Tag: espionage

Good News for TikTok Users: The PRC Definitely Isn’t Interested in Your Data (Just the Global Internet Backbone, Apparently)

If you’re a TikTok user who has ever worried, even a tiny bit, that the People’s Republic of China might have an interest in your behavior, preferences, movements, or social graph, take heart. A newly released Joint Cybersecurity Advisory from intelligence agencies in the United States, Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and a long list of allied intelligence agencies proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that the PRC is far too busy compromising the world’s telecommunications infrastructure to care about your TikTok “For You Page.”

Nothing to see here. Scroll on.

For those who like their reassurance with a side of evidence, the advisory—titled “Countering Chinese State Actors’ Compromise of Networks Worldwide to Feed Global Espionage System”—is one of the clearest, broadest warnings ever issued about a Chinese state-sponsored intrusion campaign. And, because the agencies involved designated it as not sensitive and may be shared publicly without restriction (TLP:CLEAR), you can read it yourself.

The World’s Telecom Backbones: Now Featuring Uninvited Guests

The intel agency advisory describes a “Typhoon class” global espionage ecosystem run through persistent compromises of backbone routers, provider-edge and customer-edge routers, ISP and telecom infrastructure, transportation networks, lodging and hospitality systems, government and military-adjacent networks.

This is not hypothetical. The advisory includes extremely detailed penetration chains: attackers exploit widely known “Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures” (CVEs) in routers, firewalls, VPNs, and management interfaces, then establish persistence through configuration modifications, traffic mirroring, injected services, and encrypted tunnels. This lets them monitor, redirect, copy, or exfiltrate traffic across entire service regions.

Put plainly: if your internet service provider has a heartbeat and publicly routable equipment, the attackers have probably knocked on the door. And for a depressingly large number of large-scale network operators, they got in.

This is classical intelligence tradecraft. The PRC’s immediate goal isn’t ransomware. It’s not crypto mining. It’s not vandalism. It’s good old-fashioned espionage: long-term access, silent monitoring, and selective exploitation.

What They’re Collecting: Clues About Intent

The advisory makes the overall aim explicit: to give PRC intelligence the ability to identify and track targets’ communications and movements worldwide.

That includes metadata on calls, enterprise-internal communications, hotel and travel itineraries, traffic patterns for government and defense systems, persistent vantage points on global networks.

This is signals intelligence (SIGINT), not smash-and-grab.

And importantly: this kind of operation requires enormous intelligence-analytic processing, not a general-purpose “LLM training dataset.” These are targeted, high-value accesses, not indiscriminate web scrapes. The attackers are going after specific information—strategic, diplomatic, military, infrastructure, and political—not broad consumer content.

So no, this advisory is not about “AI training.” It is about access, exfiltration, and situational awareness across vital global communications arteries.

Does This Tell Us Anything About TikTok?

Officially, no. The advisory never mentions TikTok, ByteDance, or consumer social media apps. It is focused squarely on infrastructure.

But from a strategic-intent standpoint, it absolutely matters. Because when you combine:

1. Global telecom-layer access
2. Persistent long-term SIGINT footholds
3. The PRC’s demonstrated appetite for foreign behavioral data
4. The existence of the richest behavioral dataset on Earth—TikTok’s U.S. user base

—you get a coherent picture of the intelligence ecosystem the Chinese Communist Party is building on…I guess you’d have to say “the world”.

If a nation-state is willing to invest years compromising backbone routers, it is not a stretch to imagine what they could do with a mobile app installed on the phones of oh say 170 million Americans to pick a random number that conveniently collects social graphs, location traces, contact patterns, engagement preferences, political and commercial interests that are visible in the PRC.

But again, don’t worry. The advisory suggests only that Chinese state actors have global access to the infrastructure over which your TikTok traffic travels—not that they would dare take an interest in the app itself. And besides, the TikTok executives swore under oath to the U.S. Congress that it didn’t happen that way so it must be true.

