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      China’s Hacking Reached Deep Into U.S. Telecoms

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      The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said hackers listened to phone calls and read texts by exploiting aging equipment and seams in the networks that connect systems.China’s recent breach of the innermost workings of the U.S. telecommunications system reached far deeper than the Biden administration has described, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday, with hackers able to listen in on telephone conversations and read text messages.“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” the Democratic chairman, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a former telecommunications executive, said in an interview on Thursday.Mr. Warner said he had been stunned by the scope and depth of the breach, which was engineered over the past year by a group linked to Chinese intelligence that has been named Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, whose cybersecurity team discovered the hack in the summer. Government officials have been struggling to understand what China obtained and how it might have been able to monitor conversations held by a number of well-connected Americans, including President-elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.At first, the F.B.I. and other investigators believed that China’s hackers used stolen passwords to focus mostly on the system that taps telephone conversations and texts under court orders. It is administered by a number of the nation’s telecommunications firms, including the three largest — Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. But in recent days, investigators have discovered how deeply China’s hackers had moved throughout the country by exploiting aging equipment and seams in the networks connecting disparate systems.U.S. officials said that since the hack was exposed, the Chinese intruders had seemingly disappeared, suspending their intrusion so their full activity could not be discovered. But Mr. Warner said it would be wrong to conclude that the Chinese had been ousted from the nation’s telecommunications system, or that investigators even understood how deeply they were embedded.“We’ve not found everywhere they are,” Mr. Warner said.The committee has received briefings from the government on the hack, and Mr. Warner has had conversations with telecommunications executives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      Dozens of Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Leaders Sentenced in Mass Trial

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      The 45 defendants, including Joshua Wong, were at the forefront of the opposition movement crushed by Beijing. Many have already been in jail for years.A Hong Kong court on Tuesday sentenced 45 former politicians and activists in a mass trial that has decimated the city’s once vibrant pro-democracy opposition and served as a warning that resistance to Beijing can be costly.The landmark trial is the most forceful use of a national security law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 in response to months of large protests against Chinese rule. The prosecution of the activists, the vanguard of Hong Kong’s opposition, has delivered what experts described as a knockout blow to hopes for democracy in the city.Their offense, according to the authorities: holding or taking part in an unofficial primary election.In one fell swoop in 2021, the authorities arrested Benny Tai, 60, a legal scholar and opposition strategist; Joshua Wong, 28, a prominent pro-democracy activist; and dozens of others, including veteran former lawmakers and younger politicians who called for self-determination for Hong Kong. Mr. Tai was sentenced on Tuesday to 10 years in prison. Several opposition politicians and activists, including Au Nok Hin, Andrew Chiu and Ben Chung, were handed terms of around six and seven years each. Mr. Wong was given a sentence of about four years and eight months.The trial made clear that any form of dissent or criticism, however moderate, carried significant risk, analysts said. “If you are being critical of the authorities both in Hong Kong and in China, then it’s open season,” Steve Tsang, a Hong Kong-born political scientist and director of the SOAS China Institute in London, said in an interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Biden heads for last meeting with Xi Jinping before Trump takes office

