The Global Daily Watch and National Security
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NASA chief warns Congress about Chinese space station
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nasa-chief-warns-congress-chinese-212233505.html
NASA chief Jim Bridenstine told lawmakers Wednesday it was crucial for the US to maintain a presence in Earth's orbit after the International Space Station is decommissioned so that China does not gain a strategic advantage.
The first parts of the ISS were launched in 1998 and it has been continuously lived in since 2000.
The station, which serves as a space science lab and is a partnership between the US, Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada, is currently expected to be operated until 2030.
"I'll tell you one thing that has me very concerned -- and that is that a day is coming when the International Space Station comes to the end of its useful life," said Bridenstine.
"In order to be able to have the United States of America have a presence in low Earth orbit, we have to be prepared for what comes next," he added.
To that end, NASA has requested $150 million for the 2021 fiscal year to help develop the commercialization of low Earth orbit, defined as 2,000 km (1,200 miles) or less from the planet's surface.
"We want to see a public-private partnership where NASA can deal with commercial space station providers, so that we can keep a permanent uninterrupted human presence in low Earth orbit," said Bridenstine.
"I don't think it's in the interest of the nation to build another International Space Station -- I do think it's in the interest of the nation to support commercial industry, where NASA is a customer."
Bridenstine warned the lawmakers this was critical to maintain US space supremacy in the face of a planned Chinese space station that Beijing hopes will be operational by 2022.
The station is named Tiangong, meaning Heavenly Palace, and in June Chinese state media announced it was partnering with 23 entities from 17 countries to carry out scientific experiments on board.
These countries included both developed and developing countries, such as France, Germany and Japan, as well as Kenya and Peru, according to Xinhua news agency.
"China is rapidly building what they call the 'Chinese International Space Station,' and they're rapidly marketing that space station to all of our international partners," said Bridenstine.
"It would be a tragedy, if, after all of his time, and all of this effort, we were to abandon low Earth orbit and cede that territory."
He explained that the microgravity of ISS offered great potential for scientific advances, from innovations in pharmaceuticals to printing 3D human organs to the creation of artificial retinas to treat people with macular degeneration.
Bridenstine said that it was therefore necessary to fund NASA to pay companies to set up a space station, where it would be one of several customers in order to drive down its own costs.
This, he added, was vital to "ultimately not cede that territory to another country that doesn't have our interests at heart."
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China has 'comprehensive plan' to steal US technology, secrets: Gen. Jack Keane
https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-comprehensive-plan-steal-us-145326898.html
Gen. Jack Keane on an NYPD officer being accused of acting as a Chinese Communist Party agent and new sanctions on Iran.
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World
An NYPD officer and US Army reservist has been arrested and accused of spying on Tibetan New Yorkers for China
Baimadajie Angwang, a 33-year-old NYPD officer and US Army reservist, was arrested on Monday and accused of spying for China, multiple reports say.
Federal prosecutors said in their complaint that Angwang spied on Tibetans living in New York and offered Chinese officials access to NYPD officials and information about the department.
He started working with a handler in the Chinese consulate in New York in 2018, but had been in contact with consulate officials as early as 2014, the complaint said.
Angwang became a naturalized US citizen after seeking asylum under the claim that he had been arrested and tortured in China "due partly to his Tibetan ethnicity," the complaint said.
In reality, both of his parents are Chinese Communist Party members and his brother is a reservist in the People's Liberation Army, the complaint said.
Baimadajie Angwang, a 33-year-old NYPD officer and US Army reservist, was arrested on Monday and accused of spying for China, multiple reports say.
Federal prosecutors said in their complaint that Angwang spied on Tibetans living in New York and offered Chinese officials access to NYPD officials and information about the department.
He started working with a handler in the Chinese consulate in New York in 2018, but had been in contact with consulate officials as early as 2014, the complaint said.
Angwang became a naturalized US citizen after seeking asylum under the claim that he had been arrested and tortured in China "due partly to his Tibetan ethnicity," the complaint said.
In reality, both of his parents are Chinese Communist Party members and his brother is a reservist in the People's Liberation Army, the complaint said.
A New York Police Department officer and US Army reservist with a "secret" security clearance has been arrested and accused of spying for China, according to multiple reports.
Baimadajie Angwang, a 33-year-old married father of one, was arrested at his home on Long Island on Monday, the New York Daily News reported.
He later appeared in Brooklyn Federal Court where he was charged with acting as an agent of a foreign government, wire fraud, and making false statements â€" charges that could see him face up to 55 years in prison, the outlet said.
Federal prosecutors have accused Angwang of working with a handler in the Chinese consulate and passing on intelligence about Tibetans living in New York, according to a criminal complaint obtained by CBS New York.
The complaint also said that Angwang provided "information from NYPD systems" to Chinese officials and and gave them "access to senior NYPD officials through invitations to official NYPD events."
