Russia bombards Ukraine. Israel and Hamas are locked in a danse macabre. The threat of outright war between Jerusalem and Tehran grows daily. Beijing and Washington snarl. In a moment like this, David Sanger’s latest book, subtitled China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West, is a must-read. Painstakingly researched, New Cold Wars brims with on-record interviews and observations by thinly veiled sources. Officials closest to the president talk with an eye on posterity. The words of the CIA director, Bill Burns, repeatedly appear on the page.…
Tag: US national security
Chinese students in US tell of ‘chilling’ interrogations and deportations
Stopped at the border, interrogated on national security grounds, laptops and mobile phones checked, held for several hours, plans for future research shattered. Many western scholars are nervous about travelling to China in the current political climate. But lately it is Chinese researchers working at US universities who are increasingly reporting interrogations – and in several cases deportations – at US airports, despite holding valid work or study visas for scientific research. Earlier this month the Chinese embassy in Washington said more than 70 students “with legal and valid materials”…
FBI chief says Chinese hackers have infiltrated critical US infrastructure
Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into US critical infrastructure and are waiting “for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow”, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, has warned. An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday. China is developing the “ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time…
‘A 1939 moment’: Jim Sciutto on Russia, China and the threat of war
At CNN in Washington, Jim Sciutto’s dimly lit office is both man cave and shrine to a foreign correspondent who has reported from more than 50 countries. A typewriter he bought on Portobello Road during a decade in London. Photos he took in Afghanistan and Ukraine. A Vietnamese newspaper account of the time he rode over the South China Sea on a US spy plane. A corked bottle of water from his trip to the North Pole in a US nuclear submarine. A fragment of the Black Hawk helicopter destroyed…
Australia says AI will be used to help track Chinese submarines under new Aukus plan
Artificial intelligence, drones, and deep space radar are among the technologies that will be used by Australia and its Aukus allies to counter China’s aggression in the Pacific. Australia’s defence minister, Richard Marles, met with his counterparts from the United States and United Kingdom – Lloyd J Austin and Grant Shapps – in California on Saturday to announce the second “pillar” of the Aukus deal. It came after the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, last month accused a Chinese naval ship of “dangerous, unsafe and unprofessional” behaviour after Australian naval divers…
US charges ex-intelligence officer with trying to give defence secrets to China
A former US army intelligence officer has been charged with attempting to provide classified defence information to the Chinese security services during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic – including some listed in a Microsoft Word document titled “Important Information to Share with Chinese Government”. Authorities on Friday arrested former sergeant Joseph Daniel Schmidt, 29, at San Francisco international airport as he arrived from Hong Kong, where he had been living since March 2020, the Justice Department said. A federal grand jury in Seattle returned an indictment on Wednesday charging…
TikTok unveils European data security plan amid calls for US ban
TikTok has announced a data security regime for protecting user information across Europe, as political pressure increases in the US to ban the social video app. The plan, known as Project Clover, involves user data being stored on servers in Ireland and Norway at an annual cost of €1.2bn (£1.1bn), while any data transfers outside Europe will be vetted by a third-party IT company. TikTok is under pressure in the US and Europe over its links to China via its Beijing-based parent, ByteDance. On Tuesday the White House gave its…
Of course China’s balloon was spying. States all spy on each other – and we all benefit | Jonathan Steele
Long ago, in May 1960, an American U-2 spy plane took off from Pakistan to fly at high altitude across the Soviet Union as part of a mission to photograph key facilities and military sites on behalf of the CIA. The Russians saw it and shot it down. The pilot, Gary Powers, managed to descend by parachute and was arrested. In Washington, the Eisenhower administration lied about his mission, claiming the U-2 was a “weather plane” that had strayed off course after its pilot had “difficulties with his oxygen equipment”…
Three objects shot down by US jets may be ‘benign’ balloons, White House says
Three unidentified objects shot down by US fighter jets since Friday may turn out to be balloons connected to “benign” commercial or research efforts, a White House official said on Tuesday. The US has not found any evidence to connect the objects to China’s balloon surveillance program nor to any other country’s spy program, national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, told reporters. “We haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the [People’s Republic of China’s] spying program, or…
China has been spying on US and allies via balloon for years, White House says
China has been operating a high-altitude balloon program spying on the US and its allies for many years, the White House said on Monday as it answered questions about a series of mysterious objects shot down by the US military over an eight-day period in North American airspace. The surveillance program, according to John Kirby, the US national security council spokesperson, dated back to at least the administration of Donald Trump, which he said was oblivious to it. “It was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect…