Last Friday, President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping announced the United States and the People’s Republic of China have “reached a common understanding on the way forward” with respect to cyber security and economic espionage – neither government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property for commercial purposes, and both governments will work towards establishing appropriate state behaviors and norms in cyberspace. Both leaders offered optimistic prognoses for cooperation between both nations.
Judging from the skepticism of top U.S. officials, however, it appears Chinese Americans, especially Chinese Americans employed in defense, tech, and energy sectors, can expect little relief from intense government scrutiny.
The U.S. has considered itself under sustained attack in a massive cyber-espionage campaign since the late ‘00s. Earlier this year, hackers tied to the Chinese government stole the personal information of over 21 million current, former, and prospective federal employees in the extensive OPM breach.
The U.S. Department of Justice is understandably eager to root out foreign spies stealing government and corporate secrets, but rampant fears of espionage, a lack of adequate technological expertise, and assumptions about race and national origin have ensnared innocent American citizens of Chinese descent in the criminal justice system. Dr. Xi Xiaoxing, a professor of physics and naturalized U.S. citizen, faced federal charges for giving scientists in China the schematics of a device used in superconductor research. It was only after indicting Dr. Xi that the federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents were forced to acknowledge the blueprints at issue were not what they had claimed before the grand jury and were not, in fact, schematics for sensitive American technology at all. His story is, unfortunately, not unique.
This agreement on cybertheft is genuinely a mark of progress, especially when one compares this recent accord to the results of 2013’s Obama-Xi summit. However, the anxieties provoked by our increasingly technologically-mediated conditions and concerns that China may renege at any time with few cognizable consequences mean that all of the factors that make Chinese Americans targets of profiling have not changed.
Despite the creation of the National Security Division in 2006 and the DOJ’s concerted effort to train more lawyers to address cyber threats to national security since 2012, the U.S. still wants for expertise in key sectors. This underlying shortage of science and tech experts in law enforcement increases the United States’ vulnerability to real threats posed to national interests and susceptible to imagined threats from unoffending Americans with Chinese ancestry.
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Szuwei Co is an editor on the Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review, and a member of the University Michigan Law School class of 2017.
Great piece, bring out the outcry and concern of a would-be victimized minority niche’ prospective, the U.S. policy makers should seriously focus on, if devotions and royalties, are to be extracted from all foreign talents !