Sick Hackers Of Asia

China’s cyberattacks should make it a trade pariah
New York Post


Four members of China’s People’s Liberation Army now stand charged in the 2017 Equifax hack, one of the largest cybercrimes ever — and they were plainly working Beijing’s will, since they’re all members of a PLA unit dedicated to hacking.
In other words: China is waging cyberwar on the West even as it insists on being treated like a normal country.
The hack of one of the biggest US consumer-credit reporting agencies grabbed personal info on half the country: birthdates and Social Security numbers of 145 million and driver’s license info of 10 million, plus 200,000 stolen credit-card numbers.
And the danger goes far beyond the monetary, Attorney General William Barr noted in announcing the charges: “These thefts can feed China’s development of artificial intelligence tools, as well as the creation of intelligence targeting packages” — meaning industrial as well as regular-old espionage.
This follows the feds’ 2014 indictment of PLA hackers for breaching the computer systems of a number of American manufacturers, among other crimes.
Since then, notes Barr, “We have witnessed China’s voracious appetite for the personal data of Americans, including the theft of personnel records from the Office of Personnel Management, the intrusion into Marriott Hotels and Anthem health-insurance companies and now the wholesale theft of credit and other information from Equifax.”
It’s unlikely the hackers will ever face trial — and even less likely Beijing will stop trying to steal American data and know-how.
The Trump administration’s efforts to block the Chinese firm Huawei from building 5G networks in the West is clearly the bare minimum needed now.

As lucrative as China’s market may be, the rest of the world needs to start asking how it can trade with a pack of unapologetic thieves.

American Quislings

Harvard scientist lied about academic, financial ties with Chinese
Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, lied about contacts with a Chinese state-run initiative that seeks to draw foreign-educated talent.

By Ellen Barry

Charles M. Lieber at an award ceremony in Jerusalem in 2012.

BOSTON — Early Tuesday morning, F.B.I. agents arrived at two of the most protected corners of Harvard University’s academic cloister, raking through a gabled house in the suburb of Lexington and a neoclassical brick building in Cambridge.
By afternoon, one of Harvard’s scientific luminaries was in handcuffs, charged with making a false statement to federal authorities about his financial relationship with the Chinese government, and especially his participation in its Thousand Talents program, a campaign to attract foreign-educated scientists to China.

The arrest of Charles M. Lieber, the chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, signaled a new, aggressive phase in the Justice Department’s campaign to root out scientists who are stealing research from American laboratories.

For months, news has been trickling out about the prosecution of scientists, mainly Chinese graduate students and researchers working in American laboratories. 

But Lieber represents a different kind of target, a star researcher who had risen to the highest reaches of the American academic hierarchy.

Lieber, a leader in the field of nanoscale electronics, has not been accused of sharing sensitive information with Chinese officials, but rather of hiding — from Harvard, from the National Institutes of Health and from the Defense Department — the amount of money that Chinese funders were paying him.
Lieber’s lawyer, Peter Levitt, made no comment after a preliminary hearing in federal court in Boston on Tuesday.
His arrest sent shock waves through research circles.
“This is a very, very highly esteemed, highly regarded investigator working at Harvard, a major U.S. institution, at the highest rank he could have, so, all the success you can have in this sphere,” said Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges. 

“It’s like, when you’ve got it all, why do you want more?”
McKinney described anxiety among his colleagues that scientists will be scrutinized over illegitimate sources of international funding.
“We worry that, slowly but surely, we’re going to be criminally charged. This is a big deal. We all could end up in jail.”

Lieber, 60, was charged with one count of making a false or misleading statement, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. 

He appeared in court on Tuesday wearing the outfit he had put on to head to his office at Harvard: a Brooks Brothers polo shirt, cargo pants and hiking boots. 

He appeared subdued as he flipped through the charge sheet. 

Levitt, his lawyer, said it was his first opportunity to read the charge against him.
Harvard said Lieber had been placed on indefinite administrative leave.“The charges brought by the U.S. government against Lieber are extremely serious,” said Jonathan Swain, a spokesman for the university. 

“Harvard is cooperating with federal authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, and is initiating its own review of the misconduct.”
Lieber was one of three scientists to be charged with crimes on Tuesday.

Harvard Chinese criminals

Zaosong Zheng, a Harvard-affiliated cancer researcher was caught leaving the country with 21 vials of cells stolen from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, according to the authorities. 

He had admitted that he had planned to turbocharge his career by publishing the research in China under his own name. 

He was charged with smuggling goods from the United States and with making false statements, and was being held without bail in Massachusetts after a judge determined that he was a flight risk. 

His lawyer has not responded to a request for comment.

The third was Yanqing Ye, who had been conducting research at Boston University’s department of physics, chemistry and biomedical engineering until last spring, when she returned to China. 

She hid the fact that she was a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army, and continued to carry out assignments from Chinese military officers while at B.U.
Yanqing was charged with visa fraud, making false statements, acting as an agent of a foreign government and conspiracy.

She was in China and was not arrested.
Prosecutors made it clear that the charges announced on Tuesday were part of a bigger crackdown on researchers working with the Chinese government.
“No country poses a greater, more severe or long-term threat to our national security and economic prosperity than China,” said Joseph Bonavolonta, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Boston field office. 

“China’s communists’s goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world superpower, and they are breaking the law to get there.”
He called Massachusetts, with its cluster of elite universities and research institutions, “a target-rich environment.”

Charging documents in the case describe Lieber’s growing commitments in China, and efforts to hide them from his employers in the United States.
In 2011, the documents say, he signed an agreement to become a “strategic scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology in China, entitling him to a $50,000 monthly salary, $150,000 in annual in living expenses and more than $1.5 million for a second laboratory in Wuhan. 

In 2013, he celebrated the founding of a joint laboratory, the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory.
He was informed in 2012 that he had been selected to participate in the Thousand Talents plan, the China-run program.
In 2015, Harvard officials discovered that Lieber was leading a laboratory at Wuhan University, and informed him that the use of Harvard’s name and logo was a violation of university policy. 

Lieber then distanced himself from the project, but continued to receive payment.Then in 2017 he was named a university professor, Harvard’s highest faculty rank, one of only 26 professors to hold that status. 

The same year, he earned the N.I.H. Director’s Pioneer Award for inventing syringe-injectable mesh electronics that can integrate with the brain.
Investigators from the Defense Department — which had extended $8 million in grants to Lieber — began questioning him in 2018 about secondary sources of income, prosecutors said.
Lieber told them that he was aware of China’s Thousand Talents program, but had never been invited to participate, prosecution documents say. 

Two days after that conversation, the documents say, Lieber asked a laboratory associate to help him identify web pages in which he was named as the head of the Chinese lab.
“I lost a lot of sleep worrying all of these things last night and want to start taking steps to correct sooner than later,” he wrote in an email to a research colleague that was cited by prosecutors. 

“I will be careful about what I discuss with Harvard University, and none of this will be shared with government investigators at this time.”
Last year, Harvard was required to submit a detailed report about Lieber to N.I.H., which had provided $10 million in grants for his research projects. 

He told university officials that he had “no formal association” with the Wuhan University of Technology, prosecutors said, and that he “is not and has never been” a participant in the Thousand Talents program.The campaign to scrutinize scientists’ foreign funding is a relatively new one.
Late in 2018, Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, announced that the United States was “standing up to the deliberate, systematic and calculated threats posed, in particular, by the communist regime in China.”
As a result, researchers are adjusting to a higher level of scrutiny about foreign funding than they faced in the past, said Derek Adams, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in civil fraud.
“The problem here, in my view, is that in 2018 there was a material change in the way the F.B.I. and the agencies were approaching this issue,” said Adams, now a partner in the law firm Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell.
In many cases, he said, “they’re looking at conduct that occurred many years ago. For an individual that may have had an obligation to disclose, it may not have been front at center at that time.”
Frank Wu, a law professor and former president of the Committee of 100, an organization of communist Chinese-Americans, has criticized the recent prosecutions as “potentially devastating to American science, because the number of people who have some connection to China is so vast.” Until recently, he said, such collaborations were considered healthy.
“These rules are new rules,” he said.

U.S.'s 5,025,817 Chinese Spies

FBI spied on Chinese students and scientists, new book reveals
By Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian


In 1967, at the height of the Cold War, the FBI began collecting information on thousands of Chinese "scientists and students" in cities across the U.S.
The Scientist and the Spy, a book publishing in February, reveals the existence of this former program for the first time.

