Former NSA Director Keith Alexander called it “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.” Hillary Clinton, FBI Director James Comey and President Barack Obama also sounded the alarm on the biggest heist in human history. In Episode 1, host and former lead cybersecurity and digital espionage reporter for The New York Times, Nicole Perlroth, pulls back the curtain on China’s sprawling hacking operations. To combat the “Five Poisons”, or the five groups the Chinese Communist Party deems existential threats, China builds an expansive domestic surveillance apparatus. As these dissidents fled China, China’s state-sponsored hackers followed closely behind, wiring the world for Chinese surveillance and paving the way for Operation Aurora.
Chapter 1: What is the greatest transfer of wealth in history?
I think it's the greatest transfer of wealth in history. So they call it advanced persistent threat.
That time period was the most dangerous in America's history.
Here, danger and the greatest wealth transfer in history. And your mind goes to heist of the old school variety. Masked thieves making off with diamonds or bags of cash. But this, this was burglary on a global scale.
You know they're there. You see these terrible little scraps of, yeah, they looked at this one file. But you know they looked at 10,000 files. And the evidence has only given you the one. And you're like, oh my god, I'm getting less than 1% visibility into what they're doing here.
And that's how that feels. And it was very apparent that the business had just been stolen. The entire business was stolen. There's nothing we were going to do on the incident response side. Like, it's over. It's a wash.
As long as they keep stealing, they can't innovate. And I was like, what are you smoking?
For two decades now, trillions of dollars worth of American R&D, trade secrets, intellectual property have crept out the back door. And when you peel the mask off the thieves, it's the same culprit every single time.
China's multi-pronged assault on our national and economic security make it the defining threat of our generations.
Our adversarial focus has long been on our Russian comrades across the Atlantic. But in the meantime, a more insidious rivalry has quietly taken shape on the far side of the Pacific.
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Chapter 2: How did China become a major cybersecurity threat?
So a virtual cage.
A virtual cage. What was really sad to see was that, you know, it was utterly targeted on the Uyghur ethnic minority. So you would see Han Chinese get out of their cars and just walk right past these checkpoints and nobody would stop them. But then for the ethnic minority for whom this is their homeland, it applies, and so they have to stop every single time.
That level of surveillance didn't stop in Xinjiang. Over the next several years, it began to creep into larger China and beyond.
By 2017, they were appearing absolutely everywhere. They almost looked like Baroque sculptures mocking surveillance in some ways. You'd have three cameras hanging from a pole with another pole sticking off and two more cameras and then a camera next to that. I mean, it was just totally remarkable.
And so I endeavored just to kind of get a sense of how absurd this was to track how many cameras I passed on my commute to work, which is about, I think, two subway stops in Shanghai. It took about 15 minutes. And during that time, I counted 250 people cameras. I tried to do it the first time without a counter and I'd lost track.
So I actually had to download a little app that was a counter just to, you know, do it as I go. And I mean, there are big cameras on the escalators. There's tiny little hidden lenses inside each subway car, you know, just everywhere you can think of are cameras. And you just all of that data is being collected and being processed. And so it was a really remarkable thing.
But for a lot of people, you know, it sort of didn't register. You know, they just kind of ignored it and kept going. But it was, you know, the one thing that, you know, the physical infrastructure of China, you know, fundamentally changed.
If it works at home, why not do it overseas? It's a little harder because, you know, in China they own the networks, they can put cameras up, they have everybody's birth certificate, but they're doing their best to wire the world for Chinese surveillance.
That was Jim Lewis again. What Google was now witnessing, hackers inside its systems, that was the first glimpse that China was exporting its surveillance overseas.
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