Are 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.