China's Campaign To Shape What You Think And How You Behave

Hoover Institution Fellow, Markos Kounalakis, exposes how China is aggressively expanding its state-controlled media operations worldwide to spread propaganda and undermine Western democracies. This information offensive fills the void left by declining Western news bureaus in places like Africa and Latin America, using reporters that also serve as spies. To counter this effort, the West must expose Chinese disinformation, rebuild local journalism, and raise public awareness of foreign influence. Be sure to visit The Hoover Institution at https://www.hoover.org/ and PolicyEd at https://www.policyed.org/

China’s news organizations in the United States are really spy agencies

A decade ago, I first saw signs that Chinese news organizations were operating as global spy dens and diplomatic outposts. Last week, America decided not only to call them out for what they do, but to punish them further for this activity within the United States. 

It’s about time.

It’s also time to counter China and help American journalism survive.

My 2018 book “Spin Wars & Spy Games: Global Media and Intelligence Gathering” detailed how China’s global news organizations are used to advance its national interests. China — and also Russia — uses its foreign news bureaus as fronts for editors and journalists to work as both witting and unwitting spies. My research over the years shows that these news bureaus’ primary responsibility is to report to their countries’ political leadership in Beijing. READ MORE

Cowering for profits: US firms in China sell out America by bending to Beijing

American technology companies operating in China had a secret weakness, one that is not so concealed anymore. Not after an apparently bad miscalculation in which Intel gave the Chinese government an incredible security advantage that the tech giant withheld from the U.S. government. Oops.

What happened? It appears Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel recently tipped off the Chinese government about flawed computer chips’ security vulnerabilities well before letting American government and industry officials know. Whether Intel did this consciously or accidentally, the move is deeply concerning because it could have handed China a digital key to unlocking secrets and proprietary data around the world. National security may have been compromised and House Energy and Commerce Chairman Greg Walden has already called the episode "troublesome."

Even worse, Intel is not alone.  READ MORE

Star Wars and drone spies threaten America’s defenses

Star Wars’ newest episode “The Last Jedi” is hitting screens nationwide this week, but less entertaining is this season’s latest space weaponry and commercial drone deployments that increasingly threaten America’s national security.

Kim Jong Un may be planning to use his nuclear and missile technology not to land an explosion on U.S. soil, but to blast it in space. Such an explosion would trigger a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) that could cripple satellites and blind any nation that relies on orbiting communications for everything from airline navigation to financial transactions.

A HEMP strike would bring about a “doomsday scenario” and an act of war that kills no one directly but plunges everyone into the first stages of a technological dark age. An October 2017 congressional hearing on this threat brought testimony that a North Korean HEMP attack could “shut down the U.S. electric power grid for an indefinite period, leading to the death within a year of 90 percent of all Americans.”  READ MORE