When a Fishing Ship is a Chinese Spy Ship

Posted on June 11, 2018June 11, 2018 by Denise Simon

The Chinese are relentless in all parts of the world.

It may not have looked like much of a match — or a showdown for that matter — but when Australia’s largest warship HMAS Adelaide arrived at the Fijian port of Suva on Saturday, it had an interesting neighbour.

Key points:

Chinese fishing boat believed to be carrying wide range of surveillance equipment

Fiji tipped off Australian Navy about Chinese spy ship expected to dock next to HMAS Adelaide

China has a strong commercial and military presence in the South Pacific

A Chinese ship fitted with communications equipment docked alongside the new Canberra-class landing helicopter dock.

The Royal Australian Navy suspects the Chinese vessel is a spy ship, which deliberately arrived at the same time to carry out surveillance on the Australians.

HMAS Adelaide and other Australian warships visiting Fiji will “take the appropriate security precautions”, but the surveillance craft is “just another ship”, Captain Jim Hutton, Commander of the Navy’s Joint Task Group 661, said.

Deputy Chief of Navy Rear Admiral Mark Hammond also played down concerns about the presence of the Chinese vessel.

“That’s a space surveillance ship, it’s a scientific ship,” he told reporters on board HMAS Adelaide.

ABC News understands the primary purpose of the Chinese ship is to track satellite launches from out on the ocean, but it does have the capability to also collect intelligence on other naval vessels.

Australia’s High Commissioner to Fiji John Feakes also revealed the skipper of the Chinese vessel had even been invited to an on-board reception, although it is not clear whether the offer was accepted.

Australia’s Navy, like every navy around the world, is well-versed in these sorts of nautical games.

“If you’re in the Navy you presume that anytime that a fishing vessel or even merchant fleets of nations like China are around that they may have a dual purpose,” ANU academic and retired Australian Naval Commodore Richard Menhinick said.

“You just presume that they may well be tasked by government for other activities.”

China’s looking for South Pacific foothold

Chinese presence — both commercial and military — is common in the South Pacific.

Beijing sees economic opportunity in the region and economic imperatives commonly herald other strategic interests.

Photo: The HMAS Adelaide is expected to be carefully scrutinised by its temporary neighbour. (File Photo: CPL Kyle Genner)

Agriculture and aquaculture projects in Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga and other Pacific nations have been given significant help by the Chinese over the years, as have roads, ports and other infrastructure.

Media player: “Space” to play, “M” to mute, “left” and “right” to seek.

Audio: Chinese spy ship tipped to dock next to HMAS Adelaide in Suva (AM)

When you have more than 1.3 billion people back home to feed, finding secure food supplies are critical.

As China grows, Mr Menhinick said it was not surprising that the nation’s presence in the Pacific was also increasing.

“China’s a rising power… economic power’s always led and the military’s followed, and the Chinese economic interest in the south-west Pacific has increased substantially over the last fifteen year,” he said.

But Australia and its strategic partners are anxious China does not use its presence to jeopardise regional structures — political, economic and diplomatic.

Now a visiting US General has given the strongest public indication yet that his nation would like Australia to join in naval and air patrols to challenge Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea.

Asked whether joint American-Australian patrols would be welcomed by America, the commander of US Marines in the Pacific, Lieutenant General David Berger gave an enthusiastic response.

“Obviously that’s Australia’s decision, would we welcome that? Absolutely yes,” Lt Gen Berger said.

Meanwhile, all eyes are on Singapore….but in advance of the talks between the United States and North Korea in Singapore, there was a LOT of nefarious activity.

photo

Independent: Hackers from China and Russia are targeting South Korea with cyber espionage attacks ahead of the summit between the US and North Korea, a leading security firm has claimed.

The foreign ministry and financial institutions were identified as potential targets by, US cyber security firm FireEye.

The company’s analysts noted the timing of the attacks and said they expected the intensity of the operations to increase in the build up to the historic meeting between US President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un.

“South Korea has frequently been the target of cyber espionage. Though the biggest threat is North Korea actors. [FireEye] believes that China- and Russia- [based hackers] also target South Korea,” Ben Read, a cyber espionage analyst at the firm, told The Independent.

“With the heightened attention to inter-Korean relations in the lead up to a potential Trump–Kim meeting, we expect this targeting to continue at an increased pace.”

Scheduled to take place on 12 June in Singapore the leader are expected to discuss the denuclearisation of North Korea.

It will be the first meeting between a sitting US president and leader of North Korea.

Some experts have suggested that a formal end to the Korean War – more than six decades after the 1950-1953 conflict – could be declared.

Although an armistice was signed, no peace treaty has ever been signed to formally end the war.

