American Spies Confront a New, Formidable China | Hacker News Reader

American Spies Confront a New, Formidable China

wsj.com

31 pointsbookofjoe14 comments

> Even as the Middle East and Afghanistan dominated resources and attention in the years after 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies never stopped targeting China aggressively, according to former officials directly involved in those efforts. This intelligence focus intensified in the mid-2000s ...

Reminds me of this 2002 report, also from WSJ (https://archive.is/8zfgT):

> Revelations that a U.S.-made plane supplied to the Chinese president came riddled with eavesdropping devices is discomfiting China's leaders, but the low-key Chinese response so far suggests it won't upset efforts to improve ties, or a planned summit next month.

> China's government ordered the luxuriously outfitted plane, a modified Boeing 767, in mid-2000 for President Jiang Zemin, and a company owned by the Chinese air force flew it to Beijing in August. Within a few weeks, military technicians uncovered more than 20 listening devices, according to people familiar with the situation. Among the detected bugs were sophisticated models activated by satellite; one such device was found planted behind the headboard of the presidential bed, according to foreign diplomats and a Chinese scholar with military ties.

Probably didn’t even want the plane. Just order a plane and get all the latest spy tech for free to study.

> Xi’s security-first state employs Orwellian surveillance systems that vastly complicate spy operations inside the country.

Grapes are probably real sour, anyway.

This reminds me of when I was in China in early 2020 and I felt like there were still places in many cities you could go without being seen with cameras. However in and around cities in Xinjiang, it was fairly impossible. Even on highways in the desert there's a camera every km or so, that I recall. I had my passport checked just to go into some buildings, like for example if the building was within a block of an elementary school...

Well Xinjiang is basically governed by the PLA, and institutional memory of the insurgency is strong.

Yep! They even had large barricades in front of schools to prevent vehicles/vehicle bomb attacks, as well as barbed wire around the schools, and officers on shifts with what appeared to be MP5s...

Anyway, somewhat more related, I recently learned about the Church of Scientology's Operation Snow White with over 5,000 covert agents in various branches of the US government. That's just a religious group! Imagine what other governments are trying to do, and the potential scale of covert actions we take.

The US's biggest strength is it's decentralization.

It creates multiple redundancies from the local level all the way to the federal level.

For 70-80% of QoL, most of that is impacted by your City Council, County Board, and School Board. There are so many of those that it's logistically impossible to influence.

The US is riddled with "optimised" just in time supply chains that are bottlenecks; eg: meat supply during COVID

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fvets.2021.6607...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9478983/

From an outside PoV there are a number of places that can be attacked to cause nationwide upsets from small investments of time and effort.

"There are so many of those that it's logistically impossible to influence."

This confuses me - you mean like how corporations and even NIMBY-ists do all the time?

https://archive.ph/Pm7M4

This article reads like counterintelligence.

That's what it is, FUD

In the same week:

- https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article...

- https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/Analys...

Obviously it will be hard for DEI trained folks to do any "real" work.

> American Spies Confront a New, Formidable China

I thoght they were busy changing the regime in Belgrade. /s

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