Why it matters: Recent FBI indictments and investigations, targeting Chinese researchers in the U.S. and aimed at stemming the unauthorized flow of science and tech secrets to China, have raised American public's awareness of massive Chinese espionage efforts.
In The Scientist and the Spy, out Feb. 4, former China correspondent Mara Hvistendahl traces the history of China's theft of trade secrets through the case of a Chinese scientist imprisoned in 2016 for stealing corn seed from Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer.
In the process, Hvistendahal exposes a classified FBI program that tracked Chinese scientists and science students in the U.S. beginning in 1967 and at least through the 1970s.
A letter sent to FBI agents in 1967 "ordered agents to cull names of ethnically Chinese researchers, including U.S. citizens from the membership records of scientific organizations," Hvistendahl writes.


 
Chinese spy Mak Chi

The result: A "rolodex of an estimated four thousand ethnically Chinese scientists under surveillance."
Chinese science students were also targeted.
In New York City, 200 students were surveilled; in San Francisco, up to 75.
"In their haste to follow orders, some offices followed shaky leads," writes Hvistendahl.
Some scientists targeted by the program had only loose ties to China; others were repeatedly interrogated by the FBI.
Hvistendahl spoke with the family of one such Sino-American scientist, Harry Sheng, who was permanently shut out of his career.

Background: Chinese scientists in the U.S. have faced several extended periods of surveillance.
Some of their cases offer cautionary tales.
In the 1950s, Qian Xuesen, a Chinese scientist who helped the U.S. develop the world’s first atomic weapon, was accused of harboring communist sympathies and spent five years under house arrest. After he was released, he fled to China, eventually helping develop China’s nuclear weapons program.
In 1999, a Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist, Wen Ho Lee, was indicted on 59 counts for theft of state secrets and held in solitary confinement for 278 days.

Our thought bubble: The spate of investigations and indictments is a response to a real problem.
In recent years, a massive, unlawful transfer of intellectual property from the U.S. to China has unquestionably occurred.

The bottom line: “If China is shaped by systematic theft of Western technology,” Hvistendahl writes, “America is locked in its own internal struggle, between openness and security.”

Chinese Peril

The Chinese threat to U.S. research institutions is real
By Josh Rogin
Sen. Rick Scott questions Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz during a Senate Committee On Homeland Security And Governmental Affairs.

The Chinese communists are pursuing a comprehensive, well-organized and well-funded strategy to abuse the open and collaborative research environment in the United States to advance their economic and military expansion at our expense.
But now U.S. research institutions are finally waking up to Beijing’s efforts to recruit American scientists for China’s benefit.
On Wednesday, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute announced the forced resignations of its chief executive and president, Alan List, Vice President Thomas Sellers and four researchers.
In a news release, the center said the employees committed compliance and conflict-of-interest violations. 
Specifically, the researchers didn’t reveal they had been recruited and paid by the Chinese government under its “Thousand Talents” program, a massive effort controlled by the Chinese Communist Party to recruit foreign scientists for its own purposes.
The Moffitt Center, located in Tampa, essentially fired its leaders after an investigation prompted by the National Institutes of Health, which had warned them “of foreign efforts to influence or compromise U.S. researchers,” the center said. 
The NIH, which is funded by U.S. taxpayers, is the source of more than half of the center’s $71 million in annual grant funding.
Although the center claims it found no evidence its research was compromised, the details of the relationships between its employees and the Chinese government are unknown.
The center is now working with federal officials on the case.
The FBI has been warning research institutions across the country that Chinese talent-recruitment programs are not only a threat to the integrity of the U.S. research environment but also a real national security concern.
In July, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified that the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party have many “so-called talent plans” that are not illegal but are routinely abused to steal intellectual property and take it back to China to advance Beijing’s various strategic and economic plans. 
The irony is that the U.S. taxpayer is essentially funding China’s economic resurgence, Wray said.
“The Chinese government knows that economic strength and scientific innovation are the keys to global influence and military power, so Beijing aims to acquire our technology — often in the early stages of development — as well as our expertise, to erode our competitive advantage and supplant the United States as a global superpower,” John Brown, the FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence, testified in November.
FBI investigations have found that the Chinese recruitment programs — and there are more than 200 of them — have been connected to violations of U.S. laws, including economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, circumvention of export controls and grant fraud, according to Brown.
A 2019 report by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee outlined several examples of related abuses by Chinese employees at national labs, the Energy Department and graduate schools across the country.
Beijing, in response to new U.S. government and congressional scrutiny, decided to take the Thousand Talents program underground by deleting news articles and other online references to the program and its members, according to the committee’s report. 
Thousand Talents contracts even require the participants to keep their involvement secret.
Congress is pressing for more investigation, more transparency and more compliance in universities and research institutions across the country. 
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) sent a letter this month to all Florida universities calling on them to investigate and then reveal their researchers’ relationships with Chinese government programs.
“Everyone needs to be incredibly vigilant about Communist China’s growing influence,” Scott told me. “The situation at Moffitt just shows how far China will go to infiltrate American industries and institutions. I think every elected official needs to be sounding this alarm in their states.”
The Moffitt Center case is important also because it dispels the notion that any scrutiny of these programs represents anti-Chinese bias.
After the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston ousted three scientists in April over similar failures to disclose relationships with Chinese institutions, some speculated they were targeted due to their Chinese ethnicity.
U.S. research institutions have been asleep to Beijing’s efforts for a long time because they think of themselves as practicing “open science” — rather than “strategic science,” as the Chinese government does. 
Some believe that because the research will eventually be published, the China threat is overblown. But that ignores the huge body of evidence that the Chinese government is using talent programs not for mutually beneficial collaboration but as vehicles to steal non-public research to feed their own national ambitions.
The U.S. government and the U.S. research community must speed up efforts to work together to determine the extent of Chinese government infiltration into the U.S. research environment and neutralize the threat.
Then we need a national strategy for managing international scientific collaboration in a way that preserves the openness that characterizes our system while also protecting our national security.

Sino-American Double Loyalty

Ex-C.I.A. Officer Sentenced to 19 Years in Chinese Espionage Conspiracy

Jerry Chun Shing Lee pleaded guilty to conspiring with Chinese intelligence agents

By Zach Montague

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 55, pleaded guilty in May to conspiring with Chinese intelligence agents.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A former C.I.A. officer was sentenced to 19 years in prison on Friday for conspiring to deliver classified information to China in a case that touched on the mysterious unraveling of the agency’s informant network in China.
The former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 55, pleaded guilty in May to conspiring with Chinese intelligence agents starting in 2010, after he left the agency. 

Prosecutors detailed a long financial paper trail that showed that Lee received more than $840,000 for his work.
Lee, an Army veteran, worked for the C.I.A. from 1994 to 2007, including in China. 

After he resigned, he formed a tobacco company in Hong Kong with an associate who had ties to the Chinese intelligence community. 

Lee then began meeting with agents from China’s Ministry of State Security, who assigned him tasks he admitted to taking on and offered to “take care of him for life.”
While working in Hong Kong in 2010, Lee reapplied for employment with the C.I.A. but misled American officials repeatedly in interviews about his dealings with Chinese intelligence officers and the source of his income.
Around the time Lee began speaking to Chinese agents, the C.I.A. was rocked by major setbacks in China as its once-robust espionage network there began to fall apart. 

Between 2010 and 2012, dozens of C.I.A. informants in China disappeared, either jailed or killed, embroiling the agency in an internal debate about how Chinese intelligence officers had identified the informants. 

Many within the agency came to believe that a mole had exposed American informants, and Lee became a main suspect.
But F.B.I. agents who investigated whether he was the culprit passed on an opportunity to arrest him in the United States in 2013, allowing him to travel back to Hong Kong even after finding classified information in his luggage. 

F.B.I. agents had also covertly entered a hotel room Lee occupied in 2012, finding handwritten notes detailing the names and numbers of at least eight C.I.A. sources that he had handled in his capacity as a case officer.
The investigators apparently decided that by continuing to quietly monitor Lee, they might glean more clues about the disappearing C.I.A. informants in China. 

But even after his arrest in 2018 on the same charge the C.I.A. was prepared to bring in 2013, they were unable to determine whether Lee was involved in the disclosures to Chinese intelligence operatives.
Because of Lee’s plea agreement, in which he admitted to one count of possessing information classified as secret — a lower level than top secret — prosecutors asked for a relatively lighter sentence of roughly 22 to 27 years, rather than life in prison.
But prosecutors argued that even if Lee never turned over information to Chinese intelligence officers, the fact that he shared his knowledge of American intelligence work with Chinese agents alone could have a chilling effect on the C.I.A.’s source-building efforts.
“It makes it difficult to recruit people in the future if they know the C.I.A. isn’t protecting their people,” said Adam L. Small, a federal prosecutor in Northern Virginia, where Lee was charged. 

“These are people who put their names and lives in his hands.”
The sentence for Lee is the latest in a string of recent cases in which American intelligence workers have been handed lengthy prison terms for espionage connected to China. 

