The US says Chinese spies are targeting Boston for its tech secrets | Hacker News Reader

The US says Chinese spies are targeting Boston for its tech secrets

inkstonenews.com

109 pointsalanwong80 comments

The problem with these efforts is that the FBI often does not consult with technical experts before indicting Chinese nationals and have resulted in a number of false cases that have damaged the reputation of regular Chinese Americans. The rate at which Asians are falsely accused are twice those of other races[1]

[1]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/study-suggests-as...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/us/politics/us-drops-char...

https://qz.com/1116990/the-aclu-says-the-fbi-is-accusing-chi...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/aug99/sp...

https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/arti...

Surely the FBI should be held to account when they make mistakes or behave unfairly, but it seems absurd that they shouldn't consider connections to China when looking for Chinese espionage.

If you’re wondering why you’re being downvoted, read up on Soviet espionage during the cold war. Money talks.

I wasn't downvoted, and surely Chinese tactics will evolve over time to match those of the Soviets, but the majority of the Chinese espionage cases that I've seen so far have involved ethnic Chinese.

For example, Walter Liew stealing the titanium dioxide formula (with help from paid off non-Chinese), or the engineering student in Chicago sending off recruiting profiles...all Chinese or Taiwanese.

"Mistakes" can also be just lack of sufficient evidence, or even evidence that is not collected properly. Mistakes do not always mean the party is innocent, just that we take them to be on a legal basis regardless of the truth.

>"Mistakes" can also be just lack of sufficient evidence, or even evidence that is not collected properly. Mistakes do not always mean the party is innocent, just that we take them to be on a legal basis regardless of the truth.

I am extremely worried by China's panopticism, especially in Xinjiang[1]. But violating the rights of Chinese students so egregiously that you're unable to secure a conviction because your evidence is "fruit of the poisonous tree"[2] harms American interests by handing a propaganda victory to the PRC.

The FBI needs to ensure they follow the law when they investigate espionage so that offenders can be changed and convicted.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

Can you cite examples of them dropping cases against Chinese defendants because of evidence they had to exclude due to it being fruit of the poisonous tree? Inability to secure a conviction can happen for many reasons.

The FBI may very well have been overzealous here (especially considering the history of the organization), but I think we'd need to look at the facts of each case in detail, rather than only the charge and conviction statistics by nationality. The case with the Temple professor appears to have resulted from a misinterpreted email.

Parent is the one who stated that mistakes "can also be just lack of sufficient evidence, or even evidence that is not collected properly.", they would be the one to ask about specific cases.

In general, you shouldn't be taking cases to trial you can't win, whether if it's due to evidence being thrown out or evidence not being present in the first place.

of course they're targeting the Boston area; our city is the country's nexus of research and development in a plethora of fields, our culture is welcoming to foreigners at a time when most areas of the US are positively hateful, and we're large enough that expats can find at least a few others from their home country if they so choose. it's the perfect place to learn and network whether you're a spy or a jobseeker.

my main question is what can we realistically do about the problem of chinese spying while preserving the integrity of our institutions here. we have chinese expats sprinkled heavily into all of our research groups, tech groups, you name it -- and it is my assumption that the overwhelming majority of these people are innocent of any crime, so it wouldn't be acceptable to subject them to additional scrutiny. these people are valuable members of our teams and we're lucky to have them in the quantity that we do.

i'm not sure what the right move is here -- it's just my nightmare that the federal government / FBI implements some hamfisted policy that damages Boston's primary economic activities.

This is nothing new. The defense contractors working with the university have clear rules on how and what they can share with which people.

What's new is perhaps the China Initiative, something that the US Department of Justice announced late last year to focus on curbing Chinese economic espionage. Now the leader of this initiative has named Boston as a "target-rich environment."

Here's an official factsheet (PDF): https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/file/1107256/download

China has some areas where they innovate, but they primarily excel at copying.

All innovation starts with copying what came before. This is why liberal IP laws are so important to innovation. HN readers seem to understand this basic point quite well unless China is involved.