Angwang works as a community officer in the 111th precinct in Queens.
China has occupied Tibet, a region in the Himalayan mountains, since the 1950s. However, many Tibetans view the Buddhist Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959, as their leader and want independence from China.
According to the complaint, Angwang is said to have come to the country initially on a cultural exchange visa, overstayed a second visa, and then sought asylum in the US "on the basis that he had allegedly been arrested and tortured" in China "due partly to [his] Tibetan ethnicity."
But US officials threw that claim into question in the complaint, pointing out that both of his parents are Chinese Communist Party members, his mother used to work for the Chinese government, and his brother is a reservist in the People's Liberation Army.
All three still live in China, and Angwang has "traveled back to the PRC [People's Republic of China] on numerous occasions since his asylum application was granted," the New York Post reported, citing court filings.
The complaint added that Angwang started corresponding with Chinese consular officials as far back as 2014, became an NYPD officer in 2016, and started working with a handler at the consulate in 2018.
According to the complaint, Angwang told his handler in a recorded conversation in 2019: "Must bring glory to the Chinese."
The handler, whom Angwang called "Boss," is believed to work for the China Association for Preservation and Development of Tibetan Culture division of the Chinese government's United Front Work Department, the complaint said.
The United Front Work Department is an agency that collects intelligence from around the world for the Chinese government.
According
to the complaint, it is also responsible for "neutralizing sources of
potential opposition to the policies and authority of the PRC" and for
maintaining "control over potentially problematic groups, such as
religious and ethnic minorities."
It appears that Angwang was paid handsomely for this work.
According to CBS New York, which cited the complaint, Angwang has received nearly $120,000 by wire transfer from the Chinese government since 2016.
Meanwhile, during fiscal year 2019, the city of New York paid Angwang a salary of about $53,500, according to online records viewed by the Post.
Business Insider was unable to contact the Consulate General of the People's Republic of China in New York outside its working hours on Tuesday.
In a Tuesday statement to Reuters, the consulate did not comment directly on Angwang's case but said its staff had been "fulfilling duties in accordance with international law and the law of the United States," and called their work "above board and beyond reproach."
'Violated every oath he took in this country'
Following Angwang's arrest, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said in a statement cited by CBS New York: "As alleged in this federal complaint, Baimadajie Angwang violated every oath he took in this country. One to the United States, another to the U.S. Army, and a third to this Police Department."
Shea added that the NYPD's intelligence and internal affairs bureaus have been working with the FBI.
In a separate statement, FBI Assistant Director of New York William Sweeney Jr. also called Angwang "the definition of an insider threat."
"As alleged, Mr. Angwang operated on behalf of a foreign government; lied to gain his clearance, and used his position as an NYPD police officer to aid the Chinese government's subversive and illegal attempts to recruit intelligence sources," Sweeney said.
"The FBI is committed to stopping hostile foreign governments from infiltrating our institutions, and we will not tolerate the behavior of those who willingly violate their oath to the United States, and covertly work against their fellow citizens. We want to thank the NYPD for its extraordinary partnership on this investigation."
Read more:
The real cost of the police, and why the NYPD's actual price tag is $10 billion a year
NYPD sergeants union chief Ed Mullins appears on Fox News with a QAnon mug behind him
Read the original article on Business Insider
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World
US charges 5 Chinese citizens in global hacking campaign
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Chinese Hackers ChargedDeputy Attorney General Jeffery Rosen
speaks, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2020 at the Justice Department in
Washington. The Justice Department has charged five Chinese citizens
with hacks targeting more than 100 companies and institutions in the
United States and abroad, including social media and video game
companies as well as universities and telecommunications providers.
Officials announced the prosecution on Wednesday. (Tasos Katopodis/Pool
via AP) |
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has charged five Chinese citizens with hacks targeting more than 100 companies and institutions in the United States and abroad, including social media and video game companies as well as universities and telecommunications providers, officials said Wednesday.
The five defendants remain fugitives, but prosecutors say two Malaysian businessmen charged with conspiring with the alleged hackers to profit off the attacks on the billion-dollar video game industry were arrested in Malaysia this week and now face extradition proceedings.
The indictments are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to call out cybercrimes by China. In July, prosecutors accused hackers of working with the Chinese government to target companies developing vaccines for the coronavirus and of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of intellectual property and trade secrets from companies across the world.
Though those allegations were tailored to the pandemic, the charges announced Wednesday — and the range of victims identified — were significantly broader and involved attacks done both for monetary gain but also more conventional espionage purposes.
In unsealing three related indictments, officials laid out a wide-ranging hacking scheme targeting a variety of business sectors and academia and carried out by a China-based group known as APT41. That group has been tracked by the cybersecurity firm Mandiant Threat Intelligence, which described the hackers as prolific and successful at blending criminal and espionage operations.
