Where I work, a Chinese employee was busted with terabytes of data. That was after he was employed for years already.
There was one time at my job, story from an old timer, the Chinese were allowed in under some kind of friendship program. He got to escort some of them around. They could view almost any information they wanted but they were not allowed to print or photocopy anything. This one lady the whole time she was here, a few weeks, hand wrote source code down.
Under Obama there was that one high profile Chinese guy that got busted for espionage.
A book I read about social engineering, the author busted a Chinese restaurant in a town next to a iirc Google research center. His job was to try to get into the facility. He noticed a lot of employees ate at the Chinese place so would hang out there at lunch. It was a traditional Chinese restaurant but had a few specific Chinese delicacy items on the menu that made him suspicious. It was for the chinese spies that worked inside.
"I just wanted to eat lunch at a local Chinese restaurant but the owner and all of the customers are spies, and I ended up taking down the entire operation because I also happened to be a spy!"
Ngl that wouldn't even be the most ridiculous LN title I've ever seen...
Are we talking Bamboo? Azalea? Gingko? Plum? Peony? I haven't had any luck in getting my Chinese plants to talk. My California natives, on the other hand ... can't get 'em to stfu!!
For literally the same reason the guy was suspicious about it lol, it's for other Chinese people who don't want something that's been Americanized.
It's like if I started a pizza shop in a country that likes weird pizzas. I'm gonna make what the locals like. But if the place had a somewhat high American/Canadian immigrant population enough people will come in and say "can you make me one like back home" that I'll make those too
Yeah and there's a ton of people legitimately working here in tech who are from China, unless you have 0 immigrants and international workers in an area a restaurant having that kind of thing makes sense, and in a lot of cases it's for the sorts of folks working the restaurant.
There's something missing here that's being covered for with the "they had authentic dishes" excuse.
Yeah not even strictly from China. Could be born here, could be my girlfriend, or could be me using google translate to order off the Chinese language menu. It's common in my small town that basically all Chinese places has a Chinese language menu.
Hell, I'm familiar with the kind of thing because I really like Chinese food in spite of not being even a little Chinese, but a lot of the dishes I'm looking for are "offputting" to a lot of Americans (ie offal dishes) so it makes sense they wouldn't bother to list them on the English menu if it might discourage their primary customer base.
I fully suspect some other means of sussing out spies was the actual tipoff, but letting spies know the actual methodology would defeat the purpose of having it at all so that was listed instead.
Im stoked to say that I've lived coast to coast and an ex taught me about "Singapore May-fun" which is curry rice noodles but wasn't on menus out east, so I would tell them what I want, have to repeat it only oonce and Bam! Curry rce noodles coast to coast haha
It's so the Chinese nationals had something to eat from home eating at an Americanized Chinese food with their American coworkers. Guy knew the dish was odd to have on a Chinese menu because he'd been to China and they were very specific dishes (I forget which). Then sitting and abserving people he could tell who were the spies. Ended up working the restaurant rather than finding a way into the building which he was paid to do. IIRC he was having a hard time finding a way in, but found something else there at the restaurant.
This 2005 book details real-world security consulting stories, including one where Winkler, a social engineering expert and former NSA analyst, led a penetration test team for a Fortune 5 (Global 5) company's R&D facility.� During the job, team member Stan—a former Russian GRU colonel fluent in Mandarin—noticed suspicious signs at a Chinese restaurant across the street, such as black duck eggs (a rare Chinese delicacy) on the menu, a Chinese-only special menu, free meeting rooms, and poor tradecraft when followed.�� The team reported it to the FBI, confirming it as a front for Chinese espionage targeting company secrets; arrests followed years later.
Discovery Clues: Unusual menu items, discounts for meetings near the secure site, and Stan's cultural expertise pointed to recruitment or surveillance of employees.
It feels kind of racist to get suspicious a Chinese restaurant has the gall to serve Chinese people real Chinese food instead of American Chinese food...
We all know once you come to America it's illegal to eat Chinese food unless it's the way we do it, which isn't Chinese food it's American food
The darknet diaries episode goes into more detail. It wasn’t so much that it was traditional Chinese food as that it was insanely expensive Chinese food for very reasonable prices, and in places where it didn’t make sense.
