How does China keep stealing our stuff, wonders DoD group responsible for keeping foreign agents out The Pentagon outfit responsible for preventing foriegn agents from infiltrating defense agencies says the US isn't doing a very good job of preventing state secrets from falling into Chinese hands. Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) Assistant Director of Industrial Security Matthew Redding told attendees at …
Because we keep connecting stuff to the internet that doesn't really need to be connected to it...
Also because people are being forced to put their shiat on the internet wheter they want to or not.
Probably out of a combination of greed and/or sheer lazyness...
The sent people over to the US in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s. Those federal employees now have access to lots of information. CTRL-C, CTRL-V, wait 30 minutes, and then go on vacation with 10TB of brand spanking new U.S. government data. So, it took up to 40 years to get anything valuable from those agents, but if you're playing the long game, and they are, 40 years no time at all tp wait.
I'd also say because we have no right to repair. Because a company can bankrupt itself, start up a new company then send a firmware update to all those old devices (because they bought their old bankrupt company) and then state you can only unbrick them if you now give them a yearly sub. Then make it illegal to be allowed to tell people how to unbrick the kit they paid for.
Not being allowed to use your own server for IoT stuff when a company stops supporting it.
and finally, because of fuck whit trump who, near the beginning of this term got rid of the cyber security teams.
Probably out of a combination of greed and/or sheer lazyness...
Greed and laziness to be sure. But ignorance, stupidity, and incompetence play a huge roll as well. Fact is, now and for the foreseeable future, if you want to secure your data, you simply can't connect your computers to the internet as we know it. Decision makers at all levels need to have that reality pounded into them.
We have spent three decades creating a huge, intractable, unsecurable shambles while operating under the misconception that we are making progress (toward what destination one wonders)? Fixing that mess is not just a matter of a few bug fixes and some gimmicks. Secure digital communications are quite likely possible But probably not in the framework we've established. And, we're throwing in 'AI' which apparently needs to spy on everyone, everywhere, always in order to work and seems to depend on dubious output filtering to keep from shipping secrets to anyone who asks.
The best, and exceedingly painful, answer I can come up with is. Leave the current internet in place, It's fit for entertainment, routine communication, and low level commercial activity. Nothing more. Secure the transport layers (assuming that's possible) so that messages always go to their intended destination -- and only there. Establish a simple, text based, secure networking protocol for major financial transactions and command and control of critical infrastructure. Regulate the bejusus out of AI. For now, shut it down except for research. Release AI technologies for general use only after their capabilities are thoroughly understood and the risks are deemed to be acceptable. And finally. unless and until, a 100% foolproof method of identifying a compromised computer can be worked out, computers can only ever operate in one of the two modes -- general internet or secure. Never both. And no switching between modes, Yes, you'll need two computers for that and two cell phones (although maybe you can put them in one physical case) if you plan to use the secure net as well as the general internet.
Yes, I know, none of that is going to happen. Say goodbye to secrecy. Or don't use the internet (Good luck on that).
This post has been deleted by its author
"Probably out of a combination of greed and/or sheer lazyness..."
All of the above AND hiring Chinese nationals to sensitive positions with no checks.
Some of the stories tell where they have physical access to places I'm not even supposed to know anything about as a citizen.
Welcome to today's team meeting on how to keep adversaries out of our network. Our cybersecurity experts, Alice and Bob will be our presenters today... I see someone already has a question, go ahead, ummm... Eve?
Eve: Should we take notes or will there be a transcript available?
In their defense, it's not like Big Tech in general and Microsoft in particular flaunt big banners claiming Lucrum ante securitatem to be their motto. On the other hand, the MAGA dudes and dudettes seem to think they are the smartest people in the world. They ought to know that tech security is largely Potempkin flavored.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/29/pentagon_ends_microsofts_use_of/
So you have all these secrecy-obsessed companies using Teams and cloudy-versions of Exchange and Office for all their communications, and then you let a load of Chinese staff administer those clouds. Hmm. Yes. Just *how* do they do it? It's a mystery.
Obviously not everyone uses Microsoft's cloudy offerings. Some folks prefer Google. But it's still a single target to infiltrate many targets at once.
Maybe they think that invoking the (undoubtedly real) specter of "China" will protect them, but if they're a US government agency, perhaps they should keep their heads down right now. We're still a very long way from funding those tax cuts for the rich, and any functioning government agency is a target.
I know, that's really cynical. These are cynical times here in the good ol'.
> How does China keep stealing our stuff ?
Well, perhaps because of failures like this that allowed China to identify pretty much every ethnic Chinese person working for the US government? (Even without knowing their names, it's pretty easy for China to surreptitiously film a location they are interested in and simply look for people of Chinese ethnicity entering and leaving.)
Those with relatives remaining in China can easily be pressured. And for those without relatives back on the mainland there are the traditional methods of appeals to patriotism, befriending, loans, blackmail, you name it.
Without agents (double agents?) working for the DoD in the Chinese community the DoD haven't a chance.
Without agents (double agents?) working for the DoD in the Chinese community the DoD haven't a chance.