In announcing Lee’s sentence, Judge T. S. Ellis III said that a hefty sentence was necessary to deter others from jeopardizing American intelligence.
In May, another C.I.A. case officer, Kevin Patrick Mallory was sentenced to 20 years in prison for selling classified documents to a Chinese intelligence officer for $25,000. 

Judge Ellis, who presided over that case as well, decided that a life sentence for Mallory was excessively harsh even though prosecutors showed he successfully transmitted secret information.
In September, Ron Rockwell Hansen, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, received 10 years in prison for attempting to pass along defense secrets.

In announcing the sentence, Judge Ellis said he was not convinced that Lee’s interactions with Chinese intelligence officers were benign, and that it is common in espionage cases to never fully uncover the extent of illicit dealings.
While he acknowledged that Lee, a naturalized citizen born in Hong Kong, had done a great deal with his life as an American — four years in the Army, a 13-year career with the C.I.A. — Judge Ellis appeared unmoved.
“That gets erased,” he said, “when you betray your country.”

American Quislings

U.S. Company Illegally Sold Chinese-Made Security Products To Military

By PAOLO ZIALCITA

U.S. Attorney Richard P. Donoghue announces charges against Aventura Technologies, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2019, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. The New York company has been charged with illegally importing and selling Chinese-made surveillance and security equipment to U.S. government agencies and private customers.

A New York-based security products company and seven of its employees are being charged with fraud, money laundering and illegal importation of equipment manufactured in China.
Several U.S. agencies, including the FBI and the IRS, allege that Aventura Technologies Inc. falsely claimed that its products were made in the U.S. and also misrepresented itself as a woman-owned small business in order to gain access to federal contracts set aside for those businesses.
"Aventura imports its products from other manufacturers, primarily manufacturers located in China, at times with false 'Made in the U.S.A.' labels already affixed to the products or displayed on their packaging," a Justice Department court filing said.
Officials say Aventura's actions endangered military personnel on U.S. Navy ships and military bases by selling them Chinese products with known cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
"Greed is at the heart of this scheme, a reprehensible motive when the subjects in this case allegedly put into question the security of men and women who don uniforms each day to protect our nation," said FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge William Sweeney.

"There is no mistaking the cyber vulnerabilities created when this company sold electronic surveillance products made in the People's Republic of China, and then using those items in our government agencies and the branches of our armed forces."
According to court documents, Aventura has held multiple contracts with the federal government, selling about $20.7 million of security equipment to the various military factions between 2006 to 2018. 

These contracts prohibited Aventura from providing goods from a wide array of countries, one of which is China.
Among the seven employees arrested is Jack Cabasso, Aventura's managing director, and his wife, Frances Cabasso, the purported CEO.
The couple is being accused of lying in order to extend and obtain government contracts reserved for women-owned businesses. 

The DOJ says Frances has little or no role at the company, making its claim as a woman-owned small business false.
The Cabassos are also being accused of siphoning millions of company dollars through shell companies and intermediaries. 

In addition, Aventura paid $1 million to fund the Cabasso's 70-foot luxury yacht.
Federal agents confiscated the yacht at the gated community where the couple live. 

Agents also seized $3 million dollars from several bank accounts.
The government intercepted shipments carrying Chinese manufactured goods several times, which agents later linked to Aventura's operations, according to the Justice Department.
Founded in 1999, Aventura self-describes itself as an "innovative designer, developer and manufacturer" of security products. 

The DOJ says the company has been misleading customers since 2006.

Born to Spy: The Chinese and Sino-American Massive Threat

Scientists With Links to China Are Stealing Biomedical Research

Nearly 200 investigations are underway at major academic centers. Researchers of Chinese descent are usual suspects.
By Gina Kolata

The M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Administrators have investigated five faculty members on suspicions that they stole intellectual property or violated funding rules.

The Sino-American scientist at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston was hardly discreet. 

“Here is the bones and meet of what you want,” he wrote in a misspelled email to researchers in China.
Attached was a confidential research proposal, according to administrators at the center. 

The scientist had access to the document only because he had been asked to review it for the National Institutes of Health — and the center had examined his email because federal officials had asked them to investigate him.
The N.I.H. and the F.B.I. have begun a vast effort to root out scientists who are stealing biomedical research for China from institutions across the United States.

Almost all of the incidents they uncovered and that are under investigation involve scientists of Chinese descent, including naturalized American citizens, stealing for China.
Seventy-one institutions, including many of the most prestigious medical schools in the United States, are now investigating 180 individual cases involving theft of intellectual property. 

The cases began after the N.I.H., prompted by information provided by the F.B.I., sent 18,000 letters last year urging administrators who oversee government grants to be vigilant.
So far, the N.I.H. has referred 24 cases in which there may be evidence of criminal activity to the inspector general’s office of the Department of Health and Human Services, which may turn over the cases for criminal prosecution. 

“It seems to be hitting every discipline in biomedical research,” said Dr. Michael Lauer, deputy director for extramural research at the N.I.H.
China is exploiting the openness of the American scientific system to engage in wholesale economic espionage. 

The scale of the dragnet has sent a tremor through the ranks of suspected Sino-American and Chinese biomedical researchers.
“You could take a dart board with medical colleges with significant research programs and, as far as I can tell, you’d have a 50-50 chance of hitting a school with an active case,” said Dr. Ross McKinney Jr., chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges.
The theft involves not military secrets, but scientific ideas, designs, devices, data and methods that may lead to profitable new treatments or diagnostic tools.
Some researchers under investigation have obtained patents in China on work funded by the United States government and owned by American institutions, the N.I.H. said. 

Others are suspected of setting up labs in China that secretly duplicated American research, according to government officials and university administrators.
The N.I.H. has not named most of the scientists under investigation, citing due process, and neither have most of the institutions involved. 

“As with any personnel matter, we typically do not share names or details of affected individuals,” said Brette Peyton, a spokeswoman at M.D. Anderson.
But roughly a dozen Chinese scientists are known to have resigned or been fired from universities and research centers across the United States so far. 

Some have declined to discuss the allegations against them; others have denied any wrongdoing.
In several cases, Chinese scientists supported by the N.I.H. or other federal agencies are accused of accepting funding from the Chinese government in violation of N.I.H. rules. 

Some have said that they "did not know" the arrangements had to be disclosed or were forbidden.

“How would you feel if you were a U.S. scientist sending your best idea to the government in a grant application, and someone ended up doing your project in China?” said Dr. Ross McKinney, chief scientific officer at the Association of American Medical Colleges.

In August, Feng Tao, 48, a chemist at the University of Kansas known as Franklin, was indicted on four counts of fraud for failing to disclose a full-time appointment at a Chinese university while receiving federal funds.
His lawyer, Peter R. Zeidenberg, declined to comment on Tao’s case but suggested that prosecutors were targeting academics nationwide who had made "simple" mistakes.
“Professors, they get their summers off,” he said in an interview.
“Oftentimes they will take appointments in China for the summer. They don’t believe they have to report that.”

The investigations have left Chinese and Sino-American academics feeling “that they are at risk,” said Frank Wu, a former president of the Committee of 100, an organization of pro-Beijing Sino-American scientists.
Wu and other critics said the cases recalled the government’s investigation of Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory who was accused in 1999 of stealing nuclear warhead plans for China and incarcerated for months.
He pleaded guilty to a single felony count of "mishandling" secrets.

The Justice Department changed its rules in 2016, giving greater oversight over these national security cases to prosecutors in Washington.

Dr. Lauer and other officials said the investigations into biomedical research have uncovered clear evidence of wrongdoing.
In one case at M.D. Anderson, a Chinese scientist who had packed a suitcase with computer hard drives containing research data was stopped at the airport on the way to China, Dr. Lauer and officials at the center said.
Overall, they argued, the cases paint a disturbing picture of economic espionage in which the Chinese government has been taking advantage of a biomedical research system in the United States built on trust and the free exchange of ideas.
“How would you feel if you were a U.S. scientist sending your best idea to the government in a grant application, and someone ended up doing your project in China?” Dr. McKinney asked.
‘This was something we had never seen.’

The F.B.I. director Christopher Wray appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 23.

Concern at the N.I.H. about the theft of biomedical research stretches back at least to June 2016, when the F.B.I. contacted N.I.H. officials with unusual questions about the American scientific research system.
How did peer review happen? 

What sort of controls were in place? 

“They needed to know how our system worked as compared to, say, national defense,” Dr. Lauer said.
The F.B.I. declined to discuss ongoing investigations, including why it initiated so many and how targets were selected. 