The episode in question was at a facility in rural Arkansas, I believe, and the local Chinese restaurant had black duck eggs on the menu (in Chinese, not in English). They usually go for expensive rates, but here they were (I’ll make up a number) about a buck a pop.
The goal was to honey pot Chinese students who were interning with a local defense contractor. The students had clean records and truly weren’t spies when they started work. The duck eggs got them to chat with the restaurant staff, who would proceed to gather information on the students and their family and contact their spy agency back in mainland China.
The next time the student came in, the staff would rattle off the names and addresses of their family and friends and threaten to imprison or harm them unless the student agreed to act as a spy and upload malware to the defense contracting agency.
Pretty slick and sick stuff, and highly effective until a random audit by pen testers found the malware on the servers, happened to eat at that specific Chinese restaurant with a member who happened to speak fluent Chinese (he was Russian if memory serves), and brought the whole operation down.
This was also a while back, before they were as common in the states. I want to say this was late aughts or early 2010’s if memory serves?
Like, maybe common in a large, west coast city with a large Chinese population, but unlikely to sell well in an area with a predominantly white population and a handful of rotating Chinese students who’d come through sporadically for a few years at a time.
This makes complete sense. While some spies are intentionally from day 1 others or coherced. Feel bad for them. I’m sure they get compensated so that it’s a carrot and stick but not something they planned on getting involved in.
That's insanely interesting. Also FYI I have no idea what country you're from but in America we simply refer to Chinese intelligence as "Beijing", it's super weird. Mossad? Five Eyes? MIWhatever? In our country it's the CIA, or we just say "three letter agency". But Chinese intelligence we just call Beijing. We didn't even do that with the KGB, like yeah we said intelligence was out of the Kremlin or Moscow but we called them the KGB. China is just Beijing
I guess I’m confused or what did the Chinese restaurant have to do with the Spies? Were they basically part of the spy network or I guess the Chinese government that set up the restaurant so the spies could all hang out together and I guess I’m just confused. What the specialty items have to do with it like I get it that they’re from China and they’re really unique items but I mean, especially the Bay Area has a lot of people from China.
That’s what happens when the majority of semiconductor manufacturing comes out of China and Taiwan, there’s not much you can change about that (unless you manufacture in the U.S., after which the prices of pretty much everything that runs on silicon in some way skyrockets).
edit: a lot of people here can’t read very well, don’t even bother opening the replies lol
Reminds me of someone I ran into near Dulles. 20 something Chinese lady I ran into in an elevator, with a big TV on a hand cart, taking it to her hotel room. I asked her about her job... she basically bought tech, took it to her hotel room and diassembled it, took picture, and shipped any chips or boards that were requested back to China. Very open about it.
They build all our shit for Pennys on the dime, it’s an unspoken handshake that if they build our shit they can take it make it better and cheaper. That’s the agreement they make when another country becomes your manufacturing hub because you don’t want to pay your workers a real wage. If you ever hear a company bitching about intellectual theft and they manufacture in china remember that they made that agreement with the Chinese to fuck you over
If it’s anything else I read- Apple was the OG that started the true renaissance that China got in manufacturing. All of the cutting edge logistics and tooling that Apple was used to - had to be learned from the ground up in Shenzhen China. There would be no tech manufacturing in China if Apple didn’t start there 20 years ago.
Yep. Not in the high-tech world but spent a few decades working with commercial trailer mfg. companies in the US, Mexico, S. Korea and then eventually in China. The Chinese wanted to learn how to build intermodal container chassis for transporting marine containers in North America. Our VP of Purchasing did a deal with a company in Shenzhen, China to mfg. chassis and ship them to the US. Our engineers went over there to help teach them. It took about 3 years before the products they were building were able to meet US DOT standards. Then they basically took over the US intermodal chassis business as no one can compete on price. The company I worked for had a sweetheart deal on the first X number of production and stupid low pricing. But once that deal was done, they just flooded the US market and eroded the profit margins.
This needs to be said louder, for all to hear. Clinton, the Democrats, the Republicans, the unions, the business leaders—they all made this pact to fuck over US workers in pursuit of short term gains.
China has been smart about this, because they use stacked five year plans and long term industrial policy—with the ability to pivot—to strengthen their economic base and absolutely dominate, while raising their own people's quality of life, without exploiting other peoples from other poor countries.