The hackers relied on a series of tactics, including attacks in which they managed to compromise the networks of software providers, modify the source code and conduct further attacks on the companies' customers.
The Justice Department did not directly link the hackers to the Chinese government. But officials said the hackers were probably serving as proxies for Beijing because some of the targets, including pro-democracy activists and students at a Taiwan university, were in line with government interests and didn't appear to be about scoring a profit.
“A hacker for profit is not going to hack a pro-democracy group,” said acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin of the District of Columbia, where the cases were filed. Those targets, including some that bear the “hallmark” of conventional espionage, point to the conclusion that the hackers had at least an indirect connection with the government, Sherwin said.
In addition, one of the five defendants told a colleague that he was very close to the Chinese Ministry of State Security and would be protected “unless something very big happens,” and also agreed not to go after domestic targets in China, said Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.
But some of the conduct was clearly profit driven, officials said. Two of the Chinese defendants, for instance, were charged with breaking into video game companies and obtaining digital currency that was then sold for profit on the black market, officials said.
Rosen, the Justice Department's No. 2 official, criticized the Chinese government for what he said was a failure to disrupt hacking crimes and to hold hackers accountable.
“Ideally, I would be thanking Chinese law enforcement authorities for their cooperation in the matter and the five Chinese hackers would now be in custody awaiting trial,” Rosen said. “Unfortunately, the record of recent years tells us that the Chinese Communist Party has a demonstrated history of choosing a different path, that of making China safe for their own cyber criminals, so long as they help with its goals of stealing intellectual property and stifling freedom.”
There was no immediate response Wednesday to an email seeking comment from the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
The Justice Department also announced that it had seized hundreds of accounts, servers and domain names used by the defendants and that it had worked with Microsoft and other private sector companies to deny the hackers continued access to tools, accounts and hacking infrastructure.
Also Wednesday, the department announced charges against two Iranian nationals accused of stealing hundreds of terabytes of data in a hacking campaign targeting institutions — and perceived enemies of Iran — in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.
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Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP
Pompeo hopeful China's Confucius Institutes will be gone from U.S. by year-end
https://www.yahoo.com/news/pompeo-cold-war-analogy-relevance-220007274.htmlWASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Tuesday he was hopeful that Chinese Confucius Institute cultural centers on U.S. university campuses would all be shut down by the end of the year.
"I think everyone's coming to see the risk associated with them," Pompeo told Lou Dobbs on the Fox Business Network, accusing the Chinese-government funded institutes of working to recruit "spies and collaborators" at U.S. colleges.
"I think these institutions can see that, and I'm hopeful we will get them all closed out before the end of this year."
Last month, Pompeo labeled the center that manages the Confucius Institutes in the United States "an entity advancing Beijing's global propaganda and malign influence" and required it to register as a foreign mission.
David Stilwell, the top U.S. diplomat for East Asia, said at the time that the dozens of Confucius Institutes on U.S. campuses were not being kicked out, but U.S. universities should take a "hard look" at what they were doing on campus.
Pompeo was asked about a warning last month by the Chinese government's top diplomat, Wang Yi, about the need to avoid a new Cold War, an apparent reference to escalating tensions between China and the United States.
Pompeo said "the Cold War analogy has some relevance," but the challenges with China were different.
"This is different from the Cold War in that we are challenged by a country with 1.4 billion people," he said.
"The challenges are different, they are economic challenges."
Pompeo referred to actions the Trump administration has taken to restrict the activities of Chinese firms like Huawei Technologies Co and said further moves could be expected.
"And now you'll see a broader effort, they'll be announcements, I think, in the coming days and weeks we will see the United States confront this in a very serious way, all for the benefit of the American economy," he said.
(Reporting by David Brunnstrom; Editing by Sandra Maler and Tom Brown)
Chinese national arrested in U.S. probe of possible transfer of software to China
WASHINGTON, Aug 28 (Reuters) - A Chinese national who is a researcher at a California university was arrested and charged with destroying a computer hard drive during an FBI investigation into the possible transfer of sensitive software to China, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday.
Guan Lei, 29, of Alhambra, California, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, was arrested after he was seen throwing a damaged hard drive into a dumpster outside his apartment in July, the department said in a statement.
"Guan is being investigated for possibly transferring sensitive U.S. software or technical data to China’s National University of Defense Technology" and falsely denying his association with the Chinese military on his visa application and in interviews with federal agents, the Justice Department said.
The statement did not say when the investigation started.
- ADVERTISEMENT -Guan made an initial court appearance on Friday and an arraignment was scheduled for Sept. 17, the statement said. The felony offense of destruction of evidence carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison. (Reporting by Mohammad Zargham; Editing by Leslie Adler)
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