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No idea if eternal spy and counterspy cat and mouse game counts as part of culture wars, but here are some recent news from this area.
1/Teixeira leaks were discussed here when they happened, here is the resolution of the case.
We would all agree that 16 years of maximum security prison is price worth paying to impress your gamer buddies in Thug Shaker Central Discord.
2/In related news, important US Foreign Service officer, former ambassador to Bolivia was uncovered to be lifelong spy for ... Cuba.
Another source.
Do not laugh, Cuban DI counts among the better ones in the spook world, infiltrating Washington DC previously while running circles aroud US agents in Cuba. US is rather lucky that Cuba is shithole in every other measure.
3/Another, more pedestrian case of desperate American greed and disgraceful Chicom penny pinching. Surely US top secrets are worth more that $42,000? What insult.
Conclusion: US security is as big shitshow as it had always been. No loyalty (if you keep back stabbing everyone who trusts you, what could you expect), no grand idea inspiring self sacrificing volunteers and no rewards for service either.
Good that any superpower or wannabe superpower competitors are even worse. Notoriously insular Chinese who understand nothing about outside world and have to rely on cash and Chinese ethnic ties, and the less said about Russian Petrov & Boshirov clown show, the better.
Unlike the great and tragic struggle of the First Cold War, the second one is going to be slapstick comedy. Freedom and Democracy (TM) vs. Bright Communist Future(TM) are over.
LGBTQ+BLM vs Xi Jinping Thought is the game now. Enjoy the show.
edit: links now work
During my recent two months in China I infrequently watched the news and remember seeing about three reports of uncovered spies working in the government. At the time my sentiment was “that seems like too many spies, probably this is political maneuvering.”
In light of this post, maybe not. Or maybe a bit of both.
Also curious that uncovered spies make the nightly news in China, but not here in America.
The true extent of Chinese espionage in the US is only going to become apparent following the war.
If China doesn't have an extensive illegals program where it sent fake dissidents in the US to raise US born Chinese who could then get top secret clearances and get into the right places I'm a Mormon.
Obviously they do have it, and obviously US is not up to task to rooting this particular kind of spy out. Obviously even if they caught one it'd be kept quiet because no one wants a paranoid spy mania aimed at all the POC democrat voters and competent MIC personnel who thankfully aren't toxic white males.
I'd ask you to bring extraordinary evidence for some pretty extraordinary claims, but I suppose you've made it clear why you don't think such evidence exists.
I'll settle for reminding you that what's "obvious" to you may not be obvious to everyone else, and that you're supposed to consider alternate explanations before commencing the boos.
Their ASBM development started in earnest in late 1980s, a decade before they even got into the business of fooling Americans with promises of liberalisation. Which they kept up for cca 15 years. Even had a bunch a thoroughly fake 'reformist' forum one of whose top dogs was an communist functionary with a reputation as an ideological hatchetman (e.g. you need to justify something using ML, he was your guy).
It's clear they plan for decades ahead.
It's not a boo. I find Chinese spy initiatives laudable, showing they're serious about multipolarity, not boo-worthy. There's nothing dumber than hegemony.
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I don’t think they’d even have to do anything that drastic. When my brother graduated from engineering school at least 3/4 of the engineering majors were foreign students, and a substantial number of them were Chinese. We don’t graduate native born Americans in engineering schools to keep Chinese born engineers out of high tech projects. In fact, in that graduation ceremony, the school proudly talked about an Iranian student who was working on American nuclear submarines.
Our shitty education system means that we cannot help but give away our tech secrets. Our kids can’t do math or physics well enough to be engineers.
I was looking at it recently and the top secret clearances for the really sensitive tech are a big problem if you have a spouse with family in China, etc. If you have family in China, you can forget about it.
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Our education system isn't shitty, though. We use H1Bs because of a diversity fetish and an economy that's overclocked at the top end, not because we can't produce native engineers.
No we don't. Indians and Chinese are not central beneficiaries of diversity and are often thrown under the bus by diversity advocates.