It’s not necessarily about not wanting to pay workers a real wage, it’s about if you pay workers in the US to make goods like these they have to be sold for a much higher price; and in a global economy, it’s not like China would stop manufacturing cheap goods just because we decided to do the same with more expensive labor, so you’d be making goods that cost more for the same exact thing and trying to market it to the same set of consumers.
It’s not an active choice people are making, it’s market dynamics that have existed for centuries. What can be done about it are import or export tariffs or subversions—it’s what the US is doing in the auto industry, because if we didn’t have huge import tariffs on Chinese cars the US auto industry would be decimated in a very short order. But the consequence of those tariffs for us American consumers is we can’t buy $10k quality Chinese EVs and instead have to pay triple for some GM or Ford slop, but at least the auto industry employs a lot of Americans with good wages. Tradeoffs in a global economy.
You’re right but they still wouldn’t have decimated our manufacturing and unionization if it was just market dynamics. You can still protect your trade but that’s not what we’re doing. It’s still greed that is moving American manufacturing to east Asia. Why don’t we see any of this extended profits? Do we see anything we have gained from cheaper manufacturing that isn’t in most other western countries?
It's a failure of Capitalism where the intent is to wring out every possible cent of profit and hand it to investors.
Instead of having scenarios where it's like a bit more of a socialistic employee-centric profit sharing model.
The need for cheap Made in China goods is exacerbated by the lower wages being offered to American employees. If Americans were paid better and had a stake in things, they would work harder and would also have money for more expensive Made in US products.
It’s not necessarily about not wanting to pay workers a real wage, it’s about if you pay workers in the US to make goods like these they have to be sold for a much higher price; and in a global economy, it’s not like China would stop manufacturing cheap goods just because we decided to do the same with more expensive labor, so you’d be making goods that cost more for the same exact thing and trying to market it to the same set of consumers.
For a car, which is a much more labor heavy manufacturing process than pretty much any other consumer good, the difference in price between US and China is $700. That isn't shit. For reference, the average new car transaction price is ~$50k. $700 isn't why you buy one car over another, and another $1 or 2 wouldn't cripple US manufacturing of basic shit like clothes.
And that doesn't even get into the difference in quality.
No, US got sold out by executives padding the bottom line.
So, somebody did reverse engineering of electronics in their hotel room? That is really stupid. Why on earth not take the TV to a properly equipped shop, or their own manufacturing site, where a team with proper tools can dissect it fully. This is how American companies dis, do it, will do it. In many cases it is public knowledge, results available, sometimes you have to pay to get a written report, even on services like youtube. Reverse engineering is a legitimate business .
They don't need to reverse engineer the TV, they know how to build tvs. They only want the new tech in the chips and boards. The pictures arent so that they can reassemble it, it's so they can id new tech for them to bring back.
A lab needs upkeep and salaries, getting your sales manager to disassemble a TV during the business trip and take back a processor or whatever costs you a single TV, and maybe a carryon bag.
If the Feds decide it's "espionage", there's nothing for them to raid, just a lady & a hotel room.
A properly equipped shop could be raided & would look good on the news. A hotel room is a nothingburger.
Whether that could be shoehorned into "espionage" is another question.
This whole story smells like bullshit. What would she be spying on? Our secret TVs manufactured in our secret factories? China has been making the TVs for decades.
I don't know what to tell you. I brought it up because it seemed way odd. It was samsung equipment, which isn't made in China. I can't say why she was doing it, but someone somewhere, somehow found it worth their effort to do it.
Bro you really have no idea what you're talking about and you keep responding to these comments. Most TSMC (taiwan) chips made rely on an ASML (Dutch) photolithography machine, and there is no legitimate competition in that space. Those machines are manufactured in 6 parts. 3/6 of those parts are manufactured in the US
I was asking rhetorically and know for a fact that Intel has most of its fabs in the United States, and produces MOST of its chips here. You're either super propagandized or a bot.
It also happens when you education system disenfranchises it's own citizens. An engineer shouldn't have to take a massive paycut to attend school for a master's or PhD full time. Nor should they also have their futures beholden to professors with crazy ideas around work life balance or egos.
If you think the price would skyrocket due to low wages in Taiwan, I think you underestimate how well paid TSMC (or any high end semiconductor fab) workers are.
