The pattern of activities that I chronicled in “The New Art of War: China’s Deep Strategy Inside the United States” is clearly continuing, judging from the news this morning. Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David Sanger report in the New York Times that an unknown body, which they hint is China, has hacked the Customs and Border Protection agency and stolen 100,000 images of cars and their license plates crossing the U.S.-Mexican border over a six week period. Just how China might use the images remains a mystery because it is not selling the personal details on the dark web for purposes of fraud. Rather, the pattern seems to be that Chinese government-affiliated entities are amassing huge amounts of personal data to find patterns in individual Americans’ lives. If you can combine health records with the credit reports stolen from Equifax with 400 million passport names and numbers from Marriott, experts believe the Chinese are sophisticated enough to create profiles of individuals of interest to them.
The second article in The Wall Street Journal, unfortunately behind a reg wall, is entitled “U.S. Targets Efforts by China, Others to Recruit Government Scientists.” This one is about China’s Thousand Talents Program which seeks to identify Chinese-Americans and other ethnicities in the United States who possess technological skills that China’s party-state has targeted. In this particular case, the U.S. Department of Energy, which runs the nation’s highly advanced weapons labs, is banning its researchers from joining the Thousand Talents program after finding that its personnel were recruited by China’s military-linked institutions and offered multimillion-dollar pay packages.
It’s time that Americans wake up to the massive, coordinated effort by China’s government to steal American technologies and data. We need the equivalent of a Go-to-the-Moon strategy to concentrate our minds and resources on what needs to be done to contend with a foreign government engaged in highly intrusive actions inside our own borders.
