A Chinese crypto farm next to a nuclear missile base? Not on my watch, says Biden If you're a majority Chinese-owned company looking for cheap real estate in the US, you might want to steer clear of American missile silos and military bases. Cryptomining firm MineOne found this out the hard way after President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Monday forcing the blockchain biz to sell its facilities, …
Crypto I'll believe, but mining?
Come on, they were clearly trying to decode the 7th symbol on the Stargate!
PS
Yes, yes, I know that Francis E. Warren Air Force base isn't the Space Force base, ok! But from this distance all the States look the same! Colorado, Wyoming, you can forgive the Chinese being confused.
Your missing something.
I doubt very much that the Missiles or anything remotely connected to them is connected to the internet, but being located next to a missile base opens up a ream of possible espionage items:
- identifying staff (military and civilian)
- intercepting Comms (both encrypted and mundane)
- tracking patrol movements
- identifying visitors
- etc.
The weakest part of any securtiy in a firm are the people, so identifying the personnel allows you to find out who is in debt, who is having an affair, and who might be susceptible to pressure to provide inside info.
Intercepting Comms, even the mundane stuff, lets you find out who suppliers are, allowing you to insert your own people into the loop, build trust, and gain info. Cleaning staff once trusted, have a surprisingly large amount of access to areas all over a base or firm.
Intercepting encrypted comms, gives you a chance to look for weaknesses in the encryption, or funnel it back home to try and defeat the encryption. Hell if your sitting on a massive "Crypto" Rig, you can set that to work trying to break the encryption. It might not sucees, but even that teaches you something about the enemy. Hell, learning about frequency of encrypted comms, can you tell you stuff, like when they receives the comms, and in which room, so your inserted "cleaning" staff can setup a bug that only operates during those times, to avoid detection.
And lets face facts, could you tell just by looking at a server rack, if the equipment in there is mining crypto, breaking encryption, or running hidden listening software? I doubt it, and neither could any local plod sent in to have a look.
Lots of ways to get vital Info, being setup so close...
@ lglethal
All good points but if you want to keep track of the enemy, you're far more likely to setup a business where you can justify more staff (a DC has a remarkably low headcount for the size of the building, making them far easier to counter-surveil), nor would you be so damn foolish to leave any connection from your spying business to the hostile nation (registered in BVI with connections to China is hardly 'deep cover'). Setup a few businesses: one that has an entirely plausible justification for having different people on extended stays (your subject matter experts as and when required), maybe a 'business knowledge hub' or some such, and don't forget to cater for the vehicle repair and maintenance needs of the local community - so you can plant devices in employees' cars. You'd also be well advised to make all these businesses fairly disposable so if one of them was suspected and got raided, you don't end up having all your eggs in one basket. None of this is far-fetched or new but, there again, none of us will ever know what intelligence drove the exec. order - maybe someone simply found out that the building just happened to sit right next to the data cables feeding the nuke site!
I'd actually argue less people is better for OpSec. Your DC (or Crypto mining setup) security guards and cleaners dont need to know what you're doing. Which also means your hiring majority locals, which helps with cover. Also a DC would expect the occasional "external consultant" to come by, or potential "customers/investors". So I think your covered pretty well there.
Setting up the other businesses would probably follow after you've got a line on intel. No point setting up a garage if you dont know which cars to bug. Also there is nothing to say they dont have that setup already (just as you say for OpSec reasons, they dont need to know about each other...)
Keep in mind that this Crypto setup was only caught after a tip-off. The authorities probably wouldnt have picked up on it on their own... So the BVI cover passed first inspection, which is the majority of what you want. There's very few covers that will pass a thorough audit by the authorities, once they are certain there's something to look for...
Anyway, this is all speculation. Maybe they are completely innocent of everything, well except working to destroy the environment through massive energy usage, but unfortunately that's not illegal...
"Anyway, this is all speculation. Maybe they are completely innocent of everything, well except working to destroy the environment through massive energy usage, but unfortunately that's not illegal..."
If all they wanted to do was crypto mining, why do it in Wyoming, where the electricity price is about 30-40% higher than Chinese electricity prices?
Not really much different to the Russian investment in a new telecoms provider in the UK that just accidentally, coincidentally, purely by chance, and unintentionally happened to serve the towns around RAF and USAF bases in Lincolnshire and East Anglia, and just about nowhere else in the country.
The CCP aren't exactly the brightest. Even if this company has nothing to do with the CCP (doubt it, as become big over there, even if you're a national company and the CCP wants its bit of your pie), at some point the CCP goons will role in and tell them they need access to their business.
Much like a lot of the Chinese restaurants either just agreed or were forced to house the secret police stations so they could tell escaped Chinese to "Go back to the motherland. We have you're family".
