
How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies - raleighm
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/27/silicon-valley-spies-china-russia-219071
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07d046
> Occasionally, Chinese intelligence activities in San Francisco burst into
> plain view. Consider the story—and it is an incredible one, also told here
> for the first time—of the 2008 Olympic Torch Run.

> ...

> Most brazenly, said former intelligence agents, Chinese officials bussed in
> 6,000-8,000 J-Visa holding students—threatening them with the loss of
> Chinese government funding—from across California to disrupt Falun Gong,
> Tibetan, Uighur and pro-democracy protesters. (They even provided these
> students with a box lunch.) “I’m not sure they would have pulled out these
> stops in any other city, but San Francisco is special” to China, said a
> former senior U.S. official.

It's wild, but the same thing happened in Canberra, Australia. The CCP
organised thousands of Chinese students to support Beijing and counter-protest
pro-Tibet protesters.

~~~
grappler
Reminds me of an incident from my college days. An international student
association put on some sort of cultural appreciation event. Students from
other countries would perform songs or dances or poems from their homeland.

This was around 2004 or so. I don't remember the political climate being very
charged, or at least not at my engineering school. There were blogs but major
social networks hadn't yet taken off.

So at this international student event, a guy goes up and says he's going to
do a song from his home country, Taiwan. He doesn't get much farther before a
Chinese student runs onstage, grabs the microphone away from him and yells
into it "Taiwan is not a country!"

~~~
clubm8
>at this international student event, a guy goes up and says he's going to do
a song from his home country, Taiwan. He doesn't get much farther before a
Chinese student runs onstage, grabs the microphone away from him and yells
into it "Taiwan is not a country!"

Sounds like battery to me. Should have had this student arrested, charges
pressed, and ooops - criminality makes you lose your student visa.

Fuck anyone who abuses America's hospitality to try to take away someone's 1st
Amendment rights.

------
shiburizu
I confess to having a certain fondness for reading into the secretive nature
of Chinese perception operations.

How does one efficiently solve this problem however? If we, in a case like the
pro-china counterprotest described in the article, decide to nab the guys off
the street on counts of suspected espionage what is the repercussion we should
all fear? Bad press? Chinese students and engineers pulling out of the US tech
sector? While I feel terribly conflicted about a government that exerts such
fear on their people as someone who wants to believe in the individuality of a
person, surely the repercussions of countering Chinese espionage aren't any
worse than say...investigating Russian social media influence?

~~~
UncleEntity
> Chinese students and engineers pulling out of the US tech sector?

I'm sure the ones who were coerced into participating in the counter-protest
wouldn't care enough to hop on the next plane home.

Has to be kind of disheartening, minding your own business when all of a
sudden you get a knock on the door and a "request" to trample all over the
civil rights of the citizens of your host country "or else."

~~~
07d046
> Has to be kind of disheartening

My impression is that most Chinese students wouldn't have a problem doing
this. "Civil rights" aren't really a thing in Chinese thinking, and the
"patriotic education" in China does an excellent job at convincing them that
the Dalai Lama and Falun Gong are evil, and Tibet and Hong Kong and Taiwan are
indisputably part of China.

------
overcooked2
Society has to avoid McCarthyism (a 'reds under the bed' panic). This is what
China wants and it plays directly into the propaganda. They want false
accusations and race based panic.

Authoritarian states stealing advanced technology will be multigenerational
challenge, but it's a solvable problem. But we must stick our values while we
solve it.

The first thing to change the cost/benefit analysis of theft. This means
evidence based prosecutions conducted transparently with real jail sentences.

Technical solutions can help. All business producing innovation need long term
high quality logs for all activity (you need to know who downloaded what
software source code and when)

Perhaps the most difficult to overcome problem comes from Patriotic Education,
which is state sponsored brainwashing starting from kindergarten (since 1990)
leaving a potentially indelible effect on the psyche of graduates of the
Chinese education system. A well rounded study of history and understanding of
national strategies is needed to see through any government's propaganda (but
the propaganda from the government of China in particular). This study is
something we all can benefit from.

Every culture agrees stealing is wrong. Threats and coercion are wrong. On
this issue the moral high ground clearly belongs to the US. But we need to be
careful to always keep the moral high ground and never alienate people who
have done no wrong.

The centuries old idea of letting people into our country to work and by
adopting a few values become accepted as as American as any other is a
powerful global piece of soft power. But powerful nations will always try to
exploit to cheat America out of the technology it develops.

We must understand China's long term strategy and fight back using our moral
high ground, which includes a transparent legal system. We must see through
China's propaganda (it says it is not a perpetrator but instead a victim of
hacking. The truth is, it is both.)

~~~
gowld
I wonder if it would be helpful to mandate civics education for university
students on student visas.

Even so, just as a store can survive some shoplifters, surely American
industry can survive some IP misappropriation, perhaps with some light
assistance from a tariff system or deduction against foreign aid payments?

~~~
overcooked2
> I wonder if it would be helpful to mandate civics education for university
> students on student visas.

We need to make sure everyone - whether they are international students
spending 4 years studying, immigrants in the workforce, or locals who have
been here their whole lives - feel welcomed in this country and develop a
strong positive affinity to their new home (whether or not they stay forever),
and especially the values we try and represent.

We can make people feel more welcomed and included as individuals: we can try
and include more newcomers and students in our own social circles.

I'm a bit skeptical of trying to reverse brainwash people with a western
patriotic civics education, but a mandated program to teach newcomers their
rights and how the (in principle) mostly fair and transparent legal system
works is probably a good thing.

Each student or immigrant from Russia or China are individuals with their own
unique motivations, personality and temperaments. It's absolutely unfair to
paint them all with the same brush but they are clearly still vulnerable to a
powerful authoritarian government which can threaten and coerce them to act
against the US.

Also, for every strategy the west develops, the government of China will have
a counter strategy. Fortunately, I think we can win this fight.

> Even so, just as a store can survive some shoplifters, surely American
> industry can survive some IP misappropriation, perhaps with some light
> assistance from a tariff system or deduction against foreign aid payments?

I suspect a systematic, state sponsored attack on US IP (particularly future
technology) from a competent government is greater threat than you think.
Remember that a strong economy funds all other parts of government.