The two hacking groups identified by the FireEye researchers were TempTick and Turla, both of which are suspected of being state-sponsored operations.

TempTick has previously been involved in attacks on Chinese dissident organisations, as well as Japanese public and private sector institutions. It has been active since 2009.

The earliest known attacks linked to the group known as Turla are from 2006.

FireEye researchers noted: “They consistently target governments worldwide in search of information that can inform Russian government decision making.”

Is a Chinese Hack on our Naval Weapons an Act of War?

Posted on June 8, 2018June 8, 2018 by Denise Simon

It is long been a question of the point that a foreign hack for espionage and theft is an act of war with emphasis on our naval weapons programs or those of the Army or Air Force.

Cyber warfare is an issue few care about or have control over because data resides outside of our individual control but that is NOT the case when it comes to government. They are accountable for safeguarding networks and data.

Washington – After a hiatus of several years, Chinese state hackers are once again penetrating networks at a range of U.S. corporations in a campaign to steal secrets and leapfrog ahead in a race for global technology supremacy, cyber researchers say.

Companies in fields such as biomedicine, robotics, cloud computing and artificial intelligence have all been hit by cyber intrusions originating in China, the researchers say.

“It’s definitely accelerating. The trend is up,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, cofounder and chief technology officer at CrowdStrike, a threat intelligence firm based in Sunnyvale, Calif.,

Chinese state hacking teams linked to the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security are becoming visible on U.S. networks again, although they are using new methods to remain undetected, researchers said.

“In the last few months, we’ve definitely seen … a reemergence of groups that had appeared to have gone dormant for a while,” said Cristiana Brafman Kittner, principal analyst at FireEye, a cybersecurity firm that has tracked China hacking extensively.

The activity comes after a sharp drop in Chinese hacking that began in September 2015, when former President Barack Obama and Chinese leader Xi Jinping reached an agreement to end the hacking theft of commercial secrets. The agreement quelled U.S. anger over its charge that China is the “world’s most active and persistent perpetrator of economic espionage.”

U.S. prosecutors in 2014 indicted five PLA officers for economic espionage for hacking into firms like Westinghouse, U.S. Steel and Alcoa. The 56-page indictment said the five men worked for Unit 61398 of the PLA’s Third Department in Shanghai. The highly detailed complaint entered into details that U.S. officials later said were meant to “name and shame” China for commercial hacking.

Why China’s hackers may be getting back into the game is not readily clear. Renewed trade tensions may be a reason. President Donald Trump has threatened to impose $50 billion of tariffs on China-made products to cut the U.S. trade deficit of $375 billion with China.

Another factor may be the conclusion of a massive reorganization of China’s military, which began in late 2015 and under which various signals intelligence and cyber hacking units “were dissolved and absorbed into this one mega organization, called the Strategic Support Force,” said Priscilla Moriuchi, an expert on East Asia at Recorded Future, a cyber-threat intelligence firm based in Somerville, Mass.

China’s Xi has laid out ambitious goal of catching up with the United States and Europe in 10 key sectors, including aerospace, semiconductors and robotics, under its “Made in China 2025” program.

Moriuchi, who spent 12 years in the U.S. intelligence community, eventually leading the National Security Agency’s East Asia and Pacific cyber threats office, said China’s hackers are broadening tactics, burrowing into telecommunications networks even as they steal secrets to help party leaders achieve “Made in China 2025” goals.

“The sectors that they are going after are things like cloud computing, (Internet of Things), artificial intelligence, biomedicines, civilian space, alternative energy, robotics, rail, agricultural machinery, high-end medical devices,” Moriuchi said.

“There are companies in all of these sectors that have experienced intrusions over the past year from actors who are believed to be China state-sponsored,” she said.

Since early in the past decade, U.S. officials have alleged that Chinese state hackers were tasked with obtaining commercial secrets from Western corporations to help Chinese firms, many of them state-owned, overtake competitors to the global forefront in technology.

In a renewed warning alert for China, a March 22 report from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative on China’s trade actions said, “Beijing’s cyber espionage against U.S. companies persists and continues to evolve.

So as you read about the stolen data from the Navy by China consider this: Should the NSA get inside the Chinese networks now and infect and or re-steal our intelligence?

Unmanned underwater vehicles take advantage of advanced ... photo

(Note: according to the Washington Post item below, the contractor is not named, however ‘Inside Defense’ in September of 2016 published an item that GD Electric Boat was awarded the $105.5 million contract modification moving it into the second phase.)

electric boat « Breaking Defense - Defense industry news ... photo

WaPo: Chinese government hackers have compromised the computers of a Navy contractor, stealing massive amounts of highly sensitive data related to undersea warfare — including secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile for use on U.S. submarines by 2020, according to American officials.