After all, why would a government running a worldwide intrusion program want access to the largest behavioral-data sensor array outside the NSA?

If you still believe the PRC is nowhere near TikTok’s data, then this advisory will reassure you: it’s just a gentle reminder that Chinese state actors are burrowed into global telecom backbones, hotel networks, transportation systems, and military-adjacent infrastructure—pure souls simply striving to make sure your “For You” page loads quickly.

After all, why would a government running a worldwide network-intrusion program have any interest in the richest behavioral dataset on Earth?

AI’s Manhattan Project Rhetoric, Clearance-Free Reality

Every time a tech CEO compares frontier AI to the Manhattan Project, take a breath—and remember what that actually means.  Master spycatcher James Jesus Angleton is rolling in his grave. (aka Matt Damon in The Good Shepherd.). And like most elevator pitch talking points, that analogy starts to fall apart on inspection.

The Manhattan Project wasn’t just a moonshot scientific collaboration. It was the most tightly controlled, security-obsessed R&D operation in American history. Every physicist, engineer, and janitor involved had a federal security clearance. Facilities were locked down under military command of General Leslie Groves. Communications were monitored. Access was compartmentalized. And still—still—the Soviets penetrated it.  See Klaus Fuchs.  Let’s understand just how secret the Manhattan Project was—General Curtis LeMay had no idea it was happening until he was asked to set up facilities for the Enola Gay on his bomber base on Tinian a few months before the first nuclear bomb.  You want to find out about the details of any frontier lab, just pick up the newspaper.  Not nearly the same thing. There were no chatbots involved and there were no Special Government Employees with no security clearance.

Oppie Sacks

So when today’s AI executives name-drop Oppenheimer and invoke the gravity of dual-use technologies, what exactly are they suggesting? That we’re building world-altering capabilities without any of the safeguards that even the AI Whiz Kids admit are historically necessary by their Manhattan Project talking point in the pitch deck?

These frontier labs aren’t locked down. They’re open-plan. They’re not vetting personnel. They’re recruiting from Discord servers. They’re not subject to classified environments. They’re training military-civilian dual-use models on consumer cloud platforms. And when questioned, they invoke private sector privilege and push back against any suggestion of state or federal regulation.  And here’s a newsflash—requiring a security clearance for scientific work in the vital national interest is not regulation.  (Neither is copyright but that’s another story.)

Meanwhile, they’re angling for access to Department of Energy nuclear real estate, government compute subsidies, and preferred status in export policy—all under the justification of “national security” because, you know, China.  They want the symbolism of the Manhattan Project without the substance. They want to be seen as indispensable without being held accountable.

The truth is that AI is dual-use. It can power logistics and surveillance, language learning and warfare. That’s not theoretical—it’s already happening. China openly treats AI as part of its military-civil fusion strategy. Russia has targeted U.S. systems with information warfare bots. And our labs? They’re scraping from the open internet and assuming the training data hasn’t been poisoned with the massive misinformation campaigns on Wikipedia, Reddit and X that are routine.

If even the Manhattan Project—run under maximum secrecy—was infiltrated by Soviet spies, what are the chances that today’s AI labs, operating in the wide open are immune?  Wouldn’t a good spycatcher like Angleton assume these wunderkinds have already been penetrated?

We have no standard vetting for employees. No security clearances. No model release controls. No audit trail for pretraining data integrity. And no clear protocol for foreign access to model weights, inference APIs, or sensitive safety infrastructure. It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when—or more likely, a matter of already.

Remember–nobody got rich out of working on the Manhattan Project. That’s another big difference. These guys are in it for the money, make no mistake.

So when you hear the Manhattan Project invoked again, ask the follow-up question: Where’s the security clearance?  Where’s the classification?  Where’s the real protection?  Who’s playing the role of Klaus Fuchs?

Because if AI is our new Manhattan Project, then running it without security is more than hypocrisy. It’s incompetence at scale.