“When Big Tech dismantles trust and safety teams, they stop policing their own platforms and expose U.S. service members to espionage from countries like China, Iran, and Russia. Despite repeated warnings about targeted spying online, companies like YouTube, X, and Instagram are a gift to our enemies and a weak link in U.S. national security. If Big Tech’s business model doesn’t give them any incentive to protect American interests, then Congress should step up and force them to take these threats seriously.”
– Sacha Haworth, Executive Director, The Tech Oversight Project
Background on Big Tech’s Ongoing National Security Failures
- A former trust and safety employee with TikTok shared with Congressional leaders that the platform was lying about spying from the Chinese government.
- Russian intelligence infiltrated right-wing media outfit Tenet Media and paid their influencers to publish pro-Russian content on YouTube.
- Apple provided customer data 96% of the time when asked by the Chinese government.
- Amazon has been accused by the USDA of aiding and abetting illegal imports from China in violation of the Animal Health Protection Act and Plant Protection Act, which led to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.
- Meta provides U.S. user data to mainland Chinese advertisers, and ad trackers estimate that Facebook’s revenue from Chinese advertisers may exceed $5 billion annually, making it the second-largest revenue source for Facebook after the U.S.
CBS News – China targeting U.S. service members on social media in “virtual espionage” spy efforts
Jim Axelrod, 1/28/25
The Chinese intelligence officer who convinced Thomas Zhao to hand over sensitive information about the U.S. military seemed to know the 24-year-old U.S. Navy petty officer had a passion for the stock market … But chats about investment strategies soon veered into sensitive areas, including questions about Naval exercises in the Pacific and designs for radar installations.
The Zhao case represents a new dimension to Chinese covert activities that counterintelligence officials are calling “virtual espionage.” The practice, in which Chinese intelligence officers target members of the military and others of high interest on social media, draw them into correspondence, and extract sensitive information from them, is a rising threat, officials told CBS News.
“They will turn over every stone to try and collect what they can,” Kevin Vorndran, who leads the FBI’s counterintelligence division, told CBS News in a rare television interview. “They are certainly endeavoring to target as many people as they can.”
Over the course of two years, a Chinese intelligence officer paid Zhao, a U.S. citizen and Navy engineer, about $15,000 to take photographs and videos of restricted areas at the Southern California base where he worked, court records revealed.
With his relatively low rank, as well as a low-level security clearance, Zhao may have seemed like an unlikely target. Yet Vorndran and other U.S. officials told CBS News that intelligence officers working for the Chinese government are trolling professional networking sites, including LinkedIn, to seduce an array of American service members and others who hold U.S. government security clearances into turning over sensitive information …
In the last two years, federal law enforcement has identified a dozen such cases and brought charges against four service members recruited by suspected undercover agents of China. Vorndran said given the difficulty in policing this kind of outreach, he’s concerned the number could be far higher.
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