Slashdot Mirror
FBI Says American Universities Infiltrated by Spies
An anonymous reader writes, using various bits of the article: "While most international students, researchers and professors come to the U.S. for legitimate reasons, universities are an 'ideal place' for foreign intelligence services 'to find recruits, propose and nurture ideas, learn and even steal research data, or place trainees,' according to a 2011 FBI report. Tretyakov was quoted as saying, 'We often targeted academics because their job was to share knowledge and information by teaching it to others, and this made them less guarded than, say, UN diplomats.' China has 'lots of students who either are forced to or volunteer to collect information,' he said. 'I've heard it said, "If it wanted to steal a beach, Russia would send a forklift. China would send a thousand people who would pick up a grain of sand at a time."' China also has more than 3,000 front companies in the U.S. 'for the sole purpose of acquiring our technology,' said former CIA officer S. Eugene Poteat."
The war on the academic sector. One more nail in our coffin.
This was a headline for the 1960's. Today its much, much worse - and sadly only now noticed. 3,000 companies? Only? And how many tens of thousands of grain-pickers? China, Iran, you name it - the US and the West are over-run....
Virtually all of us are infested with CIA. What's the problem?
Meanwhile the Japanese would study the beach, then copy it, in miniature.
The Brits would copy it but get all the good bits wrong and make the bad bits worse.
The Australians would make a copy that is just better but they would never stop feeling inferior about it.
The greeks would expect the rest of the world to pay for it.
The saudies would just buy it and see nothing wrong with paying a fortune for sand.
The Germans would dig a hole in it.
The dutch wouldn't feel happy on it until they build a sand castle to protect against the tide.
Apple would put it in a pretty box and sell it for a premium but you could only use it as Jobs intended.
Have I insulted everyone yet? Not on topic? Oh come on, universities have always been a haven for spies and the recruitment of spies. Duh, where else to find information, underpaid people with lots of info and impressionable young minds looking for a cause?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Foreigners are at an university to "nurture ideas" and to "learn"!! CALL THE FBI!!!
Seriously, knowledge is supposed to be shared.
As for technology, one could argue that the current patent system is broken. Besides, I personally find it hard to believe that it's necessary for the Chinese to spy a lot on US universities when all the latest gizmos are produced in China anyway.
The purpose of universities is to share knowledge. That's why research gets published - for the whole world to see.
Information can not get stolen. Not when it's about copyright and not when it's about research. It can only get copied and doing that generally leads to more knowledge.
I don't trust anything the FBI says. Any more than I would trust an announcement from the NKVD (The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). What is the purpose of this announcement supposed to be? To induce paranoia and racism against any student whose genetics cannot be traced from Western Europe? Is it something along the lines of "If you see something, say something."? And look where that got us. The persecution of innocent people who look middle eastern or Indian or Pakistani. I think it's clear that our government's vision of an ideal society is to that of East Germany except more racially pure.
The school's campus in Dubai needed a bailout and an unlikely savior had stepped forward: a Dubai-based company that offered to provide money and students.
Simon was tempted. She also worried that the company, which had investors from Iran and wanted to recruit students from there, might be a front for the Iranian government, she said. If so, an agreement could violate federal trade sanctions and invite enemy spies.
The CIA couldnâ(TM)t confirm that the company wasnâ(TM)t an arm of Iranâ(TM)s government. Simon rejected the offer and shut down undergraduate programs in Dubai, at a loss of $3.7 million.
Un-fucking-believable. Paranoia, distrust, racism. It's truly a shameful time to be an American. Yes. College students are a threat. All Iranians and people from Dubai are a threat. Everyone and everything except lily white Americans of pure European descent are threats to our 'national security'. Trust no one. There are conspiracies everywhere you look and only the FBI and CIA can save us. Better increase their funding or we're all gonna die!
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I don't know, for years I've been telling the Chinese students at my school they need to relax more, and that America's greatest technology is the weekend. And now they say Foxconn is going to improve worker conditions, coincidence or Chinese spy?
I don't trust anything the FBI says. Any more than I would trust an announcement from the NKVD (The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). What is the purpose of this announcement supposed to be? To induce paranoia and racism against any student whose genetics cannot be traced from Western Europe?
OMFG the little yellow people with the funny eyes want to steal everything we own! They are a threat to the AMURICAN WAY OF LIFE, and they would steal that too! They aren't even real commies, they are yellow instead of red!
