Russia, Russia, Russia should have been China, China, China.

“Of all the things that surprised me since taking on the directorship, it was the breadth and depth and scale of the Chinese counterintelligence threat,” current FBI Director Christopher Wray told the RSA Security conference in San Francisco May 5.

For two years now, America’s been glued to the Mueller investigation of Russia’s cyber offensives and other activity. Long-term, it may turn out to be the wrong “Red Scare.” China’s intrusions and policies are the much bigger worry.

MUELLER TESTIFIES NO RUSSIA CONSPIRACY FOUND, BUT TRUMP NOT EXONERATED ON OBSTRUCTION

Understand, the FBI and DOJ have been chasing Russians for a hundred years. Literally.

It goes back to 1919, when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer organized raids to round up thousands of radicals and Bolsheviks with the help of the young J. Edgar Hoover. “Red” Communist Russia founded by Lenin and Stalin scared the daylights out of ordinary Americans from 1917 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Yes, there was a brief time-out for the World War II alliance against Nazi Germany. Then came the Cold War, Russia’s atomic bomb, the stain of McCarthyism, Khruschev, Sputnik, massive nuclear arsenals, and more.

To protect America, the FBI and DOJ chased real Russian threats and ran counterintelligence operations.

Hence the FBI was in position, on the counterintelligence trail of the Russians, when they picked up scent on the 2016 election. Watching the Russians watch the Trump campaign and transition looks to have been part of a larger counterintelligence effort, which included investigating the hacks of the DNC, RNC and about 1500 other political influencers in 2015 and 2016. And who knows what else.

It's China, not Russia, whose cyber villainy poses an immense threat to America.

The Department of Homeland Security helpfully released a report on some of the “Grizzly Steppe” Russian hacking on December 29, 2016.

And counterintelligence continued, of course. That same day, December 29, 2016, the Feds listened in as National Security Adviser designate Michael Flynn talked to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on the embassy office phone.

The Trump administration learned about this aspect of the counterintelligence work a month later. On January 26, 2017, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates went to the White House with the Flynn/Kislyak call transcripts. So began the chain of events exhaustively detailed in the Mueller report. The counterintelligence investigation was publicly acknowledged by then-Director James Comey in his March 2017 testimony to Congress.

The “Red Scare” was back.

Not surprisingly, the country got wrapped up worrying whether the Trump administration was in the clutches of the Russians.

Yet in the larger sense, this was the wrong “Red Scare.” After 2017, U.S. relations with Russia went downhill as the Trump administration gave lethal aid to Ukraine, set a new national military strategy, got serious with Iran and pulled out of the INF nuclear treaty.

The deeper “Red Scare” was hiding in plain sight all along. It's China, not Russia, whose cyber villainy poses an immense threat to America.

And it’s been going on a long time. China hacked into the federal Office of Personnel Management databases in 2013 and 2014. The OPM data heist exposed the personal information of over 22 million Americans.

China also stole secret material on the B-2 stealth bomber, F-35 fighter and on military laser, missile and submarine programs.

The FBI gets it. In December 2018, FBI Director Wray announced indictments of Chinese hackers who invaded major tech services companies including IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Computer Sciences Corporation. These firms have clients like Huntington Ingalls, nuclear-powered shipbuilder for the U.S. Navy.

China is “very active and we expect to see that continue,” Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at Crowdstrike, told Bloomberg in February.

Here’s the final word. “China’s pursuit of intellectual property, sensitive research and development plans, and U.S. Person data, remains a significant threat to the U.S. government and private sector,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told Congress.

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Are you scared now?

Don’t underestimate Russia. Their cyber tools are evil and expert. What past Red Scares taught us was that Russia was very, very good at propaganda and sowing fear. But from here on out the “Red Scare” is and should be all about China.

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