Federal Charges Against Stanford University Researcher Expanded
justice.gov
justice.gov
- A digital version of a letter from Song, written in Chinese and addressed to the People’s Republic of China consulate in New York, in which Song explained that her stated employer, “Beijing Xi Diaoyutai Hospital” was a false front, and that because relevant approval documents were classified, she had attempted to mail them;
- An image of Song’s PLA credentials, with a photograph of her in military dress uniform, covering the time period from July 2016 to July 2020; and
- A digital version of a resume for Song, written in Chinese, again with a photograph of her in military dress uniform and listing her employer as the Air Force General Hospital.
Yikes, that sounds pretty damning. I’m not an expert in digital forensics but I wonder why she wouldn’t destroy the hard drive after. Or is that not enough?
You need to write a drive with zeros(minimum)/random data(preferably) at least once to make forensic recovery difficult. I know all about the "5 times" rule, but I've never heard of anyone recovering a drive after even a single overwrite.
Personally, I just hammer a screwdriver through the platter. It generally converts it into glass shards--the drive sounds like a maraca afterward.
Flash, of course, is different. I suspect that writing zeros/random once is probably enough. However, I tend to just use diagonal cutters and slice through the chips.
If someone wants to reconstruct my drive after I've physically destroyed it, they've probably got enough money to just fabricate the evidence against me anyway.
SSDs won't necessarily actually erase a block when you tell them to, due to wear-leveling and weird internal RAID setups they could be doing anything in there.
That link has a bit more, but the main issue is what the others wrote. Deleting a file from your disk may not actually delete it. It can leave an entry in the file system that marks it as deleted (for undeletion later) or it may just remove the entry, in which case the data is still on the disk and recoverable.
You can’t transplant a platter into another reader, the old days of Guttman method don’t really apply anymore, density is so high that outside of research settings it’s just not practical.
That said I still put a drill through mine before disposing of them, because close to zero isn’t zero.
HDD recovery research is almost certainly a well-funded area of intelligence services, so I imagine their are a few electron microscopes and STMs which can do it.
There's certainly no military data destruction guide which doesn't start with "shred the platter to this grain size".
Then why do I get tons of results on YouTube of people doing exactly that, when searching for “HDD transplant”?
https://drivesaversdatarecovery.com/data-recovery-services/d...
It's really unclear to me whether or not HDs are recoverable from the comments I'm seeing, and honestly I don't care that much so I'm going to stop commenting.
...only if the platters are glass. Many (most?) are made of metal.
>It's really unclear to me whether or not HDs are recoverable from the comments I'm seeing, and honestly I don't care that much so I'm going to stop commenting.
The same video also mentions him being able to salvage a hard drive that was in a multi-vehicle accident, because the platters haven't been shattered.
I was thinking of this from the forensics standpoint initially of erasing data from an HD (however many comments up it was about hiding data). I don't really care about the particulars of the method. If there's an easy way to store data and secure it, it sounds like it's impossible for that data to be recovered.
https://www.ontrack.com/en-us/data-recovery/hard-drive
https://www.gillware.com/hard-drive-data-recovery/scratched-...
Note: I do overwrite the drives (DBAN) then drill them and these are going to recycling anyway - it's quantifying the risk - I drill the drives because they usually have had customer or client data on them at some point so it's just good practice.
You remove the cover, unscrew the platter, use sticky tape on the sides of the platters to remove them and place them in the donor drive...
With an identical drive you don’t even need to worry about anything else the data will be there as nothing has happened.
The “new” drive just worked it still does...
Unless the plates are completely shattered you can recover the data.
And I can guarantee you that the FBI has a data recovery lab that is much better than what I can do at home.
No, this is completely impossible and noone has ever done it. (An exception would be HDDs with bad block mapping because they might not actually erase some sector.)
SSDs don't even have platters and you could probably recover things from the flash, but you can avoid this with disk encryption by simply losing the keys.
> Really safe deleters will overwrite the segments of memory multiple times to scramble magnetic signatures
Deletion programs do this because it looks cool. It's not necessary - literally noone has ever recovered anything from a zeroed out HD sector.
Pedantic devil's advocate - nobody has claimed to do it. When dealing with international espionage and possibly the DoD or DHS examining the drive, I wouldn't bet on that assumption.
