The New York Times has a new article looking at the heightened competition between CIA and Chinese intelligence, the Ministry of State Security (MSS). The MSS has upped its game — this year announcing the capture of two “agents,” Chinese citizens, allegedly recruited by CIA. And let’s not forget the MSS’s man in Brussels.
Even more alarming is the case of Glenn Duffie Shriver, whom the MSS got ahold of while he was studying in China, and recruited him to be a mole. MSS “got him to apply to the C.I.A. and State Department.” Luckily, he was caught and sent to prison.
The NYT article talks about the battle to learn the technical secrets and capacities of the other. The NYT quotes David Cohen, CIA deputy director saying there was a specific interest in “the capability of semiconductors or A.I. algorithms or biotech equipment.” To further this effort, CIA has created “a China mission center and a technology intelligence center.”
The CIA under William Burns has made gathering intelligence on China an agency-wide mission, which is sensible given China’s global footprint and ambitions. But, there is a struggle to keep up with “China’s technology prowess”, according to Peter Mattis, as quoted by NYT.
Unlike the CIA, which is a foreign intelligence service, the MSS also has authority in China. The article notes the MSS’s interest in increasing surveillance capacities using technology — feeding the data into an AI — to be able to identify every person and every movement in areas of Beijing where foreign spies were likely to be operating. And we know that such tools are deployed elswhere in China for control of the public, e.g. in Xinjiang.
Monkton wonders if China’s total commitment to use AI as a surveillance and control mechanism gives them an advantage in the race for superiority. It is an advantage we don’t want in the West. But, we can’t ignore that China simply has more people and more people who have diligently learned their mathematics and computer science. And even if they are working at a Chinese “business”, their efforts can be steered by the Communist Party at the whim of dictator Xi Jingping or another political authority inside the CCP.
But it may come down to access to computer chips. And, of course, Taiwan looms large in that story.
