I found it interesting that the espionage is largely aimed at the private sector and not the government:<p>> About 70 percent of China’s overall espionage is aimed at the U.S. private sector, rather than the government, said Joshua Skule, the head of the FBI’s intelligence division, which is charged with countering foreign espionage in the United States.<p>> “They are conducting economic espionage at a rate that is unparalleled in our history,” he said.
A company I worked for in a $hot_field had some dev servers breached from some IPs in China; they got some of our app's buggy class files and not much more. It's the kind of app you need a bunch of corporate culture to use effectively, so the jars aren't much use.<p>Anyway, a few days later, a bunch of us in our R+D group got LI invites from Chinese recruiters out of the blue. Because of the timing and supposed motivation, we assumed we'd been approached for industrial espionage purposes, but there's not much you can do aside from decline the invite.
This reminds of a story I read a while back about India's spy agency (RAW) allegedly kidnapping a retired Lt. Colonel from Pakistan's spy agency (ISI) in Nepal using his LinkedIn information as a 'job bait'. From [1]:<p>> <i>The complainant alleges that some months ago a person called Mark Thomas called his father on his phone number 0334344</i><i>43 from a number in the UK 0044-7451</i><i></i>722 and offered him a job at the Strategic Solutions Consultancy firm.<p>> <i>It now transpires that Lt Col Zahir had put up his bio-data on LinkedIn and some other websites seeking a job opportunity three years after he retired from the Pakistan army.</i><p>In short, LinkedIn's data is very, very valuable.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/pakistan-media-raw-abudtucked-isi-man-avenge-kulbhushan-jadhav-970887-2017-04-12" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiatoday.in/mail-today/story/pakistan-media-ra...</a>
> <i>"I recently saw that Twitter is cancelling, I don’t know, millions of fake accounts, and our request would be maybe LinkedIn could go ahead and be part of that"</i><p>Wow. Strong language from the head of the U.S. National Counter-Intelligence and Security Center
There are so many unintended consequences of the internet as we know it today. This, fake news, forums that close because their moderators don't want to cope with the terrible stuff, and on and on.<p>When it was just computer science departments and a few tech companies, it was mostly OK. With a good portion of humanity online... wow.
New jobs program: you pretend to have all kinds of heavy duty intel, let the Chinese government hire you and then milk the new position for all it is worth.<p>Could be a thriller, but I would pitch this one as a comedy.
Anyone contacted by China and considering an offer of money under the table for a small "harmless" disclosure should remember that they killed at least 12 CIA sources between 2010 and 2012 [0]<p>State craft is not for amateurs and sources on both sides routinely get hung out to dry. Think of your family. Do not play this game.<p>0: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-espionage.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spie...</a>
this might sound really awkward but a few weeks ago two chinese linkedin accounts approached me and asked me to attend a career fair based in nyc and boston but i declined and said I don't understand/ can read Chinese. sorry. And now this news comes out.
The issue is that China has blurred lines between government and industry, and industry often uses government resources to accomplish "private" goals. Private defense companies use Chinese intelligence assets to gain access to IP as part of a strategic technological transfer.<p>The US has no such system. Private companies are left to their own devices and in some ways hostile to government help. On the government side, they are not well equipped to understand or handle the needs of individual businesses.<p>If we want to combat this, we need to seriously change the way we approach the problem. The reality is that private companies have immense long term strategic value for the US and we need to protect that.
I think the bigger thing going on is Chinese companies setting up "AI labs" in Silicon Valley to juice their valuation. I'm looking right at you JD.com...
New InMail<p>“Hi I saw your profile and it looked really interesting, have you considered a new oppprtinity in espionage and treason? Can we setup a phone call to discuss?”