given what the FBI has told us, what the Commerce
Department has told us, what we know from reports, I can't believe we
have to write legislation to force US agencies to ban the use of
Chinese-made drones, particularly where the servers are in China, where
the Chinese government is a part owner and a supporter of this
particular company."
The Chinese approach is to "capture" elite institutions and
individuals in the US: politicians, leading universities, large pension
funds, social media, and Hollywood among them. My latest book, Red Handed,
documents this capture in the areas of politics, diplomatic and
business consulting, Big Tech, academia, and on Wall Street. There is
insight in the Soviet-era statement, attributed to Lenin, about
capitalists "selling us the rope with which to hang them." Yet, it is
the Chinese that understood how to sell the rope at a good price.
Much as they are doing with products such as solar panels, the
Chinese realize that cornering the market in an area where reach equals
access is critical to their long-term plans to dominate. Their pattern
includes stealing technology they cannot create themselves and using any
means available to aid in that theft. Therefore, every bit of access to
information they can scour is of more value to them than the product
used to get it.
Understanding these patterns is crucial to recognizing that the Chinese do this to their own people as well. As Gordon Chang's recent piece
for the Gatestone Institute discusses, the Chinese Communist Party
maintains tight control of Chinese people overseas through many
different forms of what we may baldly call blackmail. The many stories
of intimidation of Chinese students and academics in the US who speak up
about human rights abuses by China, or in support for democracy in Hong
Kong and Taiwanese independence, all demonstrate this.
Universities have put up with this in exchange for foreign funds for
decades. They are only recently being confronted by the costs of this
indulgence. For example, the former chairman of Harvard University's
Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department was convicted
by a federal jury for lying to federal authorities about his
affiliation with the People's Republic of China's Thousand Talents
Program and the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in Wuhan, China, as
well as failing to report income he received from WUT.
It was just those sorts of concerns that led the Trump administration to create the "China Initiative"
within the Justice Department in 2018. This effort generated plenty of
convictions of Chinese nationals in the US for technology theft and
other forms of industrial espionage. The Biden administration ended the
program this year, citing concerns that a broader approach was needed
and in response to lobbying
by Asian American groups that it unfairly targeted scientists with
connections to China. Further, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen
also said he heard concerns from the academic community that
prosecutions of researchers for grant fraud and other charges was having
a "chilling effect."
Be that as it may, China's strategy has for years hinged on
infiltration by some Chinese scientists and researchers working abroad
in the US and other western nations, with threats against their Chinese
relatives as leverage for them to do so. This will remain a
counter-intelligence problem regardless of what the effort to expose it
is called.
It is all part of the pattern. Call it sabotage by remote control.
No comments:
Post a Comment