Except China as a state isn't our ally or friend. Their interests lie primarily in furthering their own political and military power, and secondarily benefiting their own population. They're more than eager to steal technology, then use that new-found knowledge and ability combined with massive government subsidies to drown out foreign competitors locally and abroad.

>Their interests lie primarily in furthering their own political and military power, and secondarily benefiting their own population.

How exactly is that different from the US? I don't see US politicians in power trying to do things to benefit their own population, such as by providing universal healthcare.

You're not wrong, it's a common criticism of democracy. Except China is not a democracy, they act only to protect their own grip on power (and keep their stolen party wealth).

Don't forget brutally repressing their citizens, which accounts to a large % of world population.

The converse of liberal IP laws is that once a company gets enough money and resources, they can just poach smaller companies for ideas, before they get any real traction.

Less innovation will happen because more people will be secretive (since there are less protections) or we will end up with a few large companies owning everything.

You also can't deny the fact that the US is probably the most innovative country in the world and has fairly strict IP laws.

China has very lax IP laws and most companies end up just copying, because nobody wants to risk capital for R&D if it's just going to get copied by someone.

Sounds exactly like the USA in the 1800s. They ripped off all kinds of stuff from Britain.

And Britain ripped off porcelain from China in the 1700s, bringing us full circle. (Until we go back another cycle, to Marco Polo. And another, to the Avars and the stirrup. Another, to the Silk Road, then on to...) It's sort of hilarious to think people wouldn't focus on copying inventions, given how much faster it is (for anyone!) than developing things from scratch. Describing it as some kind of national trait, rather than the standard response to someone else inventing things, is bizarre.

Heck, if someone really wanted to make a national-identity pitch, they'd have better luck talking about late-Ming isolationism and claiming that China is exceptional for sometimes not ripping off foreign innovations. That would be wrong too, of course, but at least it'd be better than a narrative which barely stretches back to the 1990s.

This is absolutely traditional for every country, though?

Samuel Slater brought the Industrial Revolution to America by memorizing the banned-for-export designs of water-powered spinning machines. The Brits nicknamed him "Slater the Traitor" for his trouble, but within a generation new industrial technology was being developed in the US off that basis.

British porcelain production in the 18th century was driven by the letters of a missionary in China, who secretly observed the details of Chinese production and sent them back to Europe. Mistakes in replicating that process lead to "bone china", the strongest and purest-white form of porcelain known.

Stirrups, famously (and debatably) a formative element of medieval warfare, originated in the caucasus. The Byzantines captured some of them in a war with the Avars, and within two centuries they were widespread across Europe. An invention that was at the time fueling mounted archery in Asia was combined with European iron reserves and metallurgy to (re)invent armored heavy cavalry.

Everyone excels at copying. It's much easier than inventing! That doesn't mean they won't invent further once they've caught up in a specific space.

And yes, it's possible to build infrastructure and education better suited to copying than inventing. That's not terribly surprising, and in fact downright sensible. Following WWII, both the PRC and the USSR focused heavily on replicating American nuclear and industrial developments, because they needed to not only obtain that technology but build up a core of technical talent capable of maintaining and modifying it. That didn't stop the USSR from later pursuing their own R&D to compete with projected American advances, and there's no good reason to think China won't switch to a heavier R&D footing in 10 or 20 years as current copies become widely used and understood.

If your economy is behind and you want to grow as fast as possible and copying is faster and safer than innovating... why would you not?

Kind of puts getting recruiting emails from Huawei about their imminent Boston office opening in a new light.

Just seeing their executives get charged with international crimes is enough to avoid replying.

I wouldn't want to work for a corp that doesn't have the right political muscle to avoid the charges. Halliburton, Exxon, Boeing, HSBC, etc, won't be charged.

Yep. Huawei didn't do anything except probably insert spyware on their devices, and they're being charged with crimes. Boeing killed hundreds of people through criminal negligence, but I'm sure we won't see any executives there charged with crimes in the US.

All my fears of knife wielding robot snake dogs chasing me down hallways are becoming realized.

Inkstone News, owned by the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba Group writes an article about what a US official says.

