chinese espionage group new compatible systems

At the Pittsburgh airport, Carlin lamented the obvious: None of the hackers would face a US courtroom anytime soon. But the news came with an inevitable caveat: “The move by the Justice Department was almost certainly symbolic,” The New York Times wrote, “since there is virtually no chance that the Chinese would turn over the five People’s Liberation Army members named in the indictment.”Ī few days later, Carlin and a Justice Department prosecutor named Adam Hickey were flying back from a meeting with the victims of the PLA hackers. It made front-page headlines across the country, instantly bumping the issue of Chinese economic espionage off the back burner of public consciousness. The press conference marked the first time the US had ever indicted individual foreign agents for cyber intrusions.

Two of the men were even pictured in their crisp dress uniforms. The FBI had mocked up a bunch of “Wanted” posters, which made it strikingly clear that the hackers all shared an employer: the Chinese army. Steel, Westinghouse, and a renewable-energy outfit called SolarWorld. Attorney general Eric Holder took the podium to announce charges against five hackers for breaking into the systems of several US companies, including U.S. On Monday, May 19, 2014, nearly three months before the Garratts were whisked away into the Dandong night, the US Justice Department called a press conference at its headquarters in Washington, DC. This is the story of how the US finally achieved some leverage over China to bring a stop to more than a decade of rampant cybertheft, how a Canadian couple became bargaining chips in China’s desperate countermove, and how the game ended happily-only to start up again in recent months with more rancor and new players. President Obama pressed the issue of cyberthefts in his first meeting with President Xi in 2013, only to be met with more denials. But it was far from clear how any government or company might successfully turn back the tide of Chinese incursions. Private cybersecurity firms released a string of damning investigative reports on China’s patterns of economic espionage the US government started to talk more publicly about bringing charges against the country’s hackers. And American companies, in turn, were often inclined to play dumb and look the other way: Even as they were being robbed silly, they didn’t want to jeopardize their access to China’s nearly 1.4 billion consumers.įinally, between 20, the US began to reach a breaking point. American diplomats were skittish about upsetting a sensitive bilateral relationship. China simply denied any hand in the thefts, professing to take great umbrage at the idea. In 2012, National Security Agency director Keith Alexander called it the “greatest transfer of wealth in history,” a phrase he has regularly repeated since.Īnd yet, despite a great deal of restlessness in the ranks of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the United States was, for years, all but paralyzed in its response to Chinese hacking. Coordinated campaigns by China’s Ministry of State Security and the People’s Liberation Army have helped steal the design details of countless pieces of American military hardware, from fighter jets to ground vehicles to robots. China’s military has gotten a leg up too. The Garratts had a strong social network in the city, so it didn’t seem odd to either of them when they were invited out to dinner by Chinese acquaintances of a friend who wanted advice on how their daughter could apply to college in Canada.Įach theft has allowed Chinese companies to bypass untold years of precious time and R&D, effectively dropping them into the marathon of global competition at the 20th mile.

From their perch near the border, they helped provide aid and food to North Korea, supporting an orphanage there and doing volunteer work around Dandong itself. They lived in six different Chinese cities over the years, raising four children along the way, before settling in Dandong. The Garratts had come to China from Canada in the 1980s as English teachers. “After time in North Korea a decent cup of coffee was one of those things I was really looking forward to,” one Australian tourist wrote in early 2014. For tourists and expats, the Garratts’ coffee shop-just a short walk from the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge-was a hub of Western conversation and comfort food. A devout Christian couple in their fifties with an entrepreneurial streak, they operated a café called Peter’s Coffee House, a popular destination in the city of Dandong, according to TripAdvisor.ĭandong is a sprawling border town that sits just across the Yalu River from North Korea. Kevin and Julia Garratt had spent nearly all of their adult lives in China.

Chinese espionage group new compatible systems