CCP-University Links? – USA Gov Policy

A letter was sent from Rep. Mike Gallagher, of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Wednesday evening seeking an answer. The simple question in it: Why is New York’s Alfred University receiving a $13.5 million grant to conduct hypersonic weapons research when they have close ties to China? “One university in particular – Alfred – was hosting a Confucius Institute and partnering with a Chinese university ‘actively engaged in defense research’ on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA),” Gallagher wrote. “To put it plainly, DOD is funding advanced, hypersonic weapons-related research at an American university that actively partners with a Chinese university that performs similar research for the PLA. We seek additional information regarding this alarming matter and the DOD’s efforts to safeguard sensitive U.S. military research.”

Recently, Rep. Jim Banks sent the Secretary of Defense a letter asking another “simple” question… Why are colleges seeking waivers to grant Confucius Institutes allowed to do so when they are known avenues China uses for spying and still receiving federal funding from DOD to conduct military research. So far, American taxpayer dollars have provided over $17 million to fund advanced research at Alfred University although the Biden Administration is aware that the school actively partners with a Chinese research institution working closely with the Chinese military.

Rep. Gallagher is calling for the US Government to put “hard power” in the path of China’s President Xi Jinping. Gallagher told Fox News Digital that “It is not a secret that the CCP uses Confucius Institutes to project ‘soft power,’ but it’s time to shed light on how the CCP also uses these institutes to build Chinese ‘hard power’ weapons that could be used against Americans in a future conflict.” The research grant will be in violation of the law as of October 1, 2023,” per Section 1062 of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which prohibits DOD from administering funds to “institution[s] of higher education that hosts a Confucius Institute’ after October 1, 2023.” The question remains as to why there is no immediate action by Alfred University now.

Rep. Gallagher’s letter, which comes a month after Rep. Bank’s request, asks for “additional information regarding DOD’s efforts to protect sensitive national security and American taxpayer-funded research from theft or compromise,” given the university’s Confucius Institute in conjunction with its “research agreement with China University of Geosciences in Wuhan,” which currently maintains a research center whose research area is “closely related” to that of Alfred University’s. It appears that the Biden Administration is allowing American taxpayers to fund Chinese military research in areas that threaten US national security. Intelligence analysts in Washington are puzzled about why this has not been halted immediately and funding rescinded from these programs.

This is not a new issue for the Biden Administration. The President’s own political appointee to head the CIA, Nick Burns, in a Congressional hearing on February 24, 2021, stated that American universities and colleges should “cut ties” to China’s Confucius Institutes after calling them propaganda tools. In the hearing he added: “I think what the Confucius Institutes do, and I’m no expert on them, is to promote a narrative of Xi Jinping’s China, which is designed to build sympathy for what is, in my view, a quite aggressive leadership, which is engaged in conduct and conducted an adversarial approach to relations with the United States… that particular dimension of foreign influence operations constitutes a genuine risk… my advice for any institutions in the United States, including academic institutions, is to be extraordinarily careful of what the motives are for a variety of institutions like that and to be very careful in engaging them.” Analysts are asking if anyone in the Biden White House was listening to its own appointee? The miscalculations and misinterpretation of Chinese of Chinese actions are emerging as a greater threat than in the past as agents of the CCP infiltrate more and more American institutions, draining our competitive advantage and increasing the threat to US national security.

Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.

Illustration: Pixabay

Quick Analysis

Long Term Effects of Putin’s Ukraine War

“The war in Ukraine is leading both Moscow and Kyiv to engage in increased cyberattacks that are destructive to both infrastructure and civilian lives from meddling with energy networks to manipulating people into committing violent acts,” according to Luke Rodeheffer of the Jamestown Foundation. Both sides are engaging in activities that will leave their mark on the world for years to come as the war has increasingly blurred the lines of official state actions and those of non-state cyber actors. Criminal hacking groups and official intelligence organizations are developing working relationships that offer attractive opportunities to collaborate with good pay. As the kinetic war drifts into the cyberspace domain, some members of government agencies are moonlighting as hackers and coordinating their activities over the Internet. Early on in the war Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, announced that the country needed a volunteer Information Technology (IT) Army capable of coordinating activities against Russian targets using Telegram. Today that IT Army distributes free hacking tools to its volunteers for conducting cyberattacks on the Russian infrastructure and companies. Using tens of thousands of network devices, Ukraine’s volunteers have had success in performing distributed-denial-of-service attacks. “Ukraine has conducted a large-scale call center fraud operation targeting Russia, particularly older and more gullible Russian citizens, which is forcing the Russian state to increase surveillance on communication networks,” says Rodeheffer. In late June the IT Army overwhelmed Russian target Internet infrastructure with “connection requests” that ultimately led to interruptions in Mir, Russia’s national payment card system, according to Lizzie Simpson writing for Habr. She quotes a Forbes interlocutor in the Russian information security industry as saying: “The attack is 100%, and this is the work of the IT army of Ukraine.” Confirmed attacks such as the Mir incident are changing the character of warfare and are challenging for international security networks to control. The intensity and breadth of the attacks continues to increase on both sides of the conflict, however, it started long before the invasion. As early as 2010, there are indications Russia engaged in destructive cyberattacks against Ukraine. One of the most egregious strikes occurred in the winter of 2015 against the country’s power grid. Years before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia used hacks to shut down the computer infrastructure of TV channels in the country, according to an expert involved in the investigation of one of the episodes. Russia carried it out in a “multi-stage secret infection of information networks,” says Vsevolod Nekrasov of Epravda. Russia often employs these weapons against Ukraine in its current war effort against the civilian infrastructure. Using malware capable of permanently erasing data, Russia is seen as the likely sponsor of last December’s attack on Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest telecommunications company. It resulted in extensive interruptions in telephone and Internet services that disabled the country for weeks. Kyivstar called it “catastrophic” at the time. In April, a response by a Ukrainian security services linked group called “Ukrainian Blackjack,” responded in kind by targeting a Russian data center utilized by several Large Russian companies and defense-related conglomerates. NV.ua reports that the group destroyed 300 terabytes (TB) of data. A DVD-R holds 4.7 GB. One would need 63,830 DVD’s to hold 300 TB of data! Ukraine has also targeted public figures in Russia linked to the war including high-ranking Duma members and policymakers focusing on the Middle East and Central Asia. Two of those, Alexander Babakov and Semyon Bagdasarov were close confidants of Putin. Their emails exposed sensitive detailed plans on how Russia planned to work with Iran to avoid sanctions. Simultaneously with the increase in cyberattacks, is a corresponding rise in cybercrime aimed at the Russian citizenry. Many of these incidents were in the form of fraud calls tricking Russians into transferring money out of the country or revealing personal information, according to RIA Novosti. “The scale of Ukrainian cybercrime has provided Moscow with additional justification to bolster its internal communications surveillance systems, under the auspices of detecting fraudulent phone calls,” says Rodeheffer. Radio Svoboda is reporting that it is also being used as an excuse to rush the integration of the occupied regions of Ukraine into Russia’s telecommunications systems and SORM, the communications surveillance system. What is most problematic is that the criminal elements involved may make it difficult to dismantle this “underground” after the war ends, says Rodeheffer. What is tolerated during a war, including the need for questionable characters with technical expertise, may lead to a new type of 21-century warfare that extends beyond the current geography of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It could end up as a battle for the survival of both Western military and civilian infrastructures.