Tag: Industrial Espionage

‘Rip and Replace’: The Tech Cold War Is Upending Wireless Carriers

Media Library

Deep in a pine forest in Wilcox County, Ala., three workers dangled from the top of a 350-foot cellular tower. They were there to rip out and replace Chinese equipment from the local wireless network. Three hours into the job, the team ran into a hitch. Replacement gear from a European company was obstructing a safety beacon for airplanes. “We’ve got a problem,” a crew member on the ground said. “They say it’s blocking the beacon.” The project had already been delayed for months because of storms, slow equipment shipments…

The Sunday Read: ‘The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets’

Chin@Strategy

In March 2017, an engineer at G.E. Aviation in Cincinnati received a request on LinkedIn. The engineer, Hua, is in his 40s, tall and athletic, with a boyish face that makes him look a decade younger. He moved to the United States from China in 2003 for graduate studies in structural engineering. The LinkedIn request came from Chen Feng, a school official at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in eastern China. Days later, Chen sent him an email inviting him to the university to give a research presentation.…

Justice Dept. Charges 2 Chinese Citizens With Spying for Huawei

Chin@Strategy

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department announced on Monday that it had indicted two Chinese intelligence officials who are believed to have unsuccessfully tried to obtain inside information about a federal investigation into a Chinese telecommunications company accused of stealing trade secrets, which people familiar with the situation later identified as Huawei Technologies. The Chinese intelligence officials, Guochun He and Zheng Wang, paid bribes to an official with access to sensitive details of the investigation into Huawei by the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, according to charging…

Justice Dept. to End Trump-Era Initiative to Deter Chinese Threats

Chin@Strategy

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Justice Department said on Wednesday that it was ending a contentious Trump-era effort to fight Chinese national security threats that critics said unfairly targeted professors of Asian descent. A top Justice Department official, Matthew G. Olsen, said in remarks at George Mason University’s National Security Institute that the agency would instead introduce a broader strategy meant to counter threats from hostile nations, which would extend beyond China to include countries like Russia, Iran and North Korea. “By grouping cases under the China Initiative rubric,” Mr. Olsen…

Justice Dept. Is Set to Modify Trump-Era Program Aimed at Fighting Chinese Threats

Chin@Strategy

Such losses often fuel the Chinese propaganda machine and hurt U.S. interests. “Every case that goes south, especially one that concerns a minority community, discredits the Justice Department in the minds of the American people,” said David H. Laufman, an official in the department’s national security division during the Obama administration. In announcing changes to the China Initiative, Mr. Olsen is expected to say that the Justice Department will treat some grant fraud cases as civil matters going forward, reserving criminal prosecution for the most egregious instances of deception, according…

U.S. Drops Its Case Against M.I.T. Scientist Accused of Hiding China Links

Chin@Strategy

BOSTON — Federal prosecutors on Thursday dropped the government’s charges against Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a high-profile setback to the China Initiative, a nearly three-year-old government effort intended to stop scientists from passing sensitive technology to China. Dr. Chen was arrested on Jan. 14, 2021, during President Donald J. Trump’s last full week in office, and charged with a form of grant fraud, hiding his affiliations with Chinese government institutions in applications for $2.7 million in grants from the U.S.…

Spies for Hire: China’s New Breed of Hackers Blends Espionage and Entrepreneurship

Chin@Strategy

One posting from Hainan Xiandun stood out. The ad, on a Sichuan University computer science hiring board from 2018, boasted that Xiandun had “received a considerable number of government-secret-related business.” The company, based in Hainan’s capital, Haikou, paid monthly salaries of $1,200 to $3,000 — solid middle-class wages for Chinese tech workers fresh out of college — with bonuses as high as $15,000. Xiandun’s ads listed an email address used by other firms looking for cybersecurity experts and linguists, suggesting they were part of a network. Chinese hacking groups are…