In March 2012, a 28-year-old federal contractor named Edward Snowden first reported to the National Security Agency’s Kunia Regional Security Operations Center on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Though he would later hatch a complex plan to leak highly classified intelligence documents, Snowden’s original contract was for a straightforward task: detect and thwart Chinese hacking of U.S. government operations.
The mission was urgent. Chinese cyber attacks against the U.S. were on the rise, and by the end of that year, attacks from China accounted for more than 40 percent of the world’s activity, according to a study by Akamai Technologies. In the depths of the Kunia base — a decrepit former Navy Armory that NSA employees nicknamed “The Tunnel” — a team of NSA experts focused on what top defense officials had called “China’s cyber thievery.”
By then, Snowden was well versed in China’s hacking operations. In 2010, when he worked at the NSA’s Pacific Techni
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Did Eric Dai expose a Chinese scheme to steal critical military technology? Or did he steal millions of dollars from a Chinese company by exploiting geopolitical tensions? It's not entirely clear, but Dai's saga hits all the high notes of current U.S.-China tensions, including convoluted plots to illicitly acquire U.S. semiconductor technology and extraterritorial schemes to harass, intimidate and coerce the Chinese diaspora. What is clear is that, for Dai, who founded a successful Chinese investment firm but is now seeking asylum in the U.S., it feels like World War III.
The former National Intelligence Officer for East Asia talks about why engagement hasn’t failed, it just hasn’t succeeded yet; why strategic empathy is so hard to do; and why the U.S. needs an approach to...