But Christopher Wray, director of the F.B.I., told the Senate Judiciary Committee in July that China is using “nontraditional collectors” of intelligence, and is attempting to “steal their way up the economic ladder at our expense.”
The F.B.I.’s national field office for commercial counterespionage, in Houston, asked administrators from Texas academic and medical centers to attend classified meetings in the summer of 2018 to discuss evidence of intellectual property theft. 

The administrators were given emergency security clearances and told to sign nondisclosure agreements.
Then, acting on information from the F.B.I. and other sources, the N.I.H. in late August 2018 began sending letters to medical centers nationwide asking administrators to investigate individual scientists.
“This was something we had never seen,” Dr. Lauer said. 

“It took us a while to grasp the seriousness of the problem.”
Some of the first inklings of trouble were discovered by administrators at M.D. Anderson, a prominent cancer research and treatment center. 

Between August 2018 and January 2019, five letters arrived at the center from the N.I.H. asking administrators to investigate the activities of five Chinese faculty members.
Dr. Peter Pisters, president of the cancer center, said he and his colleagues reviewed faculty emails, and they turned up disturbing evidence.
Among the redacted emails provided to The New York Times was one by a Chinese scientist planning to whisk proprietary test materials to colleagues in China. 

“I should be able to bring the whole sets of primers to you (if I can figure out how to get a dozen tubes of frozen DNA onto an airplane),” he wrote.

Chinese moles: Li Xiao-Jiang, right, and Li Shihua in Guangzhou, China. They were employed at Emory University in Atlanta for more than 20 years.

The redacted M.D. Anderson emails also suggest that a Chinese scientist at the medical center sent data and research to the Chinese government in exchange for a $75,000 one-year “appointment” under the Thousand Talents Program, which Beijing established a decade ago to recruit scientists to Chinese universities.
Researchers are legally obligated to disclose such payments to the N.I.H. and to their academic institutions, and the scientist had not done so, according to an internal report on the investigation.
Still another Chinese scientist at M.D. Anderson had forwarded a confidential research proposal to a contact in China, writing, “Attached please find an application about mitochondrial DNA mutation in tumor development. Please keep it to yourself.”
Administrators at M.D. Anderson said three of the Chinese scientists had resigned and one had retired. 

The fifth case involved a scientist whose transgressions may not be serious enough to be fired.
Xifeng Wu, who left M.D. Anderson and is now dean of the School of Public Health at Zhejiang University in China, declined to comment on the circumstances of her resignation. 

“I would like to focus on my research,” she said.
M.D. Anderson is not the only institution wrestling with Chinese scientific misconduct.
Last month, two married scientists, Yu Zhou, 49, and Li Chen, 46, who had worked at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, for a decade, were indicted on charges that they stole technology developed at the hospital and used it to apply for Chinese patents and set up biotech companies in China and the United States.
In May, two scientists at Emory University in Atlanta, Li Xiao-Jiang and Li Shihua, were fired after administrators discovered that Li Xiao-Jiang had received funding from China’s Thousand Talents Program.
The couple had worked there for more than two decades, researching Huntington’s disease. University administrators declined to provide further information.

In July, Kang Zhang, the former chief of eye genetics at the University of California, San Diego, resigned after local journalists disclosed his involvement with a biotech firm in China that relies on research he had performed at the university.
Zhang, also a member of the Thousand Talents Program, did not tell the university about his role. 

Dr. Michael Lauer, deputy director for extramural research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. “We know there are companies formed in China for which we funded the research,” he said.

What is coming to light, Dr. Lauer said, is “a tapestry of incidents.”
Start-up companies in China were founded on scientific and medical technology that the N.I.H. developed with taxpayer money. 

“We know there are companies formed in China for which we funded the research,” Dr. Lauer said.
Scientists of Chinese descent also secretly received patents in China for research conducted in the United States, according to Dr. Lauer, and researchers in the Thousand Talents Program signed contracts that require them to provide the Chinese government with confidential results obtained in the United States or other lab discoveries.
“If the N.I.H. funded it, it should be available to U.S. taxpayers,” said Dr. McKinney, of the Association of American Medical Colleges. 

“But if a project is also funded in China, it is moving intellectual property to China.”

Chinese and Sino-American Massive Threat

The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. 

Federal and academic officials stress that they are not targeting Chinese researchers on the basis of their ethnicity. 

But the F.B.I.’s silence regarding how so many investigations began has exacerbated concern that the government’s efforts to uncover economic espionage may tar all Chinese and Sino-American scientists.

With the Trump administration imposing tariffs intended to punish violations of intellectual property rights, Wu sees a sharp reversal in attitudes about China and the Chinese.

“I am getting calls and emails constantly now from ethnic Chinese — even those who are U.S. citizens — who feel suspected,” he said. 

To Dr. Lauer, the charges of racism are unfounded. 

“Not all the foreign influence cases involve China,” he said. 

“But the vast majority do.”
The real question, he added, is how to preserve the open exchange of scientific ideas in the face of growing security concerns. 

At M.D. Anderson, administrators are tightening controls to make data less freely available.
People can no longer use personal laptops on the wireless network. 

The center has barred the use of flash drives and disabled USB ports. 

And all of its employees’ computers can now be monitored remotely.
The N.I.H. is clamping down, too. 

It recommends that reviewers of grant applications have limited ability to download or print them. Those traveling to certain regions should use loaner computers, it says, and academic institutions should be alert to frequent Chinese travel by scientists, or frequent publishing with colleagues outside the United States.
The National Science Foundation has commissioned an independent scientific advisory group to recommend ways of balancing openness and security, and warned scientists it funds that they are prohibited from participating in programs like China’s Thousand Talents Program.
The F.B.I. has given research institutions tools to scan emails for keywords in Mandarin that might tip off administrators to breaches, according to Dr. McKinney.
“The effects this will have on long-term, trusting relationships are hard for us to face,” he said. 

“We just are not used to systematic cheating.”

No Country for Chinese Men

FBI Urges Universities To Monitor Chinese Students And Scholars In The U.S.
By EMILY FENG

University administrators say the FBI, whose headquarters are shown above, has urged them to monitor Chinese students and scholars.

U.S. intelligence agencies are encouraging American research universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and visiting scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions, as U.S. suspicion toward China spreads to academia.
Since last year, FBI officials have visited at least 10 members of the Association of American Universities, a group of 62 research universities, with an unclassified list of Chinese research institutions and companies.
Universities have been advised to monitor students and scholars associated with those entities on American campuses, according to three administrators briefed at separate institutions. 

FBI officials have also urged universities to review ongoing research involving Chinese individuals that could have defense applications, the administrators say.
"We are being asked what processes are in place to know what labs they are working at or what information they are being exposed to," Fred Cate, vice president of research at Indiana University, tells NPR. 

In a statement responding to NPR's questions, the FBI said it "regularly engages with the communities we serve. As part of this continual outreach, we meet with a wide variety of groups, organizations, businesses, and academic institutions. The FBI has met with top officials from academia as part of our ongoing engagement on national security matters."
While law enforcement agents have discussed university monitoring of other nationalities as well, these FBI briefings addressed visitors from China in particular who are involved in science, technology, engineering and math.

Administrators say the universities briefed by the FBI have not yet implemented additional monitoring protocols. 

Separately, intelligence officers have also briefed hundreds of American CEOs, investors and think tank experts on Chinese cybersecurity and espionage threats. 

"What we provide them is the classified information that we get from the collection priorities of China specifically: What they're trying to collect on, what they're interested in our campuses," William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, told NPR.
This March, U.S. intelligence officials briefed about 70 college administrators of the American Council on Education, according to university participants. 

The officials said the presidents should increase oversight of Chinese researchers and avoid research funding from Chinese firms like Huawei.
The nation's primary biomedical research agency, the National Institutes of Health, is now investigating grant recipients for not disclosing collaboration or funding from China and for sharing peer-review grant material with Chinese researchers. 

"Chinese entities have mounted systematic programs to influence NIH researchers and peer reviewers," warned NIH Director Francis Collins in a memo sent to more than 10,000 research institutions last August.

In May, the Commerce Department put Huawei on a trade blacklist, which prevents U.S. companies from selling products to the Chinese telecom firm without federal authorization. 

But the pressure to divest from research collaborations with Huawei and ZTE, another telecom company, began early last year, said three university administrators.
"For months up until [May], government officials were saying, 'We really don't think you should be doing business with Huawei,' " says Cate. 

"We said, 'Why don't you put them on a list and then we won't do business?' And they're like, 'Oh, the list process is way too slow.' "
The FBI visits have caused uncertainty among U.S. academics about whether to accept federal grants for research that may involve Chinese scholars. 

"We don't say you can't, because we don't have any legal authority to say they can't," Cate says. 