The breaches occurred in January and February, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. The hackers targeted a contractor who works for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, a military organization headquartered in Newport, R.I., that conducts research and development for submarines and underwater weaponry.

The officials did not identify the contractor.

Taken were 614 gigabytes of material relating to a closely held project known as Sea Dragon, as well as signals and sensor data, submarine radio room information relating to cryptographic systems, and the Navy submarine development unit’s electronic warfare library.

The Washington Post agreed to withhold certain details about the compromised missile project at the request of the Navy, which argued that their release could harm national security.

The data stolen was of a highly sensitive nature despite being housed on the contractor’s unclassified network. The officials said the material, when aggregated, could be considered classified, a fact that raises concerns about the Navy’s ability to oversee contractors tasked with developing cutting-edge weapons.

The breach is part of China’s long-running effort to blunt the U.S. advantage in military technology and become the preeminent power in east Asia. The news comes as the Trump administration is seeking to secure Beijing’s support in persuading North Korea to give up nuclear weapons, even as tensions persist between the United States and China over trade and defense matters.

The Navy is leading the investigation into the breach with the assistance of the FBI, officials said. The FBI declined to comment.

On Friday, the Pentagon inspector general’s office said that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had asked it to review contractor cybersecurity issues arising from The Post’s story.
Navy spokesman Cmdr. Bill Speaks said, “There are measures in place that require companies to notify the government when a ‘cyber incident’ has occurred that has actual or potential adverse effects on their networks that contain controlled unclassified information.”

Speaks said “it would be inappropriate to discuss further details at this time.”

Altogether, details on hundreds of mechanical and software systems were compromised — a significant breach in a critical area of warfare that China has identified as a priority, both for building its own capabilities and challenging those of the United States.

“It’s very disturbing,” said former Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.,) who is a member of the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission. “But it’s a of a piece with what the Chinese have been doing. They are completely focused on getting advanced weapons technology through all kinds of means. That includes stealing secrets from our defense contractors.” Talent had no independent knowledge of the breach.
Undersea priority

The Sea Dragon project is an initiative of a special Pentagon office stood up in 2012 to adapt existing U.S. military technologies to new applications. The Defense Department, citing classification levels, has released little information about Sea Dragon other than to say that it will introduce a “disruptive offensive capability” by “integrating an existing weapon system with an existing Navy platform.” The Pentagon has requested or used more than $300 million for the project since late 2015 and has said it plans to start underwater testing by September.

Military experts fear that China has developed capabilities that could complicate the Navy’s ability to defend U.S. allies in Asia in the event of a conflict with China.

The Chinese are investing in a range of platforms, including quieter submarines armed with increasingly sophisticated weapons and new sensors, Adm. Philip S. Davidson said during his April nomination hearing to lead U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. And what they cannot develop on their own, they steal — often through cyberspace, he said.

“One of the main concerns that we have,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “is cyber and penetration of the dot-com networks, exploiting technology from our defense contractors, in some instances.”

In February, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats testified that most of the detected Chinese cyber-operations against U.S. industry focus on defense contractors or tech firms supporting government networks.

In recent years, the United States has been scrambling to develop new weapons or systems that can counter a Chinese naval buildup that has targeted perceived weaknesses in the U.S. fleet. Key to the American advantage in any faceoff with China on the high seas in Asia will be its submarine fleet.

“U.S. naval forces are going to have a really hard time operating in that area, except for submarines, because the Chinese don’t have a lot of anti-submarine warfare capability,” said Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “The idea is that we are going to rely heavily on submarines in the early effort of any conflict with the Chinese.”

China has made closing the gap in undersea warfare one of its three top military priorities, and although the United States still leads the field, China is making a concerted effort to diminish U.S. superiority.

“So anything that degrades our comparative advantage in undersea warfare is of extreme significance if we ever had to execute our war plans for dealing with China,” said James Stavridis, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a retired admiral who served as supreme allied commander at NATO.

The U.S. military let its anti-ship weaponry languish after the Cold War ended because with the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Navy no longer faced a peer competitor on the seas. But the rapid modernization and buildup of the Chinese navy in recent years, as well as Russia’s resurgent forces at sea, have prompted the Pentagon to renew heavy investment in technologies to sink enemy warships.

The introduction of a supersonic anti-ship missile on U.S. Navy submarines would make it more difficult for Chinese warships to maneuver. It would also augment a suite of other anti-ship weapons that the U.S. military has been developing in recent years.
Ongoing breaches

For years, Chinese government hackers have siphoned information on the U.S. military, underscoring the challenge the Pentagon faces in safeguarding details of its technological advances. Over the years, the Chinese have snatched designs for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter; the advanced Patriot PAC-3 missile system; the Army system for shooting down ballistic missiles known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense; and the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship, a small surface vessel designed for near-shore operations, according to previous reports prepared for the Pentagon.