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      Joe Biden will meet with Xi Jinping Saturday afternoon in what is expected to be the last time the two leaders meet before Donald Trump assumes the US presidency in January.The two leaders are attending the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) summit in Peru and are expected to have a meeting on the sidelines of the summit.The White House said that Biden will communicate that the two countries need to maintain “stability, clarity and predictability through this transition”.“Transitions are uniquely consequential moments in geopolitics. They’re a time when competitors and adversaries can see possible opportunity,” Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said earlier this week.Biden is expected to talk with the Chinese president about increasing Chinese efforts to halt North Korea’s escalating role in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. In recent weeks, the Pentagon and Nato confirmed that about 10,000 North Korean troops were sent to help Russia’s offense in Ukraine.Biden met on Friday with Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean president, and Shigeru Ishiba, the Japanese prime minister, and affirmed the alliance among the three countries. The three leaders agreed that “it should not be in Beijing’s interest to have this kind of destabilizing cooperation take place in the region”, a senior administration official said in a briefing on background.Trump’s imminent return to the White House casts a dark shadow over the conversation as it remains unclear what his second term will mean for the relationship between the US and China.On the campaign trail, Trump touted a hawkish approach to China, promising to increase tariffs to 60% on Chinese imports, which could be as much as $500bn worth of goods. Trump has also promised to end Russia’s war in Ukraine “in 24 hours”, which some fear means decreasing the flow of military aid to Ukraine or pushing the country to lose territory to Russia. A general backing away from the conflict could give room for China to step up as an intermediary, increasing its presence on the global stage.Among Trump’s blitz of cabinet nominee announcements was the appointments of Florida senator Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Republican representative Mike Waltz as national security adviser, both of whom have have voiced hawkish views on China.Xi congratulated Trump on his election win earlier this month, saying that their two countries must “get along with each other in the new era”, in a statement.“A stable, healthy and sustainable China-US relationship is in the common interest of both countries and is in line with the expectations of the international community,” Xi said.But in prepared remarks at Apec earlier in the week, Xi took on a more foreboding tone, saying that the world has “entered a new period of turbulence and transformation” and proffered vague warnings of “spreading unilateralism and protectionism”.Adding more uncertainty to the relationship between the two countries, US officials have been on edge in recent weeks about an FBI investigation showing that the Chinese government tried to hack into US telecommunications networks to try to steal the information of American government workers and politicians. Officials said last month that operations linked to China targeted the phone of Trump and running mate JD Vance, along with staff of Kamala Harris. More

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      Trump Has Put an End to an Era. The Future Is Up for Grabs.

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      Kamala Harris lost the presidential election, but one of her campaign slogans was vindicated in defeat. “We’re not going back!” the Democratic nominee insisted on the campaign trail, and she was unintentionally correct: Donald Trump’s return to power is proof that we have lived through a real turning point in history, an irrevocable shift from one era to the next.In Trump’s first term, he did not look like a historically transformative president. His victory was narrow, he lacked real majority support, he was swiftly unpopular and stymied and harassed.Even if his 2016 upset proved that discontent with the official consensus of the Western world ran unexpectedly deep, the way he governed made it easy to regard his presidency as accidental and aberrant — a break from a “normal” world of politics that some set of authority figures could successfully reimpose.Much of the opposition to his presidency was organized around this hope, and the election of Joe Biden seemed like vindication: Here was the restoration, the return of the grown-ups, normality restored.But somewhere in this drama, probably somewhere between the first reports of a deadly flu in Wuhan, China, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, one of history’s wheels turned irrevocably, and the normal that Trump’s opponents aspired to recover slipped definitively into the past.A restoration? No: The post-Cold War era has ended, and we’re not going back.This may sound a bit like the most alarmist interpretations of the Trump era — that we are exiting the liberal democratic age and entering an autocratic, or at least authoritarian, American future.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Here’s How Trump Could Lose the Coming Trade War

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      The good news: I don’t think Donald Trump will cause a global trade war.The bad news: The reason I say that is I believe that a trade war would be coming even if Trump had lost the election, largely because China is refusing to act like a responsible economic superpower. Unfortunately, Trump may be the worst possible person to guide U.S. policy through the turmoil that’s probably ahead.He won’t be the reason we have a trade war, but he may well be the reason we lose it.China is the greatest economic success story in history. It used to be very poor; there are still many people alive who remember the great famine of 1959-61. But after the reforms that began in 1978 its economy soared. Even now, China is only a middle-income country, with G.D.P. per capita substantially lower than ours or in Western Europe. But China has a huge population, so by some measures it is now the world’s largest economy.However, all indications are that China’s era of torrid economic growth is behind it. For decades, Chinese growth was fueled mainly by two things: a rising working-age population and rapid productivity growth driven by borrowed technology. But the working-age population peaked around a decade ago and is now falling. And despite some impressive achievements, the overall rate of technological progress in China, which economists measure by looking at “total factor productivity,” appears to have slowed to a crawl.But a growth slowdown doesn’t have to be a catastrophe. Japan went through a similar demographic and technological downshift in the 1990s and has, on the whole, handled it fairly gracefully, avoiding mass unemployment and social unrest.China, however, has built an economic system designed for the high-growth era — a system that suppresses consumer spending and encourages very high rates of investment.This system was workable as long as supercharged economic growth created the need for ever more factories, office buildings and so on, so that high investment could find productive uses. But while an economy growing at, say, 9 percent a year can productively invest 40 percent of G.D.P., an economy growing at 3 percent can’t.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