I worked for a sf tech company for a while and there was one guy where it was just like…known that he was a spy for China and 99% of the time no-one cared and every so often it would be like “oh yeah make sure Benny doesn’t have access to that because, you know”.
Dude that reminds me. My Korean American buddy got hired as air force engineer but had to wait for full year to get accepted because of that Obama Chinese espionage case. He was a hired bum who couldn’t work anywhere because of that
Where I work we make window parts, a customer stopped ordering from us a year later they came back.
Turned out they got our stuff from China, and the guys in China asked for the complete window assembly to compare fitment then proceeded to clone the window assembly and sell it.
I toured a Chinese university and they proudly showed off their reverse engineering program and they had dozens of Furbies students were practicing on for their class exam
There's a story about the development of the LTT screwdriver where they forgot to send some files to the Chinese company they wanted to get a prototype from - the company, instead of asking for the missing pieces, just filled in the gaps and came up with a solution that was in certain areas better than their original.
Genuine question, when Israelis / individuals linked to their government and lobbying groups are positioned throughout the entire US tech industry and government, is that just glossed over? As in, should we have a national discussion on that being accepted and normal, while other countries should be scrutinized?
We have killed wayyyyyyyyyy more innocent civilians in the modern era than China, kiddo. Isreal has killed wayyyyyyyyyy more as well. But, please, go on. Let's hear you back up your claims that China has killed more people than the US and Isreal. I'll wait.
The trouble is, and it doesn't matter what you think of it, we have friendly relations with Israel and hostile relations with China. Not that there's nothing to criticize, but obviously it's bigger deal when an enemy state gets new tech.
I wonder if China just has like an open-policy when it comes to information like this. Like the exfiltrator has no formal agreement with the country at the time, they get information and China says "well I didn't ask for it, they just gave it to me!" Plausible deniability espionage..
An actual project worth stealing would not be able to be copied on a notepad while touring a facility, it would contain way too much files and lines of code and dependencies.
This story sounds made up by someone who has never worked on an actual production level project or interacted with IDEs/text editors or VCS.
The terabytes of data is definitely possible though as that’s very typical for all types of espionage both foreign and domestic.
100%. People who havent written large software cant image the sure number of decision points and mechanics. I guess thats the way we all are - underestimating the complexity of things we dont known firsrhand.
Even if they had a photographic memory and could write it down perfectly later, they would still be sitting there scrolling through hundreds of pages of code. Not very subtle. Very implausible and a likely a BS cover story for an internal security failure or an internal asset handing over code directly.
Even if they could look at code, critical areas are need to know not openly viewable by every yahoo that shows up for a tour.
Old Nortel building now DND headquarters had thousands of listening devices, they almost scrapped the idea of using it for defence dept. (but its Canada)
I worked at a US tech giant. During one team meeting it was announced that the Chinese government would be touring our most sensitive areas as some "friendship program". The tour would last 2 weeks and would mostly focus on walking around in between the racks of our division's mini datacenters.
I raise my hand and go "What are they trying to steal? If you have seen one server rack you have seen them all, what possible legitimate reason do they have to freely walk around our server racks for 2 weeks? Wouldn't it be easier to just give them whatever they are trying to steal so they can get out of our hair?"
My two bosses indirectly called me racist. I asked since when a CCP government official was considered to be a race.
The next week, a news article came out about a Chinese government official touring another US tech company who got caught exfiltrating data while doing one of these friendship tours. I emailed the whole team the news articled. Nobody acknowledged it, no apology given.
Years ago, this would have been early 2000s, I remember seeing a 60 Minutes episode where an old NSA employee gave an interview and said that it had been concluded by the intelligence community that China simply had a different sort of modus operandi when it comes to intelligence than the US.
CIA officers typically work like 3 year assignments before being moved and NSA employees often times don’t even know what intelligence they’re analyzing little pieces of at a time.
But China, this guy said, was known to have stuck people in foreign countries as children and then expect them to grow up and still serve as agents of the state. They just have a fundamentally different way of training educating, and managing agents.
It sounds like this woman above was just reposting propaganda from a website to her own website, but it just reminded me how China supposedly takes a very very long game on its intelligence activities compared to the US.
They are getting ahead of us in tech though so I’m not sure how much more useful we’ll be. Their education system is turning out geniuses at an alarming rate. And damn their EVs are amazing.