I too tire of this constant barrage of borderline racist propaganda from the media. While I distrust the motives of the alphabet soup agents, the real culprit is the media. Say the FBI does a study about corporate espionage in China, at the request of a senator or some other asshole in Washington that has hear there is a 'Yellow menace', and wants to know more. They do a report, and find 3k companies that are stealing shit from us. (Aside: 3k companies in a country of 1.5 BILLION people that are illicit, really? BTW, how many companies are in all of China? How do you know they are stealing stuff? How many companies are there in the US that are conducting corporate espionage?) They write the report and that would be the end of it, except some jerk editor throws a story on the wire about how China is stacked 10 people deep with thieves which causes everybody else to believe it too, because the media always tells the truth.
Lets be real here, China has a problem with corruption, and there are some people there stealing stuff and committing IP violations. Guess what, so does every other country in the world. Enough with the propaganda.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Do you notice how the ideas that there are all these threats from everywhere are invading the public discourse?
There are all these 'stories' about spies, these have been coming out fairly consistently. Anybody remembers Anna Chapman? AFAIC it was a story about a Russian prostitute mistaken for a super-secret spy.
But there are all these other stories, everything, from spies to the idea that there is more racism or sexism than ever, to supposed nuclear threats from Iran and such, take your pick.
In reality of-course there are various political forces that are gaining power from proliferation of ideas that there is this huge division: us vs. them, them vs. us, divide you into international camps, then into race camps and into gender camps, again, choose your poison.
This is a very old trick - divide and conquer, use every bit of negative news and blow it way out of proportion, use any anecdotal evidence to create various false movements, whatever.
It's all done in order to be able to take your attention away from the real problems. How about the fact that Obama was basically an agent of the banks and the ruling elite, very skilfully disguised as a populous movement with ideology of CHANGE - changing what? Changing the way that the government works!
All the while Ron Paul is marginalised, the guy who is building real momentum, a real movement of change - this is scary, this has to be stopped and you know it's being actively fought against by the media and the government and every dollar that is coming from the corporate ruling elite.
Your government and your corporate monopolistic elite are one and the same. Ask yourself: exactly what is fascism? How is it possible that a Republic descends into fascism? Through the little trick of 'democracy' of-course. Democracy is a gateway drug to fascism, democracy comes after republic creates enough freedoms that the economy booms and allows a few to feed the many, allows the many to ask the few to give them more and more without bothering themselves to produce. This is 'bread and circuses' and the politicians are using it very effectively to destroy the very concept of individual freedoms on daily basis.
Notice how they even destroyed the concept of INDIVIDUAL freedoms by introducing the false flags of so called 'civil rights' and 'women rights' and 'minority rights' and whatever else rights. Why am I saying those are false flags? Because all of those people should have the same exact rights, and all of those rights are individual rights, but creating these separate concepts of 'rights' what really is done is that some are given not rights, but privileges, while others are forced into obligations.
And you can't have individual freedoms when some are given something at the expense of others. You NEED a powerful state to ensure that these entitlements are given to some at the expense of others, and that's just another way to 'divide and conquer'.
--
Closer to TFA: the universities are supposed to be these bastions of free expression of ideas, where non-mainstream ideas can be expressed and looked at without bias, but are they?
Who will it help if the universities end up being 'secured' the way airports are with TSA agents, for example, looking for signs of 'infiltration'?
How about FBI raiding universities with (or without) search warrants, turning papers and files over, breaking hands and throwing charges around? How about military doing it? (don't forget NDAA). What if they find a TERRORIST SYMPATHISER?! Will you ever see or hear from that person again, after all, they are terrorists, otherwise they wouldn't have been taken into the custody in the first place, right?
You think it's too far? Where do you think this is going?
You can't handle the truth.
China also has more than 3,000 front companies in the U.S.
See? That's what you call a job creator. Outsourcing works both ways.
Apple's i-everything devices are manufactured in China (e.g. Foxconn). Not only do they have the final products in their hands, they also have the individual components and the instructions to assemble them. Otherwise, Foxconn's assembly lines wouldn't work. Ditto for smartphones/laptops/computers/routers.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Incidentally, Kim Philby maintained that he did not spy on Britain for the Soviet Union; he spied on the USA on behalf of both. Perhaps bizarrely to American ideas, the Cambridge group seem to have seen themselves as patriots, helping to protect Britain against American domination. Their motivation was completely different from the Chinese spies in the USA, and the two cases are in no way comparable.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
These days, I'm more afraid of the law enforcement on campus. I'm not aware of spies braining anyone with a nightstick (and stealing their phone) for recording them, or pepper-spraying someone for sitting on the sidewalk.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I'm 90% certain this 3000 front companies figure is going to appear in a ton of places now. But where the hell does it come from?
Because S. Eugene Poteat is no longer a CIA agent. He's been out of the CIA for over 10 years. So how does he have access to privileged intel on Chinese intelligence activities? How on earth could he, a man whose intel career ended well before the start of this nonsense, know?
