China’s main intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, under its growing ambition to come on par with the CIA, has lately built itself through wider recruitment, including of American citizens and has also sharpened itself through better training, a bigger budget and the use of advanced technologies, New York Times reported.
This is being done under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s goal for the nation to rival the United States as the world’s pre-eminent economic and military power.
In the meetings during the pandemic, the Chinese spies complained that surveillance cameras tracking foreign diplomats, military officers and intelligence operatives in Beijing’s embassy district fell short of their needs.
They asked for an AI programme that can create instant dossiers on every person of interest in the area and analyse their behaviour patterns. They also proposed feeding the AI programme information from databases and scores of cameras that would include car licence plates, cellphone data, contacts and more.
NYT reported, citing internal meeting memos, that the AI-generated profiles would allow the Chinese spies to select targets and pinpoint their networks and vulnerabilities.
The Chinese agency, known as the MSS, once rife with agents whose main source of information was gossip at embassy dinner parties, is now going toe-to-toe with the Central Intelligence Agency in collection and subterfuge around the world.
Today, the Chinese agents in Beijing have what they asked for: an AI system that tracks American spies and others, NYT reported, citing US officials.
At the same time, as CIA spending on China has doubled under the Biden administration, the United States has sharply stepped up its spying on Chinese companies and their technological advances.
Notably, the competition between the American and Chinese spy agencies harks back to the KGB-versus-CIA rivalry of the Cold War. In that era, the Soviets built an agency that could pilfer America’s most closely held secrets and run covert operations while also producing formidable political leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However, a notable difference here is that China’s economic boom and industrial policies is helping the MSS is able to use emerging technologies like AI to challenge American spymasters in a way the Soviets could not. “For China in particular, exploiting the existing technology or trade secrets of others has become a popular shortcut encouraged by the government,” said Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based research institute. “The urgency and intensity of technological espionage have increased significantly.”
The MSS has intensified its intelligence collection on American companies developing technology for both military and civilian uses, while the CIA, in a change from even a few years ago, is pouring resources into collecting data on Chinese companies developing AI, quantum computing and other such tools.
David Cohen, the agency’s deputy director, said that under President Biden, the CIA was making investments and reorganising to meet the challenge of collecting on Chinese advances. The agency has started both a China mission center and a technology intelligence center.
“We’ve been counting tanks and understanding the capability of missiles for longer than we have been as sharply focused on the capability of semiconductors or AI algorithms or biotech equipment,” the New York Times quoted Cohen as saying in an interview.