The Chinese regime ‘is the defining threat of this generation,’ says FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Communist China’s espionage operations, including theft of intellectual property in technology and other trade secrets, pose significant threats to the West and is “unprecedented in human history,” intelligence chiefs from the Five Eyes alliance warned.
In an interview with CBS News’s “60 Minutes” on Oct. 22, the intelligence leaders from the Five Eyes alliance shared their concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) threats, what it means to democracies, as well as the message they want to send to Beijing.
The Five Eyes alliance was founded after World War II as an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and New Zealand.
The Chinese regime “is the defining threat of this generation. … There is no country that presents a broader, more comprehensive threat to our ideas, our innovation, our economic security, and ultimately our national security,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said.
The FBI chief said that the CCP’s spying operations could be seen in many fields, including agriculture, aviation, biotech, health care, robotics, and academic research. Furthermore, Beijing’s tech theft is not limited to big businesses, like Fortune 100 companies, but extends to smaller startup firms.
“We probably have somewhere in the order of 2,000 active investigations that are just related to the Chinese government’s effort to steal information,” Mr. Wray said.
‘Unprecedented in Human History’
The Chinese regime deploys many tools for its espionage operations, including hacking. Mr. Wray said the CCP has “the biggest hacking program in the world by far, bigger than ever other major nation combined … stolen more of our personal and corporate data than every nation, big or small, combined.”
In September, the State Department revealed that hackers linked to the CCP have secretly breached thousands of email accounts of U.S. government agencies, affecting officials such as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Daniel Kritenbrink.
Mike Burgess, the director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, emphasized that the scale of the CCP’s espionage efforts is “unprecedented.”
By Aaron Pan