The answer is, by my reckoning, he doesn't. It's just a made up statistic. And there's a pattern behind this guy's statements too: he's long been a proponent of the removal of accountability from the intel services.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0316-27.htm
There's a certain wing of the US who is pushing the intel agenda. By reproducing the cold war, they get more funding and the unlimited powers they always coveted. S. Eugene Poteat's proper title is 'Intellaine security company employee, and lobbyist for greater surveillance powers without civilian oversight'. Don't buy into their bullshit, unless they show their working.
Not to mention the small fact that the brits invented the jet engine but gave the design to the US for free for war costs (yes, the US charged the british for the some help in the war whereas the west germans got a nice free rebuild of their society at no cost)
Classified research doesn't belong in universities. They aren't equipped to handle information controls. It's that simple.
But the FBI, of course, needs more money to investigate this issue. When the deficit is sky high and government budgets are likely to be cut, it is very important to shout loudly about the importance of your agency.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Information acts like just about everything else in the universe. Without constantly applied effort and energy it flows from high concentration to lower concentrations.
We as a society need to recognize that its not possible to have it both ways. We are going to be open, and with that comes acceptance, our ideas, invention, imaginary property, etc will be making their way out in to the world; or we can close down and with concerted effort and expenditure we can keep our secrets.
I think history shows us open *is* better. If for no other reason than closed is actually really hard. We'd have to limit what you can buy/sell/manufacture abroad in ways that would probably be the undoing of many of our biggest business when they suddenly lose their foreign plant investments over night. Locking down our boards will push American wages up but it will also push prices of things like agricultural products typically produced with lots of immigrant and alien labor high enough to stave today's poor and impoverish today's middle class.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The TSA says that everyone that has a carry on with more than 3oz of liquid is a terrorist.
So how are we to believe these departments that make crap up to keep the fear machine going?:
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ron Paul voted against Pi Day. If we simply give up all interest in science and technology, the Chinese will have noting to steal. Just close the universities. Stop inventing stuff. Stop teaching math. That'll do the trick.
That's true. And wealth is inexorably moving from the West to the East for a variety of reasons.
But it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, as China and us believe it to be.
There. Fixed that for'cha. Not to say there isn't aggressive competition from China, our greatest competitor/adversary for the rest of the 21st century, but it is not like us and the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis as many chicken haws in our political establishment want to pander to our ignorant masses (who are more than happy to believe it.)
You are right. It is not a zero-sum game. It does not have to be. And we must not let it be.
But you are wrong (or at least your sentence as constructed gives the wrong impression). Badly formulated perceptions are being made on both sides of the Pacific.
I don't know why we have a special relationship with the US. We are much closer to France - we built cool stuff with them like Concord, Eurofighter and the Channel Tunnel. In the 60s there was even talk of merging the two countries. For some reason we prefer to be the US's bitch instead.
It is the unspoken, subconscious hope of reuniting the empire.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
How much of it was simple Cold-War realism?
Go ahead. Align yourself with the awesome French nuclear umbrella.
NATO was an American alliance with Europe. England hung in there because aligning with anyone else was basically going it alone. And the mindset and habits of an entire generation of politics was shaped by that.
Yeah. The U.S. was not very generous to its WWII allies. At some point, it became a critical objective to break down all the old colonial empires and reduce them to second fiddles. U.S. hegemony couldn't tolerate competition. In exchange, you got Pax Americana and 50 years of thermonuclear brinkmanship.
I guess it could have been worse. WWI segued into WWII largely because European empires were allowed to persist and continue their competition for power, prestige, and colonial holdings.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
That's true. And wealth is inexorably moving from the West to the East for a variety of reasons.
But it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game, as China and we believe it to be.
There. Fixed that for'cha. Not to say there isn't aggressive competition from China ...
And I fixed it for you!
shows that communism was right: wealth is only being transferred. Upward.
The Zen master Ryokan lived a simple life in a little hut high on a mountain. One evening while Ryokan was out walking, a thief made the arduous climb up the mountain, only to find there was nothing in the hut worth stealing.
Ryokan returned and found the thief. "You have taken great pains to come a long way to visit me," he said, "and you should not return empty-handed. Please let me give you my clothes as a gift."
The thief was confused and bewildered, but he took Ryokan's clothes and climbed back down the mountain.
Ryokan left the hut and sat naked, watching the moon. "That poor fellow," he mused, "I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon."
People are welcome to share all my knowledge. I don't care if they are brown, yellow, or pink with polka dots. Hoarding knowledge is a practice of the weak and foolish, it's how you can easily identify them. Smart, strong minds have new thoughts every day.
Communism generally espouses the view that wealth can only be transferred.
That's plainly not true. Ever heard of this thing called "labor theory of value" that's the underpinning of Marxist economics?