> Even as the Middle East and Afghanistan dominated resources and attention in the years after 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies never stopped targeting China aggressively, according to former officials directly involved in those efforts. This intelligence focus intensified in the mid-2000s ...
> Revelations that a U.S.-made plane supplied to the Chinese president came riddled with eavesdropping devices is discomfiting China's leaders, but the low-key Chinese response so far suggests it won't upset efforts to improve ties, or a planned summit next month.
> China's government ordered the luxuriously outfitted plane, a modified Boeing 767, in mid-2000 for President Jiang Zemin, and a company owned by the Chinese air force flew it to Beijing in August. Within a few weeks, military technicians uncovered more than 20 listening devices, according to people familiar with the situation. Among the detected bugs were sophisticated models activated by satellite; one such device was found planted behind the headboard of the presidential bed, according to foreign diplomats and a Chinese scholar with military ties.
This reminds me of when I was in China in early 2020 and I felt like there were still places in many cities you could go without being seen with cameras. However in and around cities in Xinjiang, it was fairly impossible. Even on highways in the desert there's a camera every km or so, that I recall. I had my passport checked just to go into some buildings, like for example if the building was within a block of an elementary school...
Yep! They even had large barricades in front of schools to prevent vehicles/vehicle bomb attacks, as well as barbed wire around the schools, and officers on shifts with what appeared to be MP5s...
Anyway, somewhat more related, I recently learned about the Church of Scientology's Operation Snow White with over 5,000 covert agents in various branches of the US government. That's just a religious group! Imagine what other governments are trying to do, and the potential scale of covert actions we take.
The US's biggest strength is it's decentralization.
It creates multiple redundancies from the local level all the way to the federal level.
For 70-80% of QoL, most of that is impacted by your City Council, County Board, and School Board. There are so many of those that it's logistically impossible to influence.
Reminds me of this 2002 report, also from WSJ (https://archive.is/8zfgT):
> Revelations that a U.S.-made plane supplied to the Chinese president came riddled with eavesdropping devices is discomfiting China's leaders, but the low-key Chinese response so far suggests it won't upset efforts to improve ties, or a planned summit next month.
> China's government ordered the luxuriously outfitted plane, a modified Boeing 767, in mid-2000 for President Jiang Zemin, and a company owned by the Chinese air force flew it to Beijing in August. Within a few weeks, military technicians uncovered more than 20 listening devices, according to people familiar with the situation. Among the detected bugs were sophisticated models activated by satellite; one such device was found planted behind the headboard of the presidential bed, according to foreign diplomats and a Chinese scholar with military ties.