Tag: Espionage and Intelligence Services

U.S. Detects Suspected Chinese Spy Balloon Hovering Over Northwest

Chin@Strategy

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has postponed his trip to China after a surveillance balloon was detected flying over the U.S. Read the latest. WASHINGTON — The United States has detected what it says is a Chinese surveillance balloon that has been hovering over the northwestern United States, the Pentagon said on Thursday, a discovery that comes days before Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s visit to Beijing. President Biden has chosen, for now, not to shoot down the balloon after a recommendation from Pentagon officials that doing so would…

U.S. Drops Case Against Police Officer It Had Called an ‘Insider Threat’

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In September 2020, when federal authorities charged Baimadajie Angwang, a Marine Corps veteran and New York Police Department officer, with acting as an illegal agent of China, the head of New York’s F.B.I. office called him “the definition of an insider threat.” The government has quietly changed its mind. On Thursday, in a brief and subdued hearing in a Brooklyn courtroom, a federal judge granted prosecutors’ request to dismiss the charges against Officer Angwang. The swift unraveling of the case — which had been hailed as a signature example of…

With F.B.I. Search, U.S. Escalates Global Fight Over Chinese Police Outposts

Chin@Strategy

The nondescript, six-story office building on a busy street in New York’s Chinatown lists several mundane businesses on its lobby directory, including an engineering company, an acupuncturist and an accounting firm. A more remarkable enterprise, on the third floor, is unlisted: a Chinese outpost suspected of conducting police operations without jurisdiction or diplomatic approval — one of more than 100 such outfits around the world that are unnerving diplomats and intelligence agents. F.B.I. counterintelligence agents searched the building last fall as part of a criminal investigation being conducted with the…

ByteDance Inquiry Finds Employees Obtained User Data of 2 Journalists

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ByteDance, the China-based parent company of TikTok, said on Thursday that an internal investigation found that employees had inappropriately obtained the data of U.S. TikTok users, including two reporters. Over the summer, a few employees on a ByteDance team responsible for monitoring employee conduct tried to find the sources of suspected leaks of internal conversations and business documents to journalists. In doing so, the employees gained access the IP addresses and other data of two reporters and a small number of people connected to the reporters via their TikTok accounts.…

UK Sees Varied Domestic Threats, Mainly From Iran, Russia and China

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The scale of those expulsions, together with the rollout of Western economic sanctions designed to isolate Russia, had proved a surprisingly potent test for Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, he added. Well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Britain was especially sensitive to the activities of Russian agents, and its pushback against Moscow’s spy networks intensified after the nerve agent poisoning of Sergei V. Skripal, the former Russian agent, and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England, in 2018. Since that episode prompted Britain to expel 23 Russian diplomats on espionage grounds,…

Did Germany Learn From Its Russia Trouble? The Test May Come in China.

Chin@Strategy

BERLIN — Germany understood the trap of strategic vulnerability that it had laid for itself in relying so heavily on Russian gas only after Moscow invaded Ukraine and turned off the spigot. But whether that lesson has been fully absorbed may be tested elsewhere: China. As Chancellor Olaf Scholz prepares for his first visit to Beijing on Thursday, a planeload of executives in tow, Germany’s intelligence chiefs and allies are warning him against pursuing business as usual with a China that is saber-rattling in the Taiwan Strait. Were tensions to…

Chinese Hackers Tried to Steal Russian Defense Data, Report Says

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Under China’s authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping, Beijing has refined its approach to cyberspying, transforming over the past decade into a far more sophisticated actor. China’s premier spy agency, borrowing a page from Russia, has recruited beyond its ranks, pulling from the country’s growing pool of tech workers. The strategy has made its attacks more scattershot and unpredictable, but analysts say it has also helped strengthen the country’s efforts, enabling spies to run stealthy attacks that target intellectual property as well as political and military intelligence around the world. Mr. Xi…

Rising Violence by Separatists Adds to Pakistan’s Lethal Instability

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Pakistan’s security agencies have cracked down on educated Baluch youth, forcibly “disappearing” suspected militants, sometimes for years, without trial, according to news reports, student advocates and human rights groups. “These days, law enforcement agencies consider every university student from Baluchistan a potential militant,” said Faisal Nawaz, a student from Panjgur, in Baluchistan, who is studying at the University of Karachi. Separatist attacks have been concentrated in the sparsely populated Makran region of Baluchistan, where residents depend on illegal cross-border trade with Iran in fuel and other commodities. In a desert…

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Fights for Survival

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan is fighting for his political survival after opposition political parties have moved for a no-confidence motion in Parliament and the country’s powerful military has withdrawn its support for his government. Mr. Khan, the former cricket-star-turned-politician, has announced plans to gather a million supporters in Islamabad, appealed to the Supreme Court to disqualify lawmakers who have defected from his party and denounced his critics as part of an American-influenced conspiracy. But as demands for his resignation mount, critics and analysts say he…

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

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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…