FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tuesday on NBC’s “Nightly News” that when he learned how widespread Chinese spying in the U.S. was, it blew him away.
Reporter Pete Williams said, “Christopher Wray said when he became FBI director, the sheer amount of Chinese spying to steal American technology was a huge surprise.”
Wray said, “This one blew me away. And I’m not the kind of guy that uses words like ‘blown away’ easily. We are opening a new China-related counterintelligence investigation about every 12 hours. We probably have over 2,000 of those investigations.”
He continued, “There is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas and our economic security than China does. I’m referring not to the Chinese people, not to people of Chinese descent or heritage. What we’re talking about here is the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.”
He added, “The scale of their hacking program and the amount of personal and corporate data their hackers have stolen is greater than every other country combined. China may be the first country to combine that kind of authoritarian ambition with cutting-edge technical capability. It’s like the surveillance nightmare of East Germany combined with the tech of Silicon Valley.”
Wray concluded, “We don’t investigate based on race, or ethnicity, or constitutionally protected activity. In fact, in many cases, Chinese Americans are some of the people most victimized by the Chinese government’s tactics that we’re describing.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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