In some cases, suspected Chinese breaches appear to have resulted in copycat technologies, such as the drones China has produced that mimic U.S. unmanned aircraft.

[Chinese cyberspies stole a long list of U.S. weapons designs]

Speaks, the Navy spokesman, said: “We treat the broader issue of cyber intrusion against our contractors very seriously. If such an intrusion were to occur, the appropriate parties would be looking at the specific incident, taking measures to protect current information, and mitigating the impacts that might result from any information that might have been compromised.”

The Pentagon’s Damage Assessment Management Office has conducted an assessment of the damage, according to the U.S. officials. The Office of the Secretary of Defense declined to comment.

Theft of an electronic warfare library, Stavridis said, could give the Chinese “a reasonable idea of what level of knowledge we have about their specific [radar] platforms, electronically and potentially acoustically, and that deeply reduces our level of comfort if we were in a close undersea combat situation with China.”

Signals and sensor data is also valuable in that it presents China with the opportunity to “know when we would know at what distance we would be able to detect their submarines” — again a key factor in undersea battles.

Investigators say the hack was carried out by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, a civilian spy agency responsible for counterintelligence, foreign intelligence and domestic political security. The hackers operated out of an MSS division in the province of Guangdong, which houses a major foreign hacking department.

Although the Chinese People’s Liberation Army is far better-known than the MSS when it comes to hacking, the latter’s personnel are more skilled and much better at hiding their tracks, said Peter Mattis, a former analyst in the CIA counterintelligence center. The MSS, he said, hack for all forms of intelligence: foreign, military and commercial.

In September 2015, in a bid to avert economic sanctions, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to President Barack Obama that China would refrain from conducting commercial cyberespionage against the United States. Following the pact, China appeared to have curtailed much, although not all, of its hacking activity against U.S. firms, including by the People’s Liberation Army.

Both China and the United States consider spying on military technology to fall outside the pact. “The distinction we’ve always made is there’s a difference between conducting espionage in order to protect national security and conduct military operations, and the theft of intellectual property for the benefit of companies inside your country,” said Michael Daniel, the White House cybersecurity coordinator under Obama.

China and Soros Take the Fun out of the Triple Crown?

Posted on June 7, 2018June 7, 2018 by Denise Simon

Seems nothing is sacred from globalism including horse-racing, especially when one investor is a rogue nation and the other is a rogue person. Sigh…

DERBY HOPEFUL JUSTIFY TAKES SANTA ANITA ALLOWANCE BY 6 ½ ... photo

So, meet the China Horse Club founded by Teo Ah Khing. Born in Malaysia, he is apparently an acclaimed architect, entrepreneur and horse breeder. He has been a senior advisor to heads of state including the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mohamed, Musharrafh, President of Pakistan and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoun of United Arab Emirates.

Justify: Meet the Horse, Jockey, Owners & Trainer | Heavy ... photo

Then we have George Soros. Soros controls operations in SF Bloodstock and SF Racing Group. Okay, read on….and decided whether or not to bet of Justify to win the Triple Crown.

Kentucky: If the strapping chestnut colt Justify wins the Belmont Stakes on Saturday to become just the 13th horse in history to claim horse racing’s Triple Crown, two of the three groups that have an ownership stake in the horse’s breeding rights will be front and center during the celebration.

WinStar Farm, one of North America’s leading Thoroughbred racing and breeding operations, owns 60 percent of Justify’s breeding rights. China Horse Club owns 25 percent. A third group, a secretive entity that holds the remaining 15 percent, will remain out of the spotlight because it vigorously avoids any public attention. It is a company controlled by top employees of billionaire investor George Soros.

Soros’ connection to Justify, which was not previously reported, has garnered little notice in the sport despite the horse’s rousing success in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes because his group tries to operate almost invisibly. Several officials, who sit atop one of the biggest owners in stallion equity in the world, declined to comment about Soros’ involvement in horse racing through his fund.

Soros’ investment firm, Soros Fund Management, is behind SF Bloodstock and SF Racing Group, an international breeding and racing operation started in 2008. Executives from the investment firm oversee the breeding and horse ownership businesses. Gavin Murphy, an Australian based in New York who has served as the Soros Fund’s longtime tax counsel, is the manager of SF Bloodstock and SF Racing Group. Christopher Naunton, chief financial officer for the Soros Fund’s family office, is the president of SF Bloodstock and SF Racing Group, corporate filings show. Tom Ryan, an Irishman based in Lexington is the team’s bloodstock agent.

