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The Editor
CHINESE SPYING
André Luís Woloszyn
Analista de Assuntos Estratégicos
Although there are high-tech tools such as electronic surveillance, digital message traffic monitoring and online financial operations, traditional espionage, the one carried out by human sources, known as HUMINT, with the influence of agents in public and private institutions, never ceased to exist. Currently, with the fierce dispute over international economic markets between the USA and China, the matter has returned to the debate with great intensity and concern.
For some US officials like John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence and Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, China has been focusing its efforts on members of the US Congress, representing the greatest threat to democracy and freedom since World War II as infiltration of American universities suppress criticism of Beijing and reinforce communist propaganda among youth by offering cultural exchanges and distributing research grants through front institutes. In fact, this was a tactic widely applied in Brazilian universities between the 1950s and the 70s, by the Soviets, with excellent results, especially in ideological recruitment through advertising. (New York Post – By Miranda Devine, December 13, 2020)
Amid this controversy, other episodes have contributed to keep it fierce. The most recent was the leak that a database containing records of members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), by the application of encrypted messages Telegram in 2016 and released in December 2020 to an international group of lawmakers called the Interparliamentary Alliance in China (AIC) exposing a massive infiltration into Chinese branches of US companies like Pfizer, Boeing and Qualcomm.
In addition, cyber attacks and invasions of corporate systems in the United States multiplied in the 2019-2020 biennium, according to these authorities, including leaks on matters considered to be national security, linked to armed forces technologies.
From what has been reported in the American media, the USA has been suffering constant attacks from China, through actions of traditional espionage and cyber espionage, in search of technological secrets, in a real backstage war.
To what extent all the facts that have been explored are true and to what extent they happen, we will not know and the evidence in this context is not very robust. The only certainty is that both countries have great expertise in espionage and with similar tools.
However, the hypothesis of a government dissimulation campaign to divert international attention from the heavy blow suffered by the world's first economy, with the Covid-19 pandemic, in addition to the 365,000 deaths already recorded, has not been ruled out.
Blaming China for the intentional dissemination of the virus may be part of the same strategy as in the end, it remains only in the psychological field, given the commercial interests involved.
