Intelligence officials discussed the threat posed by China to U.S. intellectual property, technology secrets and consumer data during the Defense One Tech Summit , C4ISRNET reported Friday. John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security at the Department of Justice, said China is homing in on IP across artificial intelligence, agriculture, high-speed rail and other technology areas.
“Ninety percent of our espionage cases that [are] the theft of intellectual property or state secrets on behalf of the state itself involve China,†said Demers. “If you want to know where they’re looking, look at the main China 2025 plan. If your company has technology that falls into any of those areas of advanced technology … then you have a risk.â€
William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, also discussed China’s efforts to steal data and its potential risks to the U.S. as the latter advances the 5G network technology and AI capabilities.
“If we’re developing AI here in the U.S., we have to find data sharing agreements to test a lot of these algorithms. The People’s Republic of China does not have to do that because they have petabytes upon petabytes upon petabytes of stolen data … that they can use,†said Evanina.