George Soros at his Open Society Foundations office in New York, May 27, 2014. If the strapping chestnut colt Justify wins the Belmont Stakes on June 9, 2018, to become just the 13th horse in history to claim horse racing’s Triple Crown, three groups have an ownership stake in the horse’s breeding rights, and one of them is a company controlled by top employees of Soros.

Joshua Bright The New York Times

SF, which is also a part-owner of Newgate Farm in Australia, has breeding stock in the United States, Australia, England, Ireland and France. It could not be determined how much money Soros’ firm has committed to the horse racing business.

SF Bloodstock, which according to court filings is owned by SF Agricultural Holdings LLC, employs a for-profit model and focuses on the breeding side of the industry, purchasing stallions, or shares in them, and broodmares while selling yearlings at auction. In 2015, it entered into a three-year partnership with WinStar Farm and China Horse Club that allowed them to spend big while spreading risk at yearling and 2-year-old sales. That is how the group partly acquired Justify and the third-place Kentucky Derby finisher Audible, but it quickly sold its racing rights in those horses to Head of Plains Partners and Starlight Racing.

“To me, and the couple guys that I do this with, it’s more fun to be in the winner’s circle when Justify wins the Derby holding the trophy,” said Sol Kumin, a hedge fund executive who runs Head of Plains. “So you kind of have to pick. If this became my full-time job, which it won’t, I would have a different program, focusing more on the stallion business and breeding. Now we still want to make money, and so far we’ve done well, but it’s hard.”

Just days after Justify’s Preakness victory, chatter began to surface about a $60 million deal with the rival farm Coolmore for his breeding rights. The deal is believed to include a bonus of about $25 million if he were to win the Triple Crown and would allow the partners to retain some shares and lifetime breeding rights in the horse. It was agreed to before the Preakness, people familiar with the deal said.

But Elliott Walden, Winstar’s president and chief executive, said a deal had not yet been completed. The partners might wait until September, when it will have owned Justify for two years, to complete a deal so they become eligible for the lower tax rates associated with capital gains.

Henry Field, head of SF’s Newgate Farm, and Eden Harrington, vice president of China Horse Club, are graduates of the Darley Flying Start program, a management and leadership training program for the industry, and have each worked for Coolmore.

American Pharoah, who in 2015 became the first horse in 37 years to sweep the Triple Crown, stands at Coolmore’s farm in Versailles, Kentucky, in the spring. He then shuttles to its Australian farm for the fall breeding season. In the past couple years in the United States, he was commanding about $200,000 per live foal that stands and nurses. Producing an average of 150 live foals from the breeding season in Kentucky, American Pharoah is racking up more than $35 million in stallion fees there. He commands about $50,000 per live foal in Australia.

WinStar, meanwhile, stands American Pharoah’s sire, Pioneerof the Nile, for $110,000 and will likely add Audible, the Florida Derby winner, to the mix.

Bradley Weisbord, who runs BSW Bloodstock, which manages Kumin’s stable along with several others, said that while a deal had not been completed, from an industry perspective, it made sense.

“Kenny Troutt has always run his WinStar Farm as a business,” he said of the owner of WinStar who made his fortune from a long-distance phone company that used a multilevel marketing approach. “On the flip side, Coolmore has always wanted the best.”

He continued: “Sure, it’s probably a tough decision for him and he’s probably going through it thinking, ‘Do I sell or do I keep him,’ but WinStar, SF, China Horse Club, they are traders, and there is a number where it becomes the perfect bloodstock deal, and that is when the buyers and the sellers both walk away with a smile on their face.”

Soros is one of the world’s most successful investors, who might be best-known for his bet in 1992 against the fortunes of the British pound. Soros is said to have made more than $1 billion by shorting the pound — a move that cemented his reputation as one of the shrewdest currency traders. Read the rest of the item here.

AI: Machine Detection of Missile/Nuclear Launches, no Google

Posted on June 5, 2018June 5, 2018 by Denise Simon

Primer: The U.S. holds an enviable lead in pushing artificial-intelligence technology out of labs and into real-world applications. Thank companies like Alphabet (GOOGL), Facebook (FB) and Apple (AAPL) for that.

But China’s government and technology elites aim to overtake the U.S. in AI by 2030 — or so they proclaimed in July at a Beijing political gathering.

Good luck with that.

Yes, China has many strengths as it sets out for worldwide dominance in AI technology. Its internet giants Baidu (BIDU), Alibaba Group Holdings (BABA) and Tencent Holdings (TCEHY) are also pouring money into AI research and hiring top scientists.

China’s huge population will generate massive raw data to train AI systems in how to make predictions. So there’s good reason to think China will make breakthroughs in developing computer algorithms — the software programs that aim to replicate the human ability to learn, reason and make decisions.

