WASHINGTON: According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, China’s government is “more brazen” and “more damaging” than ever before when it comes to stealing American ideas and innovation and conducting massive hacking operations against the West.
It was a stinging rebuke of the Chinese government, delivered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, just days before Beijing is set to host the Winter Olympics. As Russia-Ukraine tensions continue to dominate American foreign policy, the United States continues to view China as its greatest long-term economic threat.
FBI Director James Wray said that “when we tally up what we see in our investigations, over 2,000 of which are focused on the Chinese government trying to steal our information or technology, there is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, innovation, and economic security than China.” The FBI provided a copy of the speech.
China’s government hackers steal more personal and corporate data than those from all other countries combined, FBI Director James Wray has said, and the bureau is opening new cases every 12 hours or so to combat this.
Chinese espionage harms more than just its companies’ ability to profit from illegally obtained technology.” Meanwhile, our companies and workers are being left in the dust,” Wray said. We have been feeling the pressure of company failures and job losses for over a decade now. Workers in a wide variety of industries across the country are affected by this.”
Last July, a spokesman for China’s embassy in the United States said that the United States had “made groundless attacks” on China “in addition to lies and misrepresentations about Chinese hackers. When it comes to cyber security, China has been called out as being a “staunch defender.”
The threat from China is nothing new, but it hasn’t diminished in the last ten years either.
In the time since I became director, I’ve spoken a lot about this threat.” “Wray claimed this in 2017. I want to focus on it tonight because it’s reached a new level—more brazen, more damaging—and it’s critical that we all work together to combat that threat.”
Five Chinese military officers were indicted by the Justice Department in 2014 on charges of hacking into major American corporations. They were charged with For the first time in a year, the White House announced a deal between the United States and China on intellectual property and trade secrets.
However, the United States has continued to accuse China of hacking and espionage in the years since. As a result, it has blacklisted numerous Chinese companies and accused them of hacking into companies working on coronavirus vaccines and launching a massive digital attack on Microsoft Exchange email server software.
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Wray cited the case of a Chinese intelligence officer who was convicted of economic espionage last November for targeting an advanced GE engine that Chinese state-owned enterprises were working to copy as an example in his speech.
However, there have been some setbacks along the way. There was no mention of the FBI’s China Initiative on Monday night, despite the agency’s efforts to protect academic research and innovation at American colleges and universities.
It was established in 2018 to combat economic espionage and to protect against research theft, but critics have accused investigators of scrutinizing researchers and professors on the basis of their ethnicity and preventing academic collaboration. The case against a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was dropped earlier this month after prosecutors said they could no longer meet their burden of proof.
As soon as the department completes its review of the China Initiative, the results will be made public.