The reality is, China is watching. They are also listening, intercepting, and stealing.
Earlier this month, The Drill Down reported on FBI Director Christopher Wray and MI5 Director General Ken McCallum’s warning about the lengths to which China is willing to go in order to steal American technology; they call it “the most game-changing challenge we face.”
“I’ll start with what this danger looks like,” Wray said. “The Chinese government is set on stealing your technology—whatever it is that makes your industry tick—and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”
“We’ve even caught people affiliated with Chinese companies out in the U.S. heartland, sneaking into fields to dig up proprietary, genetically modified seeds, which would have cost them nearly a decade and billions in research to develop themselves,” Wray added.
With the warnings of Wray and McCallum in mind, we’re presented with a development in North Dakota that should give every American citizen pause: China-based food producer Fufeng Group has purchased 300 acres in North Dakota to build a corn-milling plant.
A location that’s 20 minutes away from Grand Forks Air Force Base.
The move puts China uncomfortably close to the U.S. Air Force base —which also has a space-networking center that’s been characterized as “the backbone of all US military communications across the globe,” according to CNBC.
Air Force Major Jeremy Fox wrote a memo back in April after the purchase.
“Some of the most sensitive elements of Grand Forks exist with the digital uplinks and downlinks inherent with unmanned air systems and their interaction with space-based assets,” Fox wrote, adding such interceptions would “present a costly national security risk causing grave damage to United States’ strategic advantages.”
“Passive collection of those signals would be undetectable, as the requirements to do so would merely require ordinary antennas tuned to the right collecting frequencies,” Fox says. “This introduces a grave vulnerability to our Department of Defense installations and is incredibly compromising to US National Security.”
“I can’t imagine anyone that we hire that’s going to even do that,” Fufeng USA chief operating officer Eric Chutorash told CNBC, saying he knew the company “absolutely” would not spy on US military interests.
I wonder if Mr. Chutorash can imagine Chinese IP thieves digging up seeds.
China has purchased 200,000 acres of US agricultural land worth $1.9 billion —and not enough people are sounding the alarm.