China also has a major weakness: a semiconductor industry that still lags the U.S. in making high-end electronic processors. Chinese companies buy AI chips mainly from Nvidia (NVDA), based in Santa Clara, Calif. Intel (INTC), the dominant supplier of brainy chips for personal computers, is pushing fast into AI. More here.

Google Employees Quit Over Controversial Pentagon Contract Some employees even quit.

Due to Google employees signing a petition for the Pentagon’s Project Maven, the AI project which is a drone contract. Project Maven is known as Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team. Google at the time of the contract beat out other bidders including Microsoft, Amazon and IBM. More here on Google.

Google will abandon Project Maven, your project of ... photo

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. military is increasing spending on a secret research effort to use artificial intelligence to help anticipate the launch of a nuclear-capable missile, as well as track and target mobile launchers in North Korea and elsewhere.

The effort has gone largely unreported, and the few publicly available details about it are buried under a layer of near impenetrable jargon in the latest Pentagon budget. But U.S. officials familiar with the research told Reuters there are multiple classified programs now under way to explore how to develop AI-driven systems to better protect the United States against a potential nuclear missile strike.

If the research is successful, such computer systems would be able to think for themselves, scouring huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, with a speed and accuracy beyond the capability of humans, to look for signs of preparations for a missile launch, according to more than half a dozen sources. The sources included U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research is classified.

Forewarned, the U.S. government would be able to pursue diplomatic options or, in the case of an imminent attack, the military would have more time to try to destroy the missiles before they were launched, or try to intercept them.

“We should be doing everything in our power to find that missile before they launch it and make it increasingly harder to get it off (the ground),” one of the officials said.

The Trump administration has proposed more than tripling funding in next year’s budget to $83 million for just one of the AI-driven missile programs, according to several U.S. officials and budget documents. The boost in funding has not been previously reported.

While the amount is still relatively small, it is one indicator of the growing importance of the research on AI-powered anti-missile systems at a time when the United States faces a more militarily assertive Russia and a significant nuclear weapons threat from long-time foe North Korea.

**

“What AI and machine learning allows you to do is find the needle in the haystack,” said Bob Work, a champion of AI technology who was deputy defense secretary until last July, without referring to any individual projects.

One person familiar with the programs said it includes a pilot project focused on North Korea. Washington is increasingly concerned about Pyongyang’s development of mobile missiles that can be hidden in tunnels, forests and caves. The existence of a North Korea-focused project has not been previously reported.

While that project has been kept secret, the military has been clear about its interest in AI. The Pentagon, for example, has disclosed it is using AI to identify objects from video gathered in its drone program, as part of a publicly touted effort launched last year called “Project Maven.”

Still, some U.S. officials say AI spending overall on military programs remains woefully inadequate.

AI ARMS RACE

The Pentagon is in a race against China and Russia to infuse more AI into its war machine, to create more sophisticated autonomous systems that are able to learn by themselves to carry out specific tasks. The Pentagon research on using AI to identify potential missile threats and track mobile launchers is in its infancy and is just one part of that overall effort.

There are scant details on the AI missile research, but one U.S. official told Reuters that an early prototype of a system to track mobile missile launchers was already being tested within the U.S. military.

This project involves military and private researchers in the Washington D.C. area. It is pivoting off technological advances developed by commercial firms financed by In-Q-Tel, the intelligence community’s venture capital fund, officials said.

In order to carry out the research, the project is tapping into the intelligence community’s commercial cloud service, searching for patterns and anomalies in data, including from sophisticated radar that can see through storms and penetrate foliage.

Budget documents reviewed by Reuters noted plans to expand the focus of the mobile missile launcher program to “the remainder of the (Pentagon) 4+1 problem sets.” The Pentagon typically uses the 4+1 terminology to refer to China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and terrorist groups.

TURNING TURTLES INTO RIFLES

Both supporters and critics of using AI to hunt missiles agree that it carries major risks. It could accelerate decision-making in a nuclear crisis. It could increase the chances of computer-generated errors. It might also provoke an AI arms race with Russia and China that could upset the global nuclear balance.

U.S. Air Force General John Hyten, the top commander of U.S. nuclear forces, said once AI-driven systems become fully operational, the Pentagon will need to think about creating safeguards to ensure humans – not machines – control the pace of nuclear decision-making, the “escalation ladder” in Pentagon speak.

“(Artificial intelligence) could force you onto that ladder if you don’t put the safeguards in,” Hyten, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, said in an interview. “Once you’re on it, then everything starts moving.”

Experts at the Rand Corporation, a public policy research body, and elsewhere say there is a high probability that countries like China and Russia could try to trick an AI missile-hunting system, learning to hide their missiles from identification.

There is some evidence to suggest they could be successful.

