In Risky Hunt for Secrets, U.S. and China Expand Global Spy Operations

zephyreks , 10 months ago

This article starts with talking about the spy balloon that wasn’t a spy balloon: cbsnews.com/…/the-bizarre-secret-behind-chinas-sp…

“The intelligence community, their assessment – and it’s a high-confidence assessment – [is] that there was no intelligence collection by that balloon,”

After the Navy raised the wreckage from the bottom of the Atlantic, technical experts discovered the balloon’s sensors had never been activated while over the Continental United States.

So, why was it over the United States? There are various theories, with at least one leading theory that it was blown off-track.

So… The only reason people even consider this a spy balloon is because some guy in China launched it? Wonderful.

autotldr Bot , 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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The balloon crisis, a small part of a much larger Chinese espionage effort, reflects a brazen new aggressiveness by Beijing in gathering intelligence on the United States as well as Washington’s growing capabilities to collect its own information on China.

For Washington, the espionage efforts are a critical part of President Biden’s strategy to constrain the military and technological rise of China, in line with his thinking that the country poses the greatest long-term challenge to American power.

But critics say some of the U.S. government’s counterintelligence efforts are racially biased and paranoid, amounting to a new Red Scare — a charge at least partly supported by the cases the Justice Department has had to drop and by its shutdown of the Trump-era China Initiative program.

And while American officials refuse to discuss details of the agency’s network of informants, Mr. Burns said publicly in July that it had made progress on rebuilding a “strong human intelligence capability.”

While it is unclear how robust the new network is, some U.S. officials think Mr. Xi’s extremely authoritarian governance style gives intelligence agencies an opening to recruit disaffected Chinese citizens, including from among the political and business elite who had benefited in previous decades from less party control and a less ideological leadership.

More recently, a sophisticated, highly targeted penetration of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform gave China access to the emails of senior State Department diplomats, including the American ambassador in Beijing and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

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The original article contains 2,395 words, the summary contains 245 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!