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How would you know? The best thing the US could do with such a spy is hire them into a top secret program designed specifically to feed bullshit to the Chinese.
a) something like that has never happened. Disinfo was usually fed through agents who were turned. You can pass disinfo onto an unwitting agent, but no way you could have an entire program.
b) US spooks just aren't very good at the moment, so, unlikely.
For B, compared to whom?
Feels like saying “the US military isn’t very good at the moment” or “the US economy isn’t very good at the moment.”
It doesn't matter whether there's someone better out there or not.
If you're bad you can't play a game where you keep stringing along some reasonably competent guy with an entirely fake program.
I’m questioning by what metrics or standards, absolute or relative, you label “US spooks” as “not very good at the moment.”
These things are hard to judge for insiders, let alone outsiders, and typically becomes evident only with the passage of time and significant declassification.
The points you make in A are sufficient to explain why it would almost never make sense for anyone to ever attempt it anyway.
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I don’t think most second-generation Chinese-Americans have any particular fondness for the CCP or any ideological reason to root for Chinese victory in Taiwan over the US and allies. They have a better life than their peers in China in practically every respect, life in China for professionals is just a worse version of life in the US. The only reason they’d do it is for money, and again, that works just as well on American intelligence personnel of other races. The discovered examples are pretty low level and seem mostly financially motivated.
Consider that the US and UK often seem to have pretty good intelligence inside China and Russia without needing to seed settler populations there.
I believe You're typical minding.
I'm not talking about 'professionals' I'm talking about people raised as illegal agents by carefully chosen ideologically committed parents. If you want to know what kind of calibre of person was being sent on such a mission, go look up Jack Barsky.
Secondly, you might not be aware of it, but US is really not looking too hot right now, and it's going to get even worse. When your choices are, defy your parents, be a part of the losing side of WW3 and return to a country that's going to unfairly blame you for losing, or be a hero and have a chance of being part of the winning side..
The US looks fine to me. Obviously not perfect, but then China is hardly building utopia either. I couldn't say who would win in a war.
As for Jack Barsky, it's not clear what, if anything, his case proves. This very ideologically committed spy did not manage a decade before he became a bigamist, and just ten years in America, he refused his order to return to the USSR. So I don't expect that second generation Chinese born and raised in the US will possess any loyalty to China. The spy's contradiction is that he must maintain total loyalty to a faraway entity while not also cultivating any loyalty to the people he actually lives with.
And as well, it's not obvious that it's that easy to just walk into the corridors of power. Barsky ended up as a programmer, not in the State Department.
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Do you honestly think there's going to be a huge war between China and the US in the near future?
There's a solid (~50%) chance of a war in the next ten years.
Especially likely if Trump wins and US recovers to a degree due to a rollback of DEI nonsense and AI.
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My understanding is that the CCP is more than happy to threaten the families of ethnic Chinese living abroad. The "C" part of MICE. I imagine the usefulness of that coercion gets less and less potent as the generations toll on and they get more distant from any family which is still within the territorial domain of the CCP, but second-generation is sort of in that "sweet spot", where they could conceivably qualify for high-level US clearances, but could also have significant ties to extended family back in China. I don't know how US counterintel is dealing with this problem. Presumably, they could choose to simply deny clearances to folks who have too much family that they are too close with back in China. Alternatively, they could still grant those clearances, yet try to flag those relationships as being of sufficient concern for some sort of extra monitoring. Or, of course, they could just be doing nothing besides trying really hard to impress upon the person applying for the clearance, "You know that if you do this, there's a decent chance that you'll be putting your family in danger. And you must must must must immediately report it if you receive any threats like this, no matter how scary it is or how much you care for them. Or else."
That sums it up yeah. It’s not a secret. You can google getting a clearance with foreign associations and learn the basics.
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Or just give every second-gen Chinamen who's granted a security clearance up to x# of greencards to get cousins and grandparents out of the CCP's reach. China's population pyramid being what it is we're not talking about giant extended clans here.
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