An experiment by M.I.T. students showed how easy it was to dupe an advanced Google image classifier, in which a computer identifies objects. In that case, students fooled the system into concluding a plastic turtle was actually a rifle. here

Dr. Steven Walker, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a pioneer in AI that initially funded what became the Internet, said the Pentagon still needs humans to review AI systems’ conclusions.

“Because these systems can be fooled,” Walker said in an interview.

DARPA is working on a project to make AI-driven systems capable of better explaining themselves to human analysts, something the agency believes will be critical for high stakes national security programs.

‘WE CAN’T BE WRONG’

Among those working to improve the effectiveness of AI is William “Buzz” Roberts, director for automation, AI and augmentation at the National Geospatial Agency. Roberts works on the front lines of the U.S. government’s efforts to develop AI to help analyze satellite imagery, a crucial source of data for missile hunters.

Last year, NGA said it used AI to scan and analyze 12 million images. So far, Roberts said, NGA researchers have made progress in getting AI to help identify the presence or absence of a target of interest, although he declined to discuss individual programs.

In trying to assess potential national security threats, the NGA researchers work under a different kind of pressure from their counterparts in the private sector.

“We can’t be wrong … A lot of the commercial advancements in AI, machine learning, computer vision – If they’re half right, they’re good,” said Roberts.

Although some officials believe elements of the AI missile program could become viable in the early 2020s, others in the U.S. government and the U.S. Congress fear research efforts are too limited.

“The Russians and the Chinese are definitely pursuing these sorts of things,” Representative Mac Thornberry, the House Armed Services Committee’s chairman, told Reuters. “Probably with greater effort in some ways than we have.”

Yet Another American Caught Spying for China

Posted on June 4, 2018June 4, 2018 by Denise Simon

It is an epidemic, only no one will admit that. Mr. Hansen’s charges are found here.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A former officer with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency was arrested over the weekend for allegedly trying to spy on the United States for China, the Justice Department said on Monday.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation took Ron Rockwell Hansen, 58, into custody on Saturday while he was on his way to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to get a connecting flight to China.

The department said he has been accused of trying to transmit national defense information to China and with receiving “hundreds of thousands of dollars” while acting illegally as an agent for the Chinese government.

Reuters could not immediately learn who may be representing Hansen in the case.

Hansen is the latest person in a string of former U.S. intelligence officers to be swept up in criminal probes related to spying for the Chinese.

Earlier this year, former CIA case officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee was indicted for conspiring to gather or deliver national defense information to China.

Another former U.S. intelligence employee named Kevin Mallory is on trial in Virginia, also in connection with selling secrets to China.

In the new case announced Monday, prosecutors said that Hansen speaks fluent Mandarin-Chinese and Russian.

He served as a case officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency while on active military duty from 2000-2006, and later continued that line of work as a civilian employee and a contractor.

He also held a top secret clearance for years.

The government said that between 2013 and 2017, he traveled between the two countries attending conferences and provided the information he learned to China’s intelligence service.

He was paid via wire transfers, cash and credit cards. He also allegedly improperly sold export-controlled technology.

“His alleged actions are a betrayal of our nation’s security and the American people and are an affront to his former intelligence community colleagues,” said John Demers, the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

According to court records, the FBI started investigating his activities in 2014. He was unaware of the probe, and participated in nine voluntary meetings with federal agents in Salt Lake City. Utah.

Prosecutors say that during his meetings, he told the FBI that Chinese intelligence had tried to recruit him, offered to cooperate as a source and even provided thumb drives to the FBI that contained classified materials he was not authorized to have.

Hansen appeared before a magistrate judge in Seattle on Monday, and is charged in a 15-count complaint.

Mr Hansen, who lives in Syracuse, Utah, was charged with attempting to gather or deliver national defense information to aid a foreign government.

Other charges – there are 15 in total – include acting as an unregistered foreign agent for China, bulk cash smuggling, structuring monetary transactions and smuggling goods from the US.

photo, Mallory

*** Now about those phones and Kevin Mallory:

The phone the Chinese intelligence operatives gave Kevin Mallory was a specialized spy gadget. If it had worked like it was supposed to, he might be a free man today.

The former CIA officer, on trial in Alexandria federal court on espionage charges, freely told his old colleagues that he had been approached by those spies on social media in February of 2017. He said he had been invited on two trips to China and given a Samsung Galaxy phone with special encryption capabilities.

What he didn’t tell his U.S. intelligence contacts, and, according to prosecutors, what he thought they would never learn, was that he also traded classified documents to the Chinese agents in exchange for $25,000.

