Llm programs and chinese espionage7/1/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Such an attack would have been impossible through traditional intelligence gathering strategies. From 1997 to 1998, for example, Chinese intelligence agents were able to both infiltrate Lawrence Livermore Labs and coerce Chinese graduate students working there into leaking top-secret material, successfully stealing blueprints and test data from the most advanced wings of the U.S. ![]() In effect, the Chinese government is able to force honest workers into espionage. Workers and researchers abroad, who may have no prior intention to commit espionage, realize their precarious positions. intelligence asset voluntarily returned to China for questioning only to be arrested and executed. Those who refuse to cooperate, or instead decide to assist U.S. that while they themselves may be outside the range of government oppression, their families and friends at home are not. Chinese intelligence officers are quick to remind visa holding workers in the U.S. Yet the one-party authoritarian rule of China affords the Communist Party ample opportunity to coerce Chinese citizens studying and working abroad into spying. J-Visas workers are granted permission to work inside some of America’s largest tech corporations, often doing jobs that are in short supply: chiefly software and hardware engineering. Workers on J-visas have a long history of utilizing their position within America’s best technology companies to supply the Chinese state, and subsequently its domestic industries, with insider information on American technology. What makes Chinese spying in California, particularly the Bay Area, so insidious is its defiance of traditional tradecraft norms. To put the threat into perspective, California is so valuable to China that it is the only state for which China’s Ministry of State Security maintains a dedicated espionage unit. Indeed, China, with the world’s second largest defense budget and largest population, presents a new sort of challenge to American counterintelligence, one that many in California are ill prepared to address. They have all the time in the world, and all the patience in the world” said Kathleen Puckett, a former FBI special agent and thirty-year Bay Area counterintelligence veteran. In the words of FBI Director Christopher Wray, Chinese espionage, “ represents the broadest, most challenging, most significant threat we face as a country.” Chinese military and intelligence resources dwarf those of the Russian Federation. San Francisco was a quiet hub in the global espionage network arrayed against the United States.įew are aware that Russia’s - at least, official - departure from the peninsula signals an almost symbolic passing of the torch between superpowers. Even after the collapse of Soviet Union, the FSB, Putin’s modern iteration of the KGB, continued an aggressive spying campaign based out of the Russian embassy, targeting American citizens, Russians working abroad, communications networks, military bases and businesses. Released CIA reports from the 1980s indicate that at the time, there were over 1,000 spies working in and around the Bay Area, including many from the USSR. Prior to its recent closure by President Trump, the Russian Consulate in San Francisco was extremely active in intelligence gathering, housing one of the few active espionage stations in the United States. As both an economic and political powerhouse, not to mention the military bases that dot its landscape, California is a high-value target for America’s adversaries. California has been a hotbed for foreign intelligence collection and surveillance for over 30 years. While it may come as a surprise to many Californians, foreign espionage is nothing new in the golden state. ![]() Feinstein is the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Feinstein’s payroll, who indeed was her personal driver, listened to hundreds of conversations between the senator and America’s political and military elite. Dianne Feinstein was secretly recruited to work as a spy for China’s Ministry of State Security. This past summer, details emerged that a staffer employed by California Sen. Unfortunately, none of this ever happened - at least that we know of. Over the next few years, this source overheard hundreds of conversations that gave the CIA an intimate picture of the inner workings of China’s state security apparatus, Party plans, and military preparations. In the early 2000s, the CIA succeeded in recruiting the personal valet of one of China’s most powerful Communist Party members. ![]()
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