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August 11, 2015

Idaho Citizens Possible Spies?

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: , — Bill @ 8:12 am

MSS-ChinaAre citizens of Idaho being targeted for potential recruitment as spies by a foreign intelligence service?

Possibly.

Our OpenCdA post on July 11 titled OPM Hack – The Real Damage briefly explained the underlying significance of the information gleaned from hacked personnel records entrusted to the US Office of Personnel Management.  The hack has been attributed to the People’s Republic of China’s intelligence service, the Guoanbu.  The information obtained in the hack would have helped the Guoanbu assess US citizens’ vulnerability to be induced to commit espionage.

Now we learn from a July 30, 2015, NBC news story headlined Exclusive:  Secret NSA Map Shows China Cyber Attacks on U.S. Targets that Idaho was one of the 48 contiguous states confirmed to have been targeted over a five year period.  Although the July 30 article uses the term “cyber attacks”, a subsequent NBC news article on August 10, 2015, entitled China Reads Emails of Top U.S. Officials uses the same map.  Since the snitched emails came from the officials’ private and not government email accounts, we can conclude the emails contained personal, very private communications about individuals’ personal behaviors and transactions.   That very private information is useful in identifying factors which could be used by an intelligence service case officer to control his agent of espionage or influence.  As Theodore Roosevelt astutely observed, “If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”  So will sensitive information they may have.

For a reasonably informative, Hollywood-ized video portraying the ChiCom’s economic espionage efforts in the US, take a look at the FBI’s 36-minute YouTube production The Company Man – Protecting America’s Secrets.  It’s dramatized to make it entertaining, but it is still not a bad tutorial in how foreign intelligence services spot, assess, and attempt to recruit US citizens to provide economic intelligence.

It’s also worth reading the FBI’s July 23 web page entitled Economic Espionage – FBI Launches Nationwide Awareness Campaign.

5 Comments

  1. Oh oh! I guess we better give the federal government control of the internet so it can protect us from these cyber terrorists/espionage recruiters. Only when we’ve relinquished all of our liberty will we be safe.

    /sarc

    Comment by JSmetal — August 12, 2015 @ 7:16 am

  2. JSmetal,

    You need to specify which federal government you would have control the internet. Right now, overall control seems to rest with the People’s Republic of China. The Russians are doing a pretty good job of taking over control of the use of the internet for financial manipulations. Should we be concerned that the US General Services Administration has just issued an RFP for ten thousand 5-1/4″ floppy discs to upgrade our federal government’s data storage capacity?

    Comment by Bill — August 12, 2015 @ 7:40 am

  3. My comment was intended as sarcasm and to show my jaded attitude toward government regulation or control of anything. My assumption is that all of these cyber attack scares will be what is used to get the final push to pass some BS legislation or new regulation to finally grant the federal government is long-desired control over the internet. Just like 9-11 was used to pass the Patriot Act.

    Government is supposed to be inefficient. If it were more efficient, I have no doubt that the American people would enjoy far fewer freedoms than they currently do.

    Comment by JSmetal — August 13, 2015 @ 7:09 am

  4. I can appreciate this information because I like to check out the links and then, I start to think, and I surf the web to back up my thoughts and it just gets scarier. 🙂 A person just does not know anymore. We are being hacked on a daily basis, it is a technology war … forget about ground troops, that is barbaric and a waste of life. So, I found this, after I checked out the map where Idaho was targeted … probably nothing, but we just do not know, yet.

    It’s been awhile, but maybe business is better than we know.

    State exports from Idaho.

    Comment by Stebbijo — August 13, 2015 @ 8:52 pm

  5. Stebbijo,

    Good observations and information. Thanks for digging it up.

    The only thing you said I disagree with was “… probably nothing.” The world’s intelligence services go after specific information based on the intelligence collection requirements levied by their national policymakers. If they were looking in Idaho, it’s because something or someone they want is here, or there is something or someone here who can facilitate access to whatever it is they’re after.

    One of the early stages in responding to a requirement will be for the collector to determine where the information sought resides and who has it. The collector will also hope to get the maximum benefit for the minimum risk of exposure. Ideally, the custodian of the information and its counterintelligence and security services will never even learn of the collector’s interest. The information sought to fulfill a particular requirement need not be classified or even necessarily national security information.

    While US companies are forbidden to conduct industrial and corporate espionage against competitors, there are few such restrictions on other countries. In some countries, notably the People’s Republic of China, international economic and commercial espionage are conducted by the state itself. The ChiComs are thieves. They steal or even buy other countries’ products, then reverse engineer them, sometimes to steal the design ideas and sometimes to make cheaper knockoffs or counterfeits and introduce them into the international market at a lower cost than competitors (US). Many western countries, including the US, are effectively absorbing the R&D costs for the ChiComs and others.

    Comment by Bill — August 14, 2015 @ 6:03 am

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