Mallory, a 61-year-old from Leesburg, Va., who also served in the Defense Intelligence Agency, State Department and U.S. Army, was arrested last spring. While prosecutors say he was selling secrets, he contends he was trying to expose the Chinese spies. Whatever jurors decide, the veteran intelligence operative’s trial is offering a glimpse into some of the inner workings of both Chinese espionage and American attempts to counter it.

It’s “very rare” for a foreign intelligence service’s device “to be revealed like that,” FBI agent Paul Lee testified on Thursday. The phone would have cost the Chinese government a lot of money to develop, he had told Mallory last year.

Mallory explained in meetings with the CIA and FBI, which were recorded and played for the jury, that the phone contained an app designed to facilitate steganography, or the hiding of information inside of an image. Documents were merged into a file that appeared as an image — in this case, the Chinese chose horses grazing in front of a mountain range.

To send the files through the secure version of the app, which was a customized version of the Chinese messaging service WeChat, both parties had to be online and type in a password. (The one built into the application, Mallory told the officials, was the word “password,” in English.)

Mallory told the FBI that the Chinese spies told him they had found a “special way” to make the app safer.

But their system was flawed. James Hamrock, an engineer who analyzed the phone for the FBI, said he believes the encrypted application crashed at one point, creating an unintentional log of Mallory’s communications with one of the Chinese spies.

If the app had not crashed, Hamrock testified, he likely would not have been able to see Mallory’s communications. Instead, as Mallory and FBI agents met in a hotel room in Ashburn, Va., last May to look at the phone, they saw conversations in which Mallory had discussed delivering “more documents,” including something related to a foreign intelligence service. (The name of that service was redacted from exhibits shown in court).

“I’m — I’m surprised it kept this much,” Mallory told the agents as they examined the phone.

But defense attorneys stressed that U.S. law enforcement would never have known about the phone — let alone have been able to examine it — had Mallory not brought it to them.

Mallory maintains that as soon as he realized the Chinese recruiters who had approached him on LinkedIn were spies, he decided to deliver them to American hands.

“Kevin Mallory has worn a white hat throughout his career, and he did not take it off for a relatively small amount of money,” public defender Geremy Kamens said in his opening statement. “If he was motivated by money, he would have kept his mouth shut.”

Instead, Mallory caught the attention of authorities because he repeatedly contacted a CIA employee from his church and a CIA contractor he worked with from 2010 to 2012 to say he believed he was in touch with Chinese intelligence.

In a text to the contractor, a covert operative who testified from behind a screen under the pseudonym John Doe, Mallory said the operatives “asked me a few questions that could have only come from our side of the house.”

Doe testified that he took that to mean that the Chinese had penetrated the CIA.

Doe said Mallory’s request to be put in touch with someone in the agency’s East Asia Division “seemed odd.”

Ralph Stevenson, a CIA resources officer, agreed. When Mallory contacted him in a similar manner, Stevenson said, he deleted the texts and responded with a terse email.

At the Montgomery Chinese Branch of the Mormon Church that weekend, Stevenson upbraided Mallory. Read more here.

*** One last item:

China’s influence in New Zealand is so extensive that it threatens the traditionally close intelligence contacts between New Zealand and its Western allies, according to a report written by the Canadian spy agency.

The report, entitled China and the Age of Strategic Rivalry, was authored by experts at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). It contains a summary of views expressed by participants at an academic outreach workshop that was organized in Canada by the CSIS. In a section focusing on Chinese “interference in democratic systems”, the report suggests that, despite its small size, New Zealand is “valuable to China […] as a soft underbelly through which to access Five Eyes intelligence”. In recent years, claims the report, Beijing has adopted “an aggressive strategy” that has sought to co-opt political and economic elites in New Zealand as a means of influencing political decision making in the country. As part of that process, China seeks to gain advantages in trade and business negotiations, suppress negative views of China, facilitate espionage and control the views of the Chinese expatriate community in New Zealand, according to the report. Ultimately, Beijing seeks to “extricate New Zealand from […] its traditional [military and intelligence] partners]” as a means of asserting its regional and —eventually— global influence, the report concludes.

In a separate but connected development, it emerged this week that China expert Peter Mattis told an American Congressional committee last month that New Zealand’s position in the Five Eyes alliance was tenuous due to China’s influence. Mattis, a former China analyst for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, was speaking before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group of experts that advise the US Congress. He told the Commission that the influence of the Chinese Communist Party in New Zealand is so deep that it raises questions about whether the Pacific Ocean country can continue to share intelligence with the other members of the Five Eyes alliance.

On Wednesday, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern emphatically dismissed questions about her country’s role in the Five Eyes alliance. She told reporters in Wellington that the issue of New Zealand’s Five Eyes membership had “never been raised” with her “or anyone else” by Five Eyes partners. Ardern added that her government received its information “from official channels, not opinions expressed at a workshop”.