Really, with Cisco having 9+ rated CVEs every few months, and with Microsoft's forever shit-show of lax security and not caring, and CEOs demanding important shit is internet connected to save manpower costs, and all you can think of is Chinese-ethnic nationals spying?
The Chinese were the West Coast equivalent of the Irish. They did a lot of the heavy lifting, building railroads and the like, and they've been part of the fabric of our society for 160 years or more. We did try to keep 'em down with our various Chinese Exclusion Acts and the like but they're persistent sorts, every time we'd push 'em down they'd pop up somewhere else, farming, building, making and generally keeping busy. Eventually, thanks to their efforts as allies in WW2 we finally allowed them to citizenship (it was banned up to the 1940s).
Obviously what goes on in California doesn't seep over the Rockies otherwise they'd realize that one reason why "the Chinese" have such a lot of access to corporate secrets is that they developed them. There is a fair few budding entrepreneurs in that group, like with everyone else, so if they see an opportunity they're quite likely to exploit it, just like anyone else. In the old days people would move down the street (often literally) and set up shop but these days if you want capital and facilities to make stuff then its actually more readily available in China now. Here people of Chinese origin have a linguistic and social leg up because while they can navigate just fine in the US we're at a bit of a loss there.
Anyway, its easier to just blame the dastardly Chinese than actually roll up sleeves etc. and do something about it. Because, as we all know, the solution to everything is yet more bureaucracy.
Do very poorly against determined autocratic aggression.
1) As mentioned here, China is a substantial source of funding for our universities. That funding IS conditional.
2) As mentioned here, China's police have been operating semi-openly in the US to keep their expats in line.
3) As mentioned here, China is prepositioning assets in major cloud providers.
So, yeah. I wonder what we're going to do about Chinese spying...
This hasn't really been true historically, China has become an interesting exception. Historically it's autocratic societies that perform more poorly against liberal societies at secret keeping(*), for a range of reasons but perhaps the most powerful is the ability to offer a sort of luxury witness protection programme to highly placed assets living in fear of the whims of their autocrats.
Because of that, point 2 you mention, along with Russia's growing success at fatally hospitalising it's own undesirable expats, are arguably the most worrying trends.
(*) Not to say either have really excelled at it in recent centuries. Either you disconnect yourself from the globe in the extreme like North Korea does, or you leak like a sieve.
America's cyber defenses are being dismantled from the inside
That is definitely very, very "stupid". But is not the answer.
"The West" has been losing at the game for much longer than FOTUS has been in office. It stems, IMHO, from the arrogance of many "deciders" who, decades past, chose to "Play the China Card", with a racist bias that the "Rice Eaters" were all stupid peasants that were great mimics, but terrible "innovators".
ERGO . . . they would never understand "how things work" but would do great at "making things".
No amount of reasoning could shake their their racism view. They continued to conflate "ignorance of technology" with "stupidity".
To be fair, anyone who pointed this out was denounced as "racist". So we trained their scientists, and bought their products, and allowed our industries to wither.
Southampton's Optical Research has large numbers of students from China. It's the UK's leading fibre optic research centre.
Re: vetting, I think there's also been a shift that in the internet age, a lot fewer people wish to be subject to vetting than hitherto, because the process has changed.
When I started my career working for a certain country's defence department, even the most intrusive vetting meant taking up references, have a few extra interviews on motivations, politics, opinions, and for higher levels of vetting them speaking to your friends and family, and perhaps former college tutors. Obviously they'd check credit history and financial records, political memberships and the like.
Now it'll also be trying to rake over EVERYTHING you've ever posted on line, every forum or social media site they can track you to, your web viewing history, search history, the contents of your phone, purchase history, emails. And all probably chucked into the hopper of somebody like Palantir, to pick out every opinion you've ever expressed, every argument you've been in or around, every statement you've made about politicians or government.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of potential employees think they'd rather not have their employer poking around in that way.
> Now it'll also be trying to rake over EVERYTHING you've ever posted on line, every forum or social media site they can track you to, your web viewing history, search history, the contents of your phone, purchase history, emails.
I doubt they are doing any of those things. My post history here alone should be enough to establish that I shouldn't have anything to do with government contracts and yet I have clearance.
Whilst holding a UK clearance already does speed the process up, every time you get to a time for renewal, they do do a further sweep to see what you've been up to, whether you pass credit checks and whether you're still not in a position where you could be influenced. Of course they won't do repeat the full ID and reference checks unless they think they got it wrong, or one of your references have been put on a watch list.
And it depends on the level of clearance. If you have DV in the UK, you can expect very much closer scrutiny in the renewal process, as there was during the initial check.
Perhaps if Americans got over their exceptionalism, and realised that people outside the USA can have original thoughts and innovations, then maybe, just maybe, they would realise that other countries can invent stuff. How much of what they consider "stolen" is actually invented in China?
Also, the USA is not exactly innocent when it comes to stealing other countries' IP, and the country which steals the most IP from the US cannot be criticised in the US. Perhaps fix that problem first.
