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Description
The United States has been locked in competition with the People’s Republic of China (henceforth China or PRC) across military, ideological, political, and economic domains for quite some time. However, the emergence of the “Made in China 2025” industrial policies indicates the aspiration of the PRC to catch up with and surpass the technological capabilities of Western nations in critical industries at any cost. In order to spur development in these capital-intensive and research-intensive fields, the PRC has leveraged the interrelation between state security and intelligence services and Chinese industry to conduct economic espionage. Countering these efforts is and will remain a key priority to defend the nation’s economic, military, and political power. To facilitate this collection of information and intellectual property, PRC intelligence services and Chinese corporations employ traditional human intelligence techniques at a large scale to include the use of non-traditional collectors. These non-traditional collectors are essentially individuals who are outside of the traditional intelligence spheres but nonetheless collect sensitive information on behalf of a foreign government. These non-traditional collectors can be business people, students, or engineers who collect information, recruit agents, and co-opt individuals and organizations. This threat differs from previous historical examples in terms of the number of financial resources and collectors that can and have been employed to accomplish this economic espionage. The key to countering this threat is to understand the tactics employed by non-traditional collectors.
