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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On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister, in Washington. It marked the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the U.S. and China during the Biden administration, and it was a signal of the Commerce Department’s increasingly central role in the current U.S.-China relationship. Usually, the Commerce Department is far from the center of anything, but as Katrina Northrop reports, the department is uniquely suited to address the China challenge.
The lawyer and author talks about the attack on a train in the 1920s which created an international incident, the rise of the Communist Party and the conditions for foreign media in China today.