"But we say you should be aware there may be some sensitivity about this."
Several university presidents have issued statements this year reaffirming their commitment to Chinese researchers and students.
Last month, pro-China Yale University's president, Peter Salovey, said he was "working with my presidential colleagues in the Association of American Universities (AAU) to urge federal agencies to clarify concerns they have about international academic exchanges. The AAU has encouraged agencies to use the tools already in place, such as export controls, while affirming the principle of open academic exchange for basic research."
Salovey's office declined to comment further when contacted by NPR.
Universities and companies use software that automatically reviews international research collaborations, commercial transactions and other exchanges and then matches them up with existing blacklists to ensure they do not violate export control laws.
Numerous universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the University of Illinois, have already cut off research collaborations with Huawei.
Besides Huawei, no other Chinese entities singled out to universities by the FBI are currently on a trade blacklist, according to the three university administrators.
That means any monitoring of specific Chinese individuals at the university level would have to be done manually, when admitting or employing them, possibly leaving a wide margin of error during evaluation.
"You're really looking at compliance systems that have to be rolled out on a department-by-department basis and person-by-person level to see if you're sticking research data in an envelope and mailing it to China," Cate says.
The Trump administration has long accused China of stealing American technology, a key factor behind the trade war between the two countries.

FBI Director Christopher Wray addresses the Council on Foreign Relations on April 26 in Washington, D.C. Wray spoke about "the FBI's role in protecting the United States from today's global threats."

As the mood in Washington, D.C., becomes more aggressive toward China, intelligence agencies have been visiting not just universities but also American tech companies to dissuade them from collaborations with Chinese entities.
"We have to wake this country up to what China is doing," Sen. Mark Warner, Va.-D, said at the Brookings Institution last month. 

"For this reason, I have been convening meetings between the intelligence community and outside stakeholders in business and academia to ensure they have the full threat picture and, hopefully, make different decisions about Chinese partnerships."

China's 340,000 potential or actual spies
Chinese students have come under particular suspicion. 

More than 340,000 were studying in the U.S. last year, according to the Department of Homeland Security. 

Since last July, Chinese students studying, in particular, science and technology fields must undergo additional screening, resulting in delayed visas for hundreds of students.
In May, Republicans introduced legislation in the House and Senate that would deny visas to Chinese researchers affiliated with Chinese military institutions.
"The Chinese intelligence services strategically use every tool at their disposal — including state-owned businesses, students, researchers and ostensibly private companies — to systematically steal information and intellectual property," FBI Director Christopher Wray said at the Council on Foreign Relations in April.
Former FBI agents say the bureau's recent visits to universities are merely an extension of long-running efforts to collaborate with the private sector and academia on national security issues.
"What the FBI has been doing is really more of an outreach and education program," says Todd K. Hulsey, a former counterintelligence official who retired from the FBI in 2014. 

Hulsey explained that such meetings began as early as two decades ago over concerns that Chinese student associations were fronts for Chinese intelligence recruiting: "It's to let these universities know that there is an existing threat to our economy."
National security concerns at universities increased after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which sent a wave of former Soviet bloc researchers to the U.S., says Edward Shaw, a former FBI special agent who retired in 2014.
Even back then, however, government agencies contacted universities with specific individuals of concern rather than presenting a broad list of institutions.
"It's casting a wide net," says Shaw. 

"When you're getting information from various government agencies and other trusted sources that a specific person is in the country and you are more targeted, you're using your resources better."

Chinese Spy Hunt

Graduates Of China's Yenching Academy Are Being Questioned By The FBI
By EMILY FENG

People cycle past a building at Peking University in Beijing in 2016. The university hosts Yenching Academy, a graduate studies program.

A sudden knock at one's door.

An unexpected call to meet off campus. 

Surreptitious visits to family members.
American graduates of the Yenching Academy, a one- to two-year master's degree program housed at Beijing's ePeking University, are being approached and questioned by the FBI about the time they spent in China. 

In the last two years, at least five Yenching graduates have been approached by agents to gather intelligence on the program and to ascertain whether they have been co-opted by Chinese espionage efforts.
Brian Kim is one of them. 

Five months ago, Kim received a call from an unfamiliar number. 

"It was a person who claimed to be an FBI agent, and I immediately thought it was a scam call," Kim recalls.
Now beginning his second year at Yale Law School, Kim was able to verify the agent's identity with the local FBI office in New Haven, Conn., the next day. 

He arranged for two FBI agents to meet him at a coffee shop near Yale's campus, where, over the next hour, they grilled him on his personal and academic history.
"It became clear to me, maybe three-quarters of the way through, that they were actually most interested in China," Kim says.
One of the agents asked if anyone in China had tried to recruit Kim for espionage efforts.

Who had encouraged Kim to apply for the Yenching program in the first place?
"I literally told them the Princeton fellowship office" had recommended he apply, says Kim, who has a bachelor's degree from Princeton University. 

Chinese espionageThe mistrust of Yenching Academy, dubbed the "Rhodes Scholarship of China," illustrates just how far fears of Chinese espionage have permeated among the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment.

Once cast as a way for America's best and brightest to build relationships with and improve understanding of China, academic programs and collaborations are now falling under scrutiny.

 FBI agents have been lobbying U.S. university administrators to monitor Chinese "researchers" and "students" working in certain science and technology fields. 

Federal funding agencies including the National Institutes of Health are also investigating academics for not properly disclosing Chinese funding or research done with Chinese institutions.
Suspicion of Yenching Academy stems in part from its funding — it is supported by China's education ministry. 

But Yenching administrators tell NPR they were not aware of their graduates being questioned upon return to the U.S.

"They don't have time to have made extensive contacts in the area that would be sensitive," David Moser, Yenching's associate dean since 2017, told NPR by phone. 

"I have not seen anything that would indicate problems. But of course, it's only recently that U.S.-China relations [have] gotten so fraught and with tension. So who knows?"

The FBI said in a statement emailed to NPR: "In an attempt to fulfill our national security mission, and in the hopes of better protecting U.S. citizens, the FBI will sometimes conduct voluntary interviews with individuals who have studied or conducted research abroad, often at their request. The goal of these interviews is to identify potential security risks and to protect U.S. citizens from illegally supporting foreign government interests."
When reached for comment, the FBI also highlighted the case of Glenn Duffie Shriver, who was convicted in 2011 of spying for the Chinese government. 

Shriver, who had studied abroad in China as an undergraduate, was recruited by three Chinese intelligence officers while living in Shanghai after graduation and encouraged to apply for U.S. intelligence positions.
"Foreign intelligence services have increasingly chosen to target and recruit academics, researchers, and others to conduct activities on behalf of foreign governments. Past investigations have identified Chinese universities as locations where such targeting occurs," according to the FBI statement. 

"These investigations have shown that foreign governments and intelligence services often seek to identify and develop relationships with U.S. students, scholars, and researchers who can help them gain access to information and persons that fulfill the foreign government's international intelligence agenda."

Yenching is no stranger to controversy. 

Ironically, when the program was launched in 2015, it was criticized in Chinese academic circles for being a vehicle of American soft power and influence.
"'English Chinese Studies' is simply a large-scale transplant of Western Chinese studies and Sinology to Peking University," two Chinese professors wrote in a widely circulated editorial for the news website Guancha in 2014.
In the U.S., Yenching was welcomed by China watchers and policymakers alongside the Schwarzman Scholars program — a rival, 3-year-old master's program funded by billionaire financier and Trump confidant Stephen Schwarzman — as an important component of people-to-people diplomacy with China. 

There are no known instances of Schwarzman students reporting scrutiny from U.S. authorities.
About 30% of Yenching's approximately 125 students each year are American or Canadian and a fifth come from mainland China.
"We know that bonds built between students of our two countries will last a lifetime," Michelle Obama said in a handwritten note, after visiting the Yenching campus in 2014.
But the bonds have led to espionage. 

Over the last year, local FBI agents have approached Yale several times, asking university officials to disclose the identities of Chinese and Chinese-American researchers and students working in certain laboratories.
Yale administrators refused. 

The experience prompted pro-China Yale President Peter Salovey to publish an open letter on the university website in May "to affirm Yale's steadfast commitment to our Chinese students and scholars."
Yale Law School declined to comment but the school's Dean Heather Gerken told NPR by email that "we are extremely protective of our students and care very much about this issue." 

When asked to comment, the university referred NPR to Salovey's letter.
When approached by the FBI, says Kim, "The instinct isn't to say, 'No, come back with a warrant.' The instinct is to say yes."
Other students accepted to Yenching Academy never made it to Beijing. 

When two West Point graduates were admitted to the fourth incoming Yenching class last year, the Department of Defense intervened and banned them from attending, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Kim hopes to serve in the public sector on Korean Peninsula issues, given his Korean language abilities and background in policy. 