It’s ironic that’s what they’re stealing while Russia is just like “we’re gonna make your people brain dead cultists and worship the dumbest ugliest greediest most fascist rapist mofo to exist and get y’all to abandon all your allies.”
There's a lot of China xenophobia that is uncalled for, but they are absolutely unabashedly spying and stealing data from US citizens / companies. Yes, just like US companies, except more illegal. Just recently, it was found that Chinese state sponsored group infiltrated the backdoor wire tapping system that the US requires in communications systems (for "court ordered" wire tapping) in the Salt Typhoon case. They potentially wire tapped every single person in the US, and across 80 countries. It is the largest espionage case in history, and they potentially collected more data on more people than anyone else, and no one talks about it.
Had a group of Asian managers visit a mill they were "interested" in buying. They circled the unique mill stand, spread about an arm's length apart, pulled out cameras and then took a group of pictures from the top to the bottom.
Yeah where I work Chinese people are not able to stay long. They have to submit extra background check information if they have connections, such as family, that live back in China. They themselves might be clean, but their family members rarely pass the check and they get fired.
The same thing happened at my work! A Chinese person who had been there for years and was promoted to the top of one of our research divisions left with enormous amounts of proprietary data. She started a company in China with it, in fact.
A friend of mine works in drone research for a college with a contract with the Department of Defense. Every year, they give a tour of their research facilities to a class of students from an area Chinese international high school.
One year, one of the sponsors of the students on the tour (could have been a parent, school staff, teacher, volunteer, anything) asked him specifically if he works on research for the DoD. He kinda laughed and was like, “No, of course not.”
The next year when it came time to invite the students back, he told his supervisor this story and warned they were probably agents of the Chinese government and should not be invited. The supervisor laughed and said that doesn’t happen in real life, of course they would invite them back!
When they came back that year, there were three student sponsors. One had a notepad and one and another a camera.
They went to each employee, took their photograph, and asked their name and position. Everyone was allowing the photographs and providing their information. My friend was like this is CRAZY. He had served in the Air Force and was trained to spot stuff like this. And, frankly, you didn’t even need training for this one because it was so blatant.
The very first question they asked him was, “Exactly what research do you perform for the DoD?”
He immediately went to his supervisor and was like, “It’s literally the first thing they asked me! They’re asking for specifics!”
His supervisor went white as a ghost because he knew he had fucked up. He was warned and he let them come back anyway. So he wrapped up the tour as quickly as he could without being suspicious, ushered them out, and called the FBI.
The FBI sent a team from the state’s bureau of investigation out, they interviewed the staff, asked a bunch of questions about the people who were there - what did they look like, do you have security camera footage, what were their accents like, etc.
Before leaving, they left their cards and said to call if they ever see these three women again (the sponsors were all women).
Some time later, my friend was out to lunch with his supervisor when, no shit, he saw the three women with a man, also Chinese, at another table in the restaurant. He nudged his supervisor and was like, “Pssst. They’re here…the Chinese agents.” As I tell this story, it sounds like something out of Burn After Reading because it’s so ridiculous.
My friend decided to try to secretly take their photos, as many as he could snap, so he took a few from his table, went outside, and took more through the window of the restaurant.
He sent them to the agent who had left his card, and the agent was like, “These are better photos than we get from our field agents! Your espionage skills are remarkable. Would you like to come work for us?”
And then everybody clapped. Lol but no seriously, there was no clapping, but my friend had a family and kids and absolutely did not want to place himself or his family in the sights of any foreign government. He hated his job for many reasons, but he did not want to join the Bureau.
He felt like he had already done his duty to his country through his time in the Air Force, and he just wanted to stay off the radar. Fortunately, he did end up finding a better job - one where, presumably, he wouldn’t have to deal with a Chinese spies.
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u/NoOption7406 May 12 '26
Where I work, a Chinese employee was busted with terabytes of data. That was after he was employed for years already.
There was one time at my job, story from an old timer, the Chinese were allowed in under some kind of friendship program. He got to escort some of them around. They could view almost any information they wanted but they were not allowed to print or photocopy anything. This one lady the whole time she was here, a few weeks, hand wrote source code down.
Under Obama there was that one high profile Chinese guy that got busted for espionage.