Its all ironic. Attempt to buy land in China and you'll be told to jog on "We don't allow foreigners to buy our land", yet a large abandon shopping mall was looking to be redeveloped in the US, so a Chinese company bought all the land and claimed they'd develop it but didn't. Just sat on the land for years until forced to sell it as the city had had enough.
Similar to this tiktok ban (Its not a ban its just a forced sale). Tiktok IS an issue (and yes we know Facebook etc are just as shit but at least we can talk about this without being made to "disappear"). Bytedance is an indepentant company as the CCP would have you believe, but then why are the CCP so bent out of shape over the sale? If the CCP disagree with this, then just move out of the US market and keep the app. Oh thats right, Tiktok itself is banned in China.
The CCP as they do, are also crying racism, but how many Western apps are allowed in China? Oh that's right, none. So if the app is totally innocent, why does it need so many permissions on devices, why does it have so much tracking and why are the CCP so upset? Could it possibly be its their own siop app and they are upset that they won't be able to spy anymore? Maybe.
Its annoying as China is a nice country and has a rich history. Its just sadly, the CCP have ruined it, actively destroyed its history by smashing monuments up, allowed local villagers to use the brick from the Great Wall of China (until recently, realised their mistake so stopped this, but not before a local villager had plowed a whole in the wall so they didn't have to go round the long way). And actively silence anyone over there that critises the government. The "tank man" was never seen again. The recent man on the bridge protesting was never seen again. The videos that do escape the country, you can even see its own people are getting fed up but can't do anything to resolve it.
I've rambled on now.
Re: "the building just happened to sit right next to the data cables feeding the nuke site"
(I got this secondhand, so some of the details may be a bit off.) One place I worked was doing some trenching work, running a new line for something or other. They came across a conduit that wasn't on any of their schematics, so had to do some extra work to avoid it. A couple hours later, some very serious folks in suits with firearms (which were prohibited on site) appeared and started asking questions. Apparently the conduit contained some kind of secret data line, and digging around it alerted the authorities.
Sorry, gov'mint. If you want your data line to be undisturbed, the property owner kinda needs to know where it is!
I know of one case where this happened, except the guys in suits showed up after the line had been severed. The contractor had some explaining to do because the line was hardened and encased in concrete; it took serious jackhammering to get to the point of actually severing the fiber.
If you're going to look for spies targeting missile bases or any other intelligence target, the place to look is most likely the staff of the three bars closest to the facility main gate. Folks from the facility stop off for a quick one, encounter a coworker, and they talk about -- the weather, and sports, and ... work. Low tech, but probably a lot more effective than trying to sort out the electromagnetic radiation from the base -- which can be monitored from anywhere near the base. If "they" do that at all, they probably use a weatherproof black box hung on a power pole near the base. So much stuff on those poles nowadays that probably no one will pay any attention to it for decades.
Hmm. Don't know if they're common there, but around here it's common to see a barrel-like transformer on a power pole. If a bucket lift with the power company's name on it rolls up and installs a new one, who's to know if it's real or a surveillance device? Bonus points if it really is tied to the power lines to run it and possibly send data.
Early warning: Adding to what you said, listening to patterns of ground noise, radio traffic, personnel movement, etc. can help you determine what is anomalous and then get an early warning even before the silo doors open.
The liquid fueled rockets need to be prepped and any hint of a first strike will give an extra minute or so for the Chinese govt leaders and military leaders to prepare.
> an Internet-connected mining site and an Internet-connected missile
Looks like you really believe this a real crypto currency mining enterprise. It's a bit like their fishing boats with tens of antennas.
- Also a milling plant near an Air Force base in Grand Forks.
- Michigan piece of land purchased in 2023 by a Chinese company (Fufeng group) near the nation's largest National Guard training facility in Grayling.
- Flannery Associates, and California’s Travis Air Force Base
Remember all these CCTV cameras send army movement info to motherland.
there is also the issue that a Chinese company is hiding under a BVI flag to potentially buy a data warehouse full of new, state of the art, high power mining kit. What happens to the used equipment when it has been "finished with" and needs upgrading after only a couple of weeks? Send on a big ship to "head office" in BVI with "scrap, for recycling" on the well packed crates? Perhaps the air force base was purely coincidental and it was just a way of getting their hands on lots of embargoed tech gear?
This is clearly more industry protectionism, purchased by the finance lobby. Likely another forced sale to a friend of a congressman, who is pleased that the facility, circuits, etc are built out already. Congress would like such a forced sale for TikTok (but a ban is more likely and also desirable to owning-class interests).
More US farmland is foreign-owned than you think, much owned by Chinese agribusiness (perhaps next to military facilities). Presumably this is a greater national (food) security threat than a single crypto shop. This is allowed to keep land speculators fat, and land assets are easier to seize.
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