Beware the Chinese App

When Whoppie blew it big on national television it, seemed sensational, and the Washington Red Skins sucked it in after two years to become the Commanders and was then accused of shady financial dealings which I couldn’t care less about, and then we, humble beings, had begun to celebrate the Chinese’s new year – “Tiger,” which to me and a lot of other people symbolizes courage and bravery. It then slowly crept into the headline news that” the number of anti-Semitic incidents in New York increased by 24 percent last year to the highest level in decades, including a surge in the number of assaults,” – both criminal and noncriminal incidents targeting Jews, according to an annual report released by the Anti-Defamation League. Then every inch of news reporting was aimed at and continues to be the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Ukraine has become a symbol of courage and bravery. All this activity took place while under the radar the director of the FBI Wray testified to Congress that the scale of Chinese spying here in the United States “blew me away.” His comment caught me left-footed.

With Putin in Moscow thumbing his nose, as emissaries from western nations pleading with him to cease and desist his invasion, more (3000) U.S. troops were sent east by Biden along with a series of ever-increasing sanctions and millions in military hardware. I was aware (see my prior commentaries) of the Chinese aggressively flexing their military muscle in every inch of the Far-East. And today China announced it has signed a security pact with the Solomon Islands that has obviously raised growing concerns among Australia and the United States about the ever-expanding Chinese influence in the South Pacific. Among the alarming concerns is the agreement would enable China to build a military base – its first in he Pacific less than 1300 miles from Australia. The Solomon Islands, the scene of deadly right last year, sits on a key shipping lane between the U.S. and Asia. And lest we forget, China is the world’s largest producer of small, off-the-shelf drones. I was mostly in the dark as to the extent it was ramping up its spying and bulling activities, not merely on United States’ academic campuses but within the high tech industries here at home. There is an aggressive, full court Chinese spying in the United States as I write this Commentary. We should be very concerned.

Although the FBI has acknowledged “some misstep,” the bureau’s focus, it is presently claimed, is on the Chinese efforts to steal from American companies, not academia. It has however moved unsuccessfully against Chinese individuals in U.S. academic research.

As the FBI director was “blown away” during his presentation, one thing not mentioned was China’s National Intelligence Law. It is breathtaking in its simplicity and requires that all Chinese companies support the government’s national intelligence work by requiring them to not only share the data it collects during the use of their product – wherever sold, but, even more compelling, to create vulnerabilities in their product to aid the Chinese Communist Party in stealing information, data, trade secrets and anything else of economic value. So, when you utilize that Chinese created app for your business, you can be well assured that China knows all your trade secrets.

Obviously, those of us who reside within the continental United States need not worry about any Chinese aggressive use of armed forces striking our backyard vegetable gardens or the local Chrysler car plant, as north Korea boasts of that capacity. What should command our attention is an article written by Pete Williams, and what caught my eye in my follow-up research. We, in the United States, are by and large, an open and welcoming society, with what appears to be in a post pandemic world an unquenchable thirst and quest for labor at all levels of need. Nursing homes are closing their door to new patients for lack of staff, airlines are cancelling flights for lack of personal.

The Chinese forces that should draw our intense domestic scrutiny are those aimed at stealing our patents, scientific and economic knowledge at the “job” level or thru hacking. I recall many years ago, in the early years of teaching Entertainment Law, and discussing the Chinese theft of not yet released domestically, potentially bestselling novels. The Chinese would steal or hack from a U.S. publisher’s printing house copies of new novels before actual printing, flown overnight to China, mass printed in record time on cheap paper and binding and flown back before or at the very release of the authorized edition, as they hit the U.S. bookseller’s market. The legal publications where often overwhelmed before they were placed in the bookstore window for sale.

Pete William’s tells us that Chinese spying within the U.S. is so rampart and widespread that the FBI is launching at least two counterintelligence probes each day — with in excess of two thousand cases under investigation as I write this Commentary. This is a full court press by the FBI to meet what could be labeled a” tsunami of spying” by the Chinese each day in this Country. Although it has been well documented that other countries, including North Korea, Russia and Iran, have carried out sustained attacks on American computer networks, Wray said China stands in a class by itself — “(T)here’s just no other country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, innovation, and economic security than China.”

Three years ago, the NYPD announced the procurement of 14 drones that were manufactured by a China-based company called Da Jiang Innovations (known as DJI Systems). In July of last year. the US Department of Defense released a memo stating that the DJI poses “potential threats to national security — “the company’s devices were indeed dangerous to the country and its citizens.”

When asked about the vulnerability of those devices that are potentially still in use by the NYPD, a spokesperson said: “we do not conduct activities that would be of national security value.” Surreptitiously, mapping of this particular City with its worldwide commercial activities, revealing its vulnerabilities is a national security issue.

“We don’t investigate based on race, or ethnicity, or constitutionally protected activity,” Wray said. “In fact, in many cases, Chinese Americans are some of the people most victimized by the Chinese government’s tactics that we’re describing.” My thought: if, as I have noted — “There’s just no other country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, innovation and economic security than China” then it behooves us to aggressively press forward not merely in the intensive investigation of economic/industrial sealing but also in the academic research arena. It is there where ideas are born, nurtured and then placed into corporate development and delivery. Clearly, we are presently at ever rising risk from aggressive Chinese expansion on all levels of international relations. It may be too late, if we limit our assault merely aimed at Chinese corporate spying.

Richard Allan
The Editor