I believe the government outsources to the same data recovery firms as everyone else; they can get things off drives with dead electronics or platters that haven't actually been erased, but that's it.
anything of value
From what I recall, with an electron microscope you can detect polarity around the edges of bits for certain magnetic storage devices and I recall seeing a paper where this was stepped through a several bits were recovered with fairly good success rates. This is part of the reason behind the old rationale of overwriting multiple passes.
With that said, given current data density for anything useful, reassembling anything remotely useful from such an approach would be nearly impossible and take a huge amount of time.
With NAND based storage, none of this applies or at least has entirely different context to consider.
Edit, was curious, here's a reference you could follow to the actual paper for empirical backup: https://www.sans.org/blog/overwriting-hard-drive-data/
"Members of the Chinese People's Liberation Army cannot lie on their visa applications and come to the United States to study without expecting the FBI and our partners to catch them." said Assistant Director Alan E. Kohler Jr. of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division. "Time and again, the Chinese government prioritizes stealing U.S. research and taking advantage of our universities over obeying international norms."
It doesn't matter if she was unsuccessful at exfiltrating secrets. What matters is that, apparently, she's an agent of a foreign government who lied about said affiliation on her application for a visa.
Most espionage laws are only directly applicable to citizens of the state in question.
If convicted, she faces a maximum statutory penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for the visa fraud count; up to 20 years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for each of the obstruction and alteration charges; and up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for the false statements charge.
Is not enforcing existing law one of their functions?
Now what is the value of a given career, US residency, Stanford employment, or Federal grant? At least hundreds of thousands of dollars - easily in the millions.
That is the scale of fraud being committed here, as none of these would have been an option for her if the PLA ties were disclosed. She would not be at Stanford, nor even in the US, nor in her current employment if her status were known.
Now you may disagree with the policy of not giving Federal dollars to PLA members or not hiring them in US research departments, but just because you disagree with the policy doesn't make the stakes any lower.
-Why people like Song would lie / conceal their identity to come to US?
Lot of Chinese people, esp among these with colleague education, and not brain-washed by government, actually think very high of US and their education system. It's not surprise a few of them would lie to get Visa. There are many online forum providing tips on how to "pass" Visa interviews.
BTW, inside China mainland, not speaking truth to government officials is not a big deal in the eye of many Chinese. In fact, being 100% truth with government officials is rare. Unfortunately, US visa officials sometimes are treated the same way as to Chinese government officials.
-Does Song have any concealed goal in US?
I do not think so. It's laughable to think Song trying to "steal" US research. Basic science research is all open. You can read Science / Nature / Cell / ... journals to know the latest research. And you can ask the authors on how to perform the experiments to reproduce their published results.
The goal of Song is almost surely personal: to get something good on her resume so she can have better career.
...how?
I assume everyone was aware that if she said something, it was being said by her. Where does the illicit foreign influence come in?
Suppose her cover story had been completely accurate -- instead of being a member of the PLA, she was someone who had "only" served in the PLA for 11 years. That person had no problem getting a visa. Is there a difference in her expected influence on Stanford?
> "Time and again, the Chinese government prioritizes stealing U.S. research and taking advantage of our universities over obeying international norms."
Ok, but that would clearly be happening with civilian researchers too. Also, we publish our research on purpose. You can't steal public information. Was she admitted to a classified research program as a presumably-reformed 11-year veteran of the PLA?
Why isn't there an indictment for espionage, or theft of private information, or anything similar to these complaints? What exactly is Stanford being protected from?
Are we at the point of zero-sum where a successful treatment in China is a loss for us?
Sure, deport her if she lied, but I'd stop way short of 'nefarious' myself.
There’s also the question of why the PLA would bother to assign an active duty soldier, with instructions to break US law, if there wasn’t some purpose which the US government would consider nefarious. If this is just harmless scientific collaboration, then why is the military involved?
This is a real reach; her non-fictitious employer was the Air Force General Hospital. Being employed by the military doesn't make you a soldier.
My beef with the outrage on this is that she was studying 'treating brain disease' according to the justice department. This isn't a national security secret, and the occam's razor answer is she fudged the forms because she wanted to do the study sabbatical.
It's the new cold war, everything must be propagandized.
By the way I agree with you that this topic is over-propagandized, by both sides. It makes it extra difficult to have good faith debates over it.
How does that sentiment apply here? Suppose the maximum possible malice on the part of the CCP, the PLA, and Song Chen. What could they have accomplished by getting a neurologist into a research project?
Then, on a more fundamental level, the more people who know how to do neurology research, the better. There's no way for the world to be made worse through too much neurology research. The more they do in China, the less everyone else needs to do everywhere else.