Hmmm...

And?

They can’t be trusted? Chinese news is a farce.

OP and an editor of Inkstone here. Surely I don't think what we do is farcical. Happy to answer any questions you have of our work.

How much leeway do you have to discuss and publicize incidents like the Tienamen Square massacre and other atrocities that the Chinese government has generally made an effort to scrub from the internet?

We're a Hong Kong-based media organization, meaning no government, Chinese or not, dictates to us what we can or cannot report on. Our website is blocked in China. We do not censor our content and have reported on Tiananmen. For example: did you know that China just sentenced several men who put the image of the Tank Man on baijiu (a kind of hard liquor) bottles as a form of protest? https://www.inkstonenews.com/politics/activists-who-put-tank...

Don't have to be farcical to have an agenda.

In fairness, so is most other "news". But yeah, I certainly wouldn't trust Chinese news any more than FOX or whatever.

Pretty much all of it's propaganda these days.

Yup. An article is only on part of any media campaign. I think it also safe to assume this HN discussion is being cataloged, if not actively manipulated, by those who created this article.

I created the article! Trust me when I say I'm not cataloging this discussion or actively manipulating it.

(EDIT: deleted "with my colleagues" because another commenter says it sounds like something other than reporters working with editors to put out an article.)

>I'm not cataloging this discussion or actively manipulating it...

???

You just did.

I know that likely read like I was trying to be snarky, but I wasn't.

No I don't find you snarky. I'm just confused. Are you saying that by engaging in a discussion about an article I posted in an online forum I'm "cataloging" and "actively manipulating" it? Am I "cataloging" a discussion if I tweet an article and reply to the responses? Am I "actively manipulating" a Reddit discussion if I post a link on the site and... respond to the comments? I've been doing both my whole career.

“You and your colleagues” makes it sound like you have a comment crew.

Thanks. A reply button wasn't available until just now, so I had edited my original comment and added a note.

Well, I only trust a news agency that would also report about the people in captivity there ( a couple of million Muslims).

Or about the digital credit system.

Or about claiming international waters.

Or about the countries that won't be able to pay back the investments of the one-road. Where locals don't get any benefits from.

Or that the worldwide loans to other countries make it clear that china is not a developing country anymore.

What's the chance of that?

( Sorry, but I'm more worried since I know China is actively sponsoring pro-China news agencies close to home ( Londen)). The sooner it fails, the better.

And no, it's not personal against you. It is however personal against me ( manipulating news close to home).

And Xi is pretty smart and hard-working. He is going for the long/slow haul, it's not what he's doing now, it's what he can do tomorrow.

What I see now, is what I thought it would be. He is waiting till Trump is gone, because he will be in charge longer.

Inkstone is Hong Kong-based and independent. We're only a little more than one year old but have published countless stories about all of the topics you mentioned. I'll give you a few examples, below. Try searching the site with site:inkstonenews.com if you want more.

> Well, I only trust a news agency that would also report about the people in captivity there ( a couple of million Muslims).

The two most recent pieces on Xinjiang:

US lawmakers want this man punished over China’s treatment of Muslims https://www.inkstonenews.com/politics/us-lawmakers-urge-sanc...

US condemns Muslim camps that China calls ‘boarding schools’ https://www.inkstonenews.com/politics/us-highlights-mass-det...

> Or about the digital credit system. ‘Worse than doing time’: life on the wrong side of China’s social credit system https://www.inkstonenews.com/china/chinas-13-million-discred... Got bad social credit? Your son isn’t going to college https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/chinas-social-credit-sy...

Thanks for the heads-up/correction

Then you want the American propaganda.

We've got plenty of that on CNN and FOX.

No need to go all the way out to China to get your fix. And the Chinese will likely be serving up Chinese propaganda anyway. If you want American propaganda, why not just consume it here in America?

>> I created the article! Trust me when I say I'm not cataloging this discussion or actively manipulating it.

