"FBI Director Wray Says Scale of Chinese Spying in The U.S. 'Blew me Away'"
In an interview, FBI Director Christopher Wray stated that the sheer scale of Chinese efforts to steal U.S. technology shocked him when he became FBI director in 2017. Wray noted that the FBI is opening a new China related counter-intelligence investigation on average every 12 hours, with over 2,000 such cases currently underway. Wray stated that "there is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas, and our economic security than China does." Wray is warning that China's economic espionage has reached a new level that is more damaging than ever before. The Chinese government has repeatedly insisted that it does not steal U.S. business secrets. However, the FBI has accused Chinese spies of targeting a wide range of U.S. innovations, including Covid vaccines, computer chips, nuclear power plants, wind turbines, and smartphones. The FBI stated that sometimes a company's technology is stolen by planting spies inside the company, but in other cases involves theft committed remotely through computer intrusions. Wray noted that when it comes to theft committed remotely through computer intrusion that China has no equal. Wray stated that the scale of China's hacking program, and the amount of personal and corporate data that their hackers have stolen, is greater than every other country combined. While other nations, including North Korea, Russia, and Iran, have carried out sustained attacks on American computer networks, Wray said China stands in a class by itself.
NBC News reports: "FBI Director Wray Says Scale of Chinese Spying in The U.S. 'Blew me Away'"