But the even more important problem with your scenario is that it is completely unaffected by whether, at the time she's studying at Stanford, Song Chen is also on the PLA payroll. Learning Stanford's research methods and then moving on with their lives is the entire point of anyone joining a research project at Stanford. If she hadn't been formally employed by the PLA, she would have been not just entitled, but expected to do everything you just described. And it was fine in that hypothetical case. She got a permit specifically allowing her to do it. So why isn't it fine here?
Have you heard of research getting scooped? Take research that isn’t complete, publish/patent first and now it’s yours. Now China can claim IP ownership so Stanford can’t use it.
So no, there is no benefit to research being freely disseminated especially to authoritarian countries that are politically opposed to the West.
And no, the point of the program is not to help transfer Stanford tech to China. It’s to train scientists who can hopefully independently develop their own science.
Hmm? How would that work? Please provide an example of what you have in mind.
Research getting scooped is about fighting over who gets official credit for the discovery.
If they don’t patent it, they could publish it ahead of Stanford and get credit for the discovery. It happens all the time even ignoring China’s growing presence.
Scooping research can be either publishing or patenting.
- The consulate has no need for the information about an expat's employer, and never reads it.
- The consulate checks up on the employer information for some reason best known to them. Maybe they call the employer and ask "does this person work for you?" Or maybe they look up the employer in some kind of database. Or maybe they already know the employer and automatically recognize the name.
But there's no case where the expat needs to submit secondary documentation saying how her official employment is a false front. No matter what happens, that information should be delivered to the consulate, if they need it, by some other means. They could answer the phone at Beijing Xi Diaoyutai and say "yes, she works here". Or they could have a special diplomatic database entry. Or the consulate staff might deal with them all the time and recognize the Beijing Xi Diaoyutai name. What purpose is served by sending the information through the expat?
Maybe you haven't worked in a place like this, but I lived in one for a while. It would be completely normal for someone at the government office to claim that the bank-supplied identification you brought with you isn't real, both of them owned wholly by the state with the bank ID being intended for the purpose you're using it for.
Will they do the simple thing of calling the bank? No. They will just say you're SOL. "But I am a Very Important Person with Very Important Things". Yeah yeah, everyone is, we hear that all the time. Bring back a real bank ID next time, you faker. Next in line!
So then you go back to the highest authority you know, get a letter from them, and you walk it up there to the guy, who instantly panics and delivers on what he was supposed to do.
If you don't know what these bureaucracies are like, you are blessed.
And this is just regular run-of-the-mill yes-I'm-really-here documentation with nothing like secret front hospitals.
This would tend to suggest that it's less important for them to have the ability to handle it, not more.
I recently read somewhere that secret angencies likely watch suspects and see when they turn off their phones or when they turn them back on for example when they have a meeting. This is a good way to narrow in on other people connected to the suspect by watching their patterns.
Edit: some of you take comments way too literally so for your benefit here is the exact question on form DS-160.
"Do you seek to engage in espionage, sabotage, export control violations, or any other illegal activity while in the United States?"
It's a similar idea behind the recent "Have you traded in any cryptocurrency" IRS question on tax returns. The idea is that it prevents anyone from claiming ignorance as to their responsibilities to disclose.
This isn't 4D chess, it's creating a reason you can detain someone once you know what they're upto without having to blow what you know about their real activities (which might lead to too many shutting down before you want them too).
This seems like a stretch. Any spy who gets detained for vague, amorphous reasons is going to assume they were detained for being a spy. Once you detain them, you have to hold on to them, and you've already revealed the fact that you suspect them. There's nobody out there going "oh look, they arrested our spy. Let's just leave everything out in the open and hope it was a coincidence."
Lying on official documents is an easy win which doesn't disclose technology and tactics. Its not apriori illegal to have worked for a foreign government's intelligence services - but it is to lie about it on official documents.
2. There is this national security risk with China. Just the other day, there was the top article on HN about a US firm having been hacked by China over a time period of years! This is not an isolated incident either.
3. Koreans like myself won't be denied entering even though we are same Asian race. We also have the mandatory military service, and have to mention it every time to enter US.
4. Nobody in the US California and New York calls it racism when you makes it harder for us to accepted to Harvard and Stanford because same test scores as Caucasians, we get dinged on the personality. This is a clear example of an actual racism.
5. China and Korea are both countries. Not races. NOT ALL Asians are Chinese. If I may suggest thinking a bit more before claiming to be on our side :(