I don't see any version of "alanwong" on the article. We have a political piece written by a journal/website/news source that is apparently owned by a Chinese company and authored by a woman named "Viola Zhou". Now we have someone calling themselves "alanwong" claiming to have created the article but whose name appears nowhere on said article. This looks like team effort to me, a badly executed one.

(Alanwong claims to be the editor, not author, but I don't see the editor listed on the website)

Few sites list editors of an individual article these days. Here's my author page. https://www.inkstonenews.com/author/alan-wong-0 My role is also listed in my hackernews profile. Try searching my name and Inkstone. You'll find me and my relations with Inkstone. It's all one search away.

I'm a bit uncomfortable with ideas like this being promoted in the popular press so much recently.

Spy-vs-spy is something that, for better or worse, nations do. It seems a complicated and delicate matter, and outside the experience of most of us.

In the Boston area, we have a wealth of colleagues, neighbors, and friends who arrived here from around the world. We welcome and appreciate them.

Ordinary people suspecting others, because of something they heard in the news (or amplified in some right-wing outlet), seems unfair and toxic. We've even seen recently that it can be deadly, when a violent mentally ill person is inspired.

I think the international spy business can best be left to the professionals (diplomats, intel agencies, law enforcement, corporate security), to handle discreetly, and the rest of us can just get along.

Completely agree but I'd bet that, if this was an article about US spies, there would be hundreds of comments deriding it by now.

If the US government engaged in industrial espionage against a foreign company, whatever US company benefitted could be sued in a US court.

What troubles me (and many others) about the PRC's behavior is the PRC's disregard for IP: US/European/other countries have no recourse.

https://law.stanford.edu/2018/04/10/intellectual-property-ch...

In theory yes in reality no. In cases of both China and the USA. Please cite any exceptions of where anything as such went to court. The reason being that it's very difficult to prove that your secrets were stolen. Sure you can sue companies for copying your products, and you can also prevent US and Europe from importing goods from China which have been copied even if you can't get a Chinese court to decide wrongdoing in your favor.

The article mentions that most are here for legitimate reasons. It seems like the headline could have had a better choice of words to be less of a blanket statement.

I agree that general "All Chinese are spying on you!" is not a helpful message, but nation-state espionage, generally, is not a bad thing to be aware of overall. The article also doesn't seem to fear-monger so much as call out recent espionage attempts while also citing the difficulty of detection because most folks are here for the right reasons.

As for "leave it to the professionals", you left out a key component from your list - the people doing the work - doing the research, building the devices. Engineers, professors. The people doing the work are the first line for any social engineering or simple vector attacks. Anyone that works with this information reads and signs things but if they haven't really been tested or understand the consequences, maybe they forget.

Having a reminder that it's OK to be impolite when somebody you don't know asks you overly specific questions you're not supposed to share is not always a bad thing.

When I said "leave it to the professionals", I meant to cover the workers indirectly when I said "corporate security". Corporate security personnel shouldn't be getting operational info from popular press.

Agreed, but corporate security is also not out at the bar on a Friday. One would hope that facilities security folks would at a minimum be briefing people, but that stuff costs money, and probably doesn't happen as much as it should.

Would not anyone working in that sort of area not have been vetted and given guidance on what to look for.

I've found that people in many areas of work are given guidance and training then either: a) forget over time b) ignore the policy because they think they know better c) ignore the policy because it is inconvenient (this is my favorite!) d) ignore the policy because it is personally advantageous to them (either for reputation, money, etc)

Reminders never hurt (assuming they are reminders and not over the top bigoted screeds)

So many people think they understand what the impacts are if they bend some of these rules, or ignore them a bit for convenience. I would argue that most of the time, unless the stakes are consistently high, they do not.

Probably employing the wrong sort of people then.

I would hypothesize that every single medium to large organization has this problem. Anecdata confirms, but that's not data, obviously.

>diplomats, intel agencies, law enforcement, corporate security

Personally, I have absolutely no trust in any of these, and I completely disagree that we should "leave it to the professionals" and let them "handle discretely" whatever is going on. This is how you end up with things like FISA courts, Gitmo, and PRISM.

As part of the discussion, the following article may be interesting too:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/

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