But, he says, "Just the idea that somewhere in D.C., there is a file on me being a threat to the national security system is a very disturbing thought."

China's Cyberattacks

Chinese hacker who obtained details of 78 million people is charged in US with one of the worst data breaches in history
by Robert Delaney

This photo provided by the FBI shows a wanted poster of Wang Fujie (left). The US Justice Department says a grand jury has indicted Wang and another man identified only as John Doe for hacking into the computers of health insurer Anthem Inc and three other, unnamed companies, in an indictment unsealed May 9, 2019, in Indianapolis. 

A US federal grand jury on May 9 charged a Chinese national in a hacking campaign described by the Justice Department as “one of the worst data breaches in history”, an effort that yielded the personal data of 78 million people.
Wang Fujie, also known as Dennis Wang, and another individual in the indictment, have infiltrated the US-based computer systems of US health insurer Anthem and three other companies, the Justice Department said in a statement on May 9.
“The allegations in the indictment unsealed today outline the activities of a brazen China-based computer hacking group that committed one of the worst data breaches in history,” Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski, said in the announcement.
“These defendants attacked US businesses operating in four distinct industry sectors, and violated the privacy of over 78 million people by stealing their [personally identifiable information].”
The indictment was the latest in a series of efforts by the US Federal Bureau of Investigations to tackle hacking operations and cybertheft emanating from China.

The bureau has become increasingly vocal about the country.
The second suspect, who was identified in court documents as John Doe and through aliases including Zhou Zhihong, conducted the hacking activities in China.
The other three companies affected by the hacks, conducted between February 2018 and January 2019, operated in the technology, basic materials and communication services sectors, according to the department.
Information taken from the companies included health identification numbers, birth dates, social security numbers, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, and employment information.
Wang and Doe obtained personal information by installing malware on the victim companies’ computers systems through “spearfishing” emails sent to the companies’ employees, according to the indictment, which was filed with the Indianapolis division of the federal court’s Southern District of Indiana, where Anthem is based.

The information obtained by the defendants was encrypted and sent through multiple computers to destinations in China. 

The files installed in the victim companies’ computers systems were then deleted.
Anthem and the other US companies involved notified the FBI when they became aware of the operation, allowing the federal investigators to monitor the activity and trace it to the defendants, according to the Justice Department.
The FBI has worked closely with companies in recent years to respond to attempts by Chinese to steal information from US companies. 

GE Aviation, for example, had worked with the bureau for more than a year to lure Xu Yanjun, a spy working for China’s Ministry of State Security, into a law enforcement trap in Belgium last year. Xu was then extradited to the US and is now awaiting trial.
According to Xu’s indictment filed in the Southern District of Ohio, the MSS officer sought GE Aviation technology used in the development of fan blades and engine encasements.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has been an outspoken critic of China since he assumed his post in 2017.
Last year, Wray accused Beijing of increasing its use of “non-traditional collectors” – such as professors, scientists and students – for its intelligence gathering.
“One of the things we’re trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat but a whole-of-society threat on their end, and I think it’s going to take a whole-of-society response by us,” Mr Wray testified at a Senate hearing in February 2018.
Eight months later at another hearing, Mr Wray declared China “the broadest, most complicated, most long-term” counter-intelligence threat confronting the US – surpassing even Russia, whose interference in the 2016 election dominated headlines for more than two years and continues to roil the country.
Speaking at a separate Senate hearing in December, Bill Priestap, the FBI’s assistant director of counter-intelligence, also called for more coordinated action to counter espionage and cybertheft originating in China.
“There are pockets of great understanding of the threat we’re facing and effective responses, but in my opinion we’ve got to knit that together better,” he said.
Warning against what he called “ad hoc responses”, Priestap added: “We need more people in government, more people in business, more people in academia pulling in the same direction to combat this threat effectively.”

Chinese Espionage

F.B.I. Bars Chinese Scholar-Spies From Visiting U.S.
By Jane Perlez

Christopher Wray, the F.B.I. director, warned at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last year that China presented “a whole-of-society threat on their end” that required a “whole-of-society response.”

BEIJING — Just as he had on previous trips, Zhu Feng bolted down his lunch at a Los Angeles airport before sprinting to catch his Air China flight back to Beijing.
Suddenly, two F.B.I. agents blocked the Chinese scholar at the boarding gate and ordered him to hand over his passport.

They flipped to the well-used 10-year visa to the United States and crossed out the page with a black pen.
“‘Go back to China,’” Zhu, a professor of international relations, recalled an agent telling him during that visit in January last year.

“You will receive a notification.”
In the four decades since China and the United States normalized relations, Washington has generally welcomed Chinese scholars and researchers to America, even when Beijing has been less open to reciprocal visits. 

Republican and Democratic administrations have operated on the assumption that the national interest was well served by exposing Chinese academics to American values.
Now, that door appears to be closing, with the two nations ramping up their strategic rivalry and each regarding academic visitors from the other with greater suspicion — of espionage, commercial theft and political meddling.
The F.B.I. has mounted a counterintelligence operation that aims to bar Chinese academics from the United States if they are suspected of having links to Chinese intelligence agencies. 

As many as 30 Chinese professors in the social sciences, heads of academic institutes, and experts who help explain government policies have had their visas to the United States canceled in the past year, or put on administrative review, according to Chinese academics and their American counterparts.
It follows the warning of the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, at a Senate hearing last year that China presented “a whole-of-society threat on their end” that required a “whole-of-society response.”
In a written response to questions, a State Department official said that Chinese intelligence services were increasingly using visiting Chinese scholars to target American citizens for intelligence gathering purposes. 

The department said it would not discuss the details of specific cases.
The F.B.I. said that it would not confirm or deny any investigations into the scholars’ visits.
The Trump administration has sought to crack down on intellectual property theft by Chinese scientists working at American research institutions. 
Last year, it began restricting visas for Chinese graduate students studying in sensitive research fields and warned biomedical researchers at American universities to beware of Chinese spies trying to steal information from their laboratories.
At the heart of the United States’ concerns is the view that China poses a threat to America’s technological dominance.
Xi Jinping has set a goal for China to become a global scientific power by 2049.

President Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing in 2017.

American researchers are arguing that academic exchanges between the countries have become a one-way street benefiting China.
They accuse China of denying visas to American scholars seeking to research subjects the Chinese consider too sensitive even as their Chinese compatriots face fewer restrictions in the United States.
China has for several decades denied visas to a number of influential American academics who have been critical of China’s human rights record. 
And as Xi Jinping wages a campaign against so-called Western values in academia, the authorities have only become even more selective.
America’s visa bans are particularly affecting experts at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a sprawling network of state-run institutes.
The director of the academy’s American studies institute, Wu Baiyi, said he was interviewed by F.B.I. agents in Atlanta where he attended an event at the Carter Center in January.
His visa was later canceled.
Lu Xiang, a "scholar" at the same academy who spent six months at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington a few years ago, said his visa was canceled last year.
“They may feel we know too much about the United States,” he said.
Some scholars have been told that they can apply for single-entry visas instead.
But they would have to provide their addresses, phone numbers and travel history over the last 15 years, said Wang Wen, the head of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies in Beijing, a think tank that promotes China’s infrastructure program, the Belt and Road initiative.
Wang’s visa was canceled after he attended the conference at the Carter Center.
He decided against applying for a single-entry visa because the questions were too intrusive, he said.
“I don’t want to go to America in the coming years,” he said.

An Air China plane at Los Angeles International Airport. Two F.B.I. agents blocked Chinese scholar Zhu Feng at the boarding gate at the airport last year.

Zhu Feng, 55, the international relations "expert" whose visa was canceled at a Los Angeles airport, was among the first generation of America "experts" in post-Mao China.
He had become enamored with American studies at Peking University in the 1980s and 1990s, studying with one of the giants of the field, Robert A. Scalapino.
His first visit to the United States was to the Monterey Institute of International Studies in 1999.
The F.B.I. first questioned him when he landed in Los Angeles to make a connection to a conference in San Diego.
They asked if he had worked with the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They also asked him, he said, who among his colleagues had close relations with Chinese intelligence.
They told him, he said, that if he did not cooperate, he would be considered unfriendly toward the United States.
Zhu said he denied working with the military and that he told the agents he had nothing to say in response to the question about the foreign ministry.
As for the question about his colleagues, he said: “I don’t know.”
He declined the offer to cooperate.
In an interview, Zhu said he worked with a group overseen by the China Association for International Friendly Contact, an arm of the ruling Communist Party that seeks to promote Chinese interests abroad. 
That group helped him organize a conference in China on Northeast Asian security that was attended by Dennis Blair, a retired admiral, and retired Chinese generals.
Zhu, who heads a South China Sea institute at Nanjing University, said he also cooperated with the foreign ministry’s policy planning department.
He said he has not acted in a way that would harm relations with the United States.
He acknowledged that the unquestionable authority of the security apparatus puts Chinese academics in an awkward position.
“China is, by its nature, a police state. When a national security official comes to my office, I have no way to kick them out,” he said.
The visa ban meant he could not travel to his son’s college graduation. 

Huawei Sting Offers Rare Glimpse of the U.S. Targeting the Chinese Rogue Company

Diamond glass could make your phone’s screen nearly unbreakable—and the FBI enlisted its inventor after Huawei tried to steal his secrets. 

By Erik Schatzker

A prototype of Akhan Semiconductor’s Miraj Diamond Glass.

The sample looked like an ordinary piece of glass, 4 inches square and transparent on both sides. 

It’d been packed like the precious specimen its inventor, Adam Khan, believed it to be—placed on wax paper, nestled in a tray lined with silicon gel, enclosed in a plastic case, surrounded by air bags, sealed in a cardboard box—and then sent for testing to a laboratory in San Diego owned by Huawei Technologies Co. 

But when the sample came back last August, months late and badly damaged, Khan knew something was terribly wrong. 

Was the Chinese company trying to steal his technology?
The glass was a prototype for what Khan’s company, Akhan Semiconductor Inc., describes as a nearly indestructible smartphone screen. 

Khan’s innovation was figuring out how to coat one side of the glass with a microthin layer of artificial diamond. 

He hoped to license this technology to phone manufacturers, which could use it to develop an entirely new, superdurable generation of electronics. 

Akhan says Miraj Diamond Glass, as the product is known, is 6 times stronger and 10 times more scratch-resistant than Gorilla Glass, the industry standard that generates about $3 billion in annual sales for Corning Inc. 

“Lighter, thinner, faster, stronger,” says Khan, in full sales mode. 

Miraj, he promises, will lead to a “fundamental next level in design.”

Miraj Diamond Glass at Akhan’s headquarters in Gurnee

Like all inventors, Khan was paranoid about knockoffs. 

Even so, he was caught by surprise when Huawei, a potential customer, began to behave suspiciously after receiving the meticulously packed sample. 

Khan was more surprised when the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation drafted him and Akhan’s chief operations officer, Carl Shurboff, as participants in its investigation of Huawei. 

The FBI asked them to travel to Las Vegas and conduct a meeting with Huawei representatives at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show. 

Shurboff was outfitted with surveillance devices and recorded the conversation while a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter watched from safe distance.
This investigation, which hasn’t previously been made public, is separate from the recently announced grand jury indictments against Huawei. 

On Jan. 28, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged the company and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, with multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy. 

In a separate case, prosecutors in Seattle charged Huawei with theft of trade secrets, conspiracy, and obstruction of justice, claiming that one of its employees stole a part from a robot, known as Tappy, at a T-Mobile US Inc. facility in Bellevue, Wash. 

“These charges lay bare Huawei’s blatant disregard for the laws of our country and standard global business practices,” Christopher Wray, the FBI director, said in a press release accompanying the Jan. 28 indictments. 

“Today should serve as a warning that we will not tolerate businesses that violate our laws, obstruct justice, or jeopardize national and economic well-being.” 

Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Feb. 11, 2019.

If the new investigation bears fruit, it could, along with the indictments, bolster the Trump administration’s effort to block Huawei from selling equipment for fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless networks in the U.S. and allied nations. 

Huawei poses a national security threat because it could build undetectable backdoors into 5G hardware and software, allowing the Chinese government to spy on American communications and wage cyberwarfare. 

On the same day Wray’s statement was released, the government searched the Huawei lab in San Diego where Akhan’s glass had been sent. 

The FBI raid was a secret, but not to Khan and Shurboff, who’d been receiving regular briefings of the investigation’s progress through Akhan’s lawyer, Renato Mariotti, a well-known former prosecutor who’s now a partner at Thompson Coburn LLP. 

By then, they’d succeeded in getting Huawei representatives to admit, on tape, to breaking the contract with Akhan and, evidently, to violating U.S. export-control laws. 

Huawei did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

This story is based on documents—including emails and text messages exchanged among Huawei, Akhan, and the FBI—as well as reporting from the sting operation in Las Vegas and interviews with Khan and Shurboff. 

Businessweek shared a detailed account of the investigation with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which declined to comment. 

The FBI also declined to comment.
Khan’s work on diamond glass goes back to his college days, when he began learning about so-called nanodiamonds as a 19-year-old electrical engineering and physics student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

After graduation, he ran experiments at the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility and teamed up with researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, eventually developing and patenting a way to deposit a thin coating of tiny diamonds on materials such as glass. 

He also licensed diamond-related patents for Akhan from the Argonne lab in 2014. 

By the following year, Khan was confident enough to start promoting his new technology. 

He joined the conference circuit, began giving interviews to trade publications, and hired Shurboff, who’d spent 25 years in various roles at Motorola Inc. 

It was time, Khan believed, to go to market.

Akhan founder and CEO Khan.

In the smartphone world, extra-strong display glass is a competitive advantage, like a fast processor or a really good camera. 

It’s been that way ever since Steve Jobs picked Corning to supply a screen for the first iPhone more than a decade ago. 

Reviewers marveled that the device could be shoved into a pocket full of keys and coins and its then-giant display would come out unscathed. 

To take on Corning, Akhan needed to convince the world’s big smartphone manufacturers—including Apple, Samsung, and Huawei—that its diamond-coated glass was even tougher than Gorilla Glass. 

In 2016, Shurboff began sending out samples from Akhan’s production facility in Gurnee, Ill., a Chicago suburb. 

He shipped the first one to Samsung; another early sample went to Huawei.
Even then, before Trump’s trade war and the indictments, the Huawei name carried plenty of baggage. 

In 2002, Cisco Systems Inc. accused Huawei of stealing source code for its routers. 

Motorola said in a 2010 lawsuit that Huawei had successfully turned some of its Chinese-born employees into informants. 

And in 2012 the U.S. House Intelligence Committee labeled Huawei a national security threat and urged the government and American businesses not to buy its products. 

The Cisco and Motorola lawsuits ended with settlements.
Since 2012, under pressure from the government, the major U.S. telecommunications companies have essentially blacklisted Huawei, refusing to carry its smartphones or use its equipment in their networks. 

But most of the world kept on buying from Huawei, choosing to ignore the allegations that the company has consistently denied. 

At the same time, U.S. tech companies have remained free to sell parts to Huawei. 

Qualcomm Inc. is one of Huawei’s big suppliers. 

So are Micron Technology Inc. and Intel Corp.
So there was nothing out of the ordinary when an email from Huawei came to Akhan on Aug. 8, 2016. 

The sender was Angel Han, a Huawei engineer in San Diego. 

In email exchanges and calls that followed, Han conveyed a sense of urgency. 

In one email on Nov. 7, 2016, Han said Huawei was “actively looking for new technologies for our innovative product in this fast pace [sic] consumer electronics industry,” according to a copy reviewed by Businessweek. 

“Vendor’s capability to move fast and deliver is also crucial for us.” 

Reached on a mobile phone number that appeared on text messages exchanged with Akhan, a woman who identified herself as Angel Han denied knowing anyone at Akhan; then, when she was presented with specific details about interactions with Akhan, she said, “I can’t recall.” 

Then she hung up.

Akhan COO Shurboff.

By February 2017, the two companies had a deal. 

Akhan would ship two samples of Miraj to Huawei in San Diego. 

According to a letter of intent, signed by both parties, Huawei promised to return any samples within 60 days and also to limit any tests it might perform to methods that wouldn’t cause damage. (The latter provision is standard in the industry and is designed to make it hard to reverse-engineer any intellectual property.) 

Shurboff noted in documents he sent to Han that Huawei had to comply with U.S. export laws, including provisions of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR, which govern the export of materials with defense applications. 

Diamond coatings are on the list because of their potential for use in laser weapons.
Khan and Shurboff decided early on that Akhan would license the first generation of its Miraj glass to a single handset maker, hoping the promise of exclusivity would give their startup some leverage. Huawei, Khan says, indicated it was eager to stay in the race, and on March 26, 2018, Akhan shipped an improved sample to Han. 

“We were very optimistic,” Khan says. 

“Having one of the top three smartphone manufacturers back you, at least on paper, is very attractive.”
The first sign of trouble came two months later, in May, when Huawei missed the deadline to return the sample. 

Shurboff says his emails to Han requesting its immediate return were ignored. 

The following month, Han wrote that Huawei had been performing “standard” tests on the sample and included a photo showing a big scratch on its surface. 

Finally, a package from Huawei showed up at Gurnee on Aug. 2.
Shurboff remembers opening it. 

It looked just like the package Akhan had sent months earlier. 

Inside the cardboard box was the usual protective packaging—air bags, plastic case, gel insert, and wax paper. 

But he could tell something was wrong when he picked up the case. 

It rattled. 

The unscratchable Miraj sample wasn’t just scratched; it was broken in two, and three shards of diamond glass were missing.
Shurboff says he knew there was no way the sample could have been damaged in shipping—all the pieces would still be there in the case. 

Instead, he believed that Huawei had tried to cut through the sample to gauge the thickness of its diamond film and to figure out how Akhan had engineered it. 

“My heart sank,” he says. 

“I thought, ‘Great, this multibillion-dollar company is coming after our technology. What are we going to do now?’”

The packaging for Akhan’s Miraj Diamond Glass.

Shurboff’s first call was to Khan. 

Then he went to the FBI, which had been cultivating relationships with even the smallest American tech companies as part of a crackdown on Chinese theft of intellectual property. 

Eight months earlier, in January 2018, a male FBI special agent in Chicago had paid a visit to Akhan in Gurnee. 

According to Shurboff, the agent told him that the bureau was hoping to educate local startups on cybercrime and security vulnerabilities and to encourage them to come forward with suspicious activity. 

The FBI specifically was trying to gather intelligence on Chinese efforts to obtain U.S. technology, the agent told Shurboff.
The conversation stuck in Shurboff’s mind. 

That August, two weeks after receiving the broken glass from Huawei, he drove down to the FBI’s Chicago field office, which was holding a seminar for area executives on corporate espionage. Shurboff watched as a female special agent discussed the case in which Huawei stole trade secrets from T-Mobile in 2012. 

During a break, Shurboff approached the agent and told her what had happened to Akhan. 

He mentioned that diamond coating was an ITAR-regulated material with defense applications and raised the possibility that the sample had been in the wrong hands. 

In addition to its work on smartphone glass, Akhan had been adapting its diamond technology for semiconductors and the military.

Shurboff

To many, Shurboff’s story might have sounded far-fetched. 

Not to the FBI. 

“They took a very keen interest immediately and wanted to know more,” he says. 

Things moved quickly. 

The Akhan executives found themselves on regular conference calls with officials from the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Taking the lead on several of these calls was David Kessler, the assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn who, it turned out later, would prosecute Huawei’s CFO.
The two FBI agents picked up the broken sample in Gurnee and delivered it to the FBI’s research center in Quantico, Va. 

When Khan and Shurboff joined the group on a subsequent call, an FBI expert in forensic gemology briefed them on his findings. 

They recall the gemologist saying he’d analyzed the diamond glass sample and concluded that Huawei had blasted it with a 100-kilowatt laser, powerful enough to be used as a weapon.
Throughout the fall of 2018, the FBI agents asked Khan and Shurboff for emails, copies of non-disclosure agreements, letters of intent, shipping records, even the box Huawei used to return the sample that summer. 

The FBI had another request, too: Would they re-establish contact with Angel Han, the Huawei engineer?
On Dec. 10, while the FBI listened in, Shurboff and Khan say they spoke to Han by phone, quizzing her about the broken sample of diamond glass. 

What happened during the tests? 

Why were shards missing? 

Han told them she didn’t know, because the sample had been in China and was shipped directly to Akhan from there. 

This was a criminal violation of ITAR rules, but Han didn’t seem to realize or care. 

And instead of backing off, Han said Huawei wanted to continue talks about becoming Akhan’s first customer and proposed a face-to-face meeting a few weeks later at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. 

She even offered to bring along a senior Huawei official from Shenzhen. 

Khan and Shurboff were flabbergasted. 

It was hard to tell who was playing whom.
The Akhan executives arrived in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Jan. 8, and checked in at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino. 

They’d arranged to meet Han and her colleague the following afternoon at 3 p.m. 

If all went according to plan, that would be the sting. 

The female FBI agent from Chicago, who’d flown in to oversee the operation, explained to Khan and Shurboff in text messages how it would work: The bureau was securing a room at the Las Vegas Convention Center, where the CES conference was taking place. 

It would be bugged, so the FBI could listen in from another location in the building. 

Shurboff brought signage to make it look like Akhan had rented the space.
At about noon on Jan. 9, the agent met with the Akhan executives and gave Shurboff three different covert recording devices to wear and carry as a backup plan. 

Shurboff texted Han: “We have a nice quiet conference room right off the Grand Hall if you like to meet there.” 

He noted it wasn’t far from the Huawei booth at CES. 

But at 2 p.m., Han responded by text, saying that she was at the Venetian Casino and couldn’t leave for at least another hour. 

That was a problem, because the FBI had the room for a limited time. 

Shurboff told Han to stay at the Venetian. 

He and Khan would meet her there.
They arrived just before 3 p.m. and texted Han a picture of their location, on the second floor of the Venetian by the escalator, right in front of Sin City Brewing. 

Khan was casually dressed in a dark peacoat, black button-up shirt, gray pants, and sneakers. Shurboff’s attire was more businesslike: a light blue dress shirt, gray sports jacket, black trousers, and brand-new leather shoes. 

Han showed up at 3:20 p.m. with a woman who introduced herself as Jennifer Lo, a senior supply manager with Huawei in Santa Clara, Calif. (The Shenzhen-based Huawei executive hadn’t come, they explained, because the company wasn’t allowing its senior Chinese executives to travel to the U.S.) 

The four of them chatted briefly, walked toward the food court at the Venetian, and took seats around a table at a Prime Burger. 

The Businessweek reporter watched from about 100 feet away, in front of a gelato stand. 

Khan and Shurboff had expected to conduct the sting in the safety and quiet of the FBI’s room at CES. 

Now, total rookies in the intelligence game, they had to remain calm while recording the conversation with Huawei in a noisy, crowded restaurant.
The hope had been that Lo, whom Khan guessed was in her early 40s, would have more to say about the destruction of Akhan’s sample and why Huawei was so interested in diamond film technology. Khan recalls her asking questions about the manufacturing capacity at Akhan’s pilot facility in Gurnee. 

She acknowledged that the sample glass had been to China but disputed that this had been an ITAR violation. 

Huawei had checked, and it was OK, she said. 

There was some tension, and at one point, Lo startled Khan and Shurboff by wondering aloud if the U.S. government was monitoring their meeting. 

As for the damaged sample, Lo, like Han, claimed ignorance. 

She was there to make sure Huawei still had a shot at being the first company to put diamond glass on a smartphone. 

If Akhan walked away, she said she might lose her job. (Reached on the mobile phone number on her Huawei business card, Lo confirmed her identity and said she was at CES to “meet with some suppliers.” When asked about the destruction of the sample and the shipment to China she said, “I’m not involved and cannot comment on this.”)
Over the next few days, Khan received an unsettling piece of news. 

During the Prime Burger meeting, Shurboff had coincidentally run into representatives from another big potential customer for Miraj glass. 

Feeling uneasy in his role as an FBI asset, he’d curtly brushed them off to return to the discussion with Huawei. 

Now the other customer seemed concerned that Akhan was trying to start a bidding war. 

Khan was determined not to lose a promising lead. 

Previously, he’d asked Businessweek to withhold the details of the sting operation until the government moved to indict Huawei or arrest someone. 

But, eager to explain the encounter at the Prime Burger and clear up any confusion, he’d changed his mind and decided to go public with Akhan’s story, as well as issue a statement about its cooperation with the FBI. 

“Akhan takes seriously any unlawful use of its technology,” an embargoed copy of the statement reads. 

The company, “will continue to cooperate with law enforcement and work towards an expedient resolution to this matter.”
The FBI raided Huawei’s San Diego facility on the morning of Jan. 28. 

That evening, the two special agents and Assistant U.S. Attorney Kessler briefed Khan and Shurboff by phone. 

The agents described the scope of the search warrant in vague terms and instructed Khan and Shurboff to have no further contact with Huawei.
Khan and Shurboff don’t know how the story will end. 

It’s possible that the government will conclude there aren’t grounds for an indictment against Huawei. 

Prosecutors also could decide that what happened to Akhan isn’t serious enough to seek charges. 

If that’s so, it raises a question about the broader U.S. crackdown on Huawei: Is it based on hard evidence of wrongdoing or driven by a desperation to catch the Chinese company doing something—anything—bad?
On the other hand, if the government does conclude that Akhan was attacked, that a Chinese multinational really did target a tiny Chicago company with no revenue and no customers (as of yet), it would show just how far and wide Huawei is willing to go to steal American trade secrets. 

“I think they’re identifying technologies that are key to their road map and going after them no matter what the size or scale or status of the business,” Khan says. 

“I wouldn’t say they’re discriminating.”