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      After Deadly Car Rampage, Chinese Officials Censor and Obstruct

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      Workers cleared away flowers laid at the site of the attack, while censors scrubbed online criticism. The goal is to stifle potential questions and criticism.Two days after the deadliest known violent attack in China in a decade, officials were working to make it seem as if nothing had happened.Outside the sports center in the southern city of Zhuhai where a 62-year-old man had plowed an S.U.V. into a crowd, killing at least 35 people, workers on Wednesday quickly removed bouquets of flowers left by grieving residents. Uniformed police officers and officials in plainclothes shooed away bystanders and warned them not to take photos. At hospitals where patients were taken after the attack — at least 43 more people were injured — local officials sat outside the intensive care units, blocking journalists from speaking with family members.“I’m here keeping watch,” one man, who identified himself as a local community worker, said when reporters entered the ward. “No interviews.”On the Chinese internet, censors were mobilized to delete videos, news articles and commentaries about the attack. Almost 24 hours had passed before officials divulged details about the assault, which happened on Monday, including the death toll. Their statement offered limited details, and they have held no news conferences.The response was a precise enactment of the Chinese government’s usual playbook after mass tragedies: Prevent any nonofficial voices, including eyewitnesses and survivors, from speaking about the event. Spread assurances of stability. Minimize public displays of grief.The goal is to stifle potential questions and criticism of the authorities, and force the public to move on as quickly as possible. And to a large degree, it appeared to be working.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Once They Were Neocons. Now Trump’s Foreign Policy Picks Are All ‘America First.’

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      The Republican Party used to have a label for the kind of foreign policy hawk that President-elect Donald J. Trump named on Tuesday as his national security adviser and is considering as his secretary of state: neocons.But while they once were neoconservatives, over the past few years Representative Michael Waltz and Senator Marco Rubio, both of Florida, have gradually shifted their positions. Sounding less like former Vice President Dick Cheney or John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, they no longer talk about foreign interventions or the prospects of regime change. Instead, they speak the language of the “America First” movement, and fit more comfortably within Mr. Trump’s often erratic worldview, in which deal-making reigns over ideology.The result is that Mr. Trump may end up with a foreign policy team composed of deep loyalists, but with roots in familiar Republican approaches. The shift that the two men have made reflects the broader marginalization of neocons throughout the Republican Party after the disaster in Iraq and the rise of America First.Mr. Trump’s loyalists, and much of the party, have now made a full conversion to that worldview, few more enthusiastically than Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host who was chosen as defense secretary on Tuesday.Mr. Hegseth channels both Mr. Trump’s avowed isolationism and his impulsive interventionism. He has also backed Mr. Trump’s occasional use of force, notably the order to killing a senior Iranian general in January 2020. Mr. Hegseth, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, described his own conversion to America First to The New York Times four years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump expected to appoint China critics Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz

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      President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly decided to appoint the prominent China hawks Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz as his respective secretary of state and national security adviser.Rubio was arguably the most hawkish option on Trump’s shortlist for secretary of state, and he has in past years advocated for a muscular foreign policy with respect to America’s geopolitical foes, including China, Iran and Cuba.Over the past several years the Florida senator has softened some of his stances to align more closely with Trump’s views. The president-elect accuses past US presidents of leading America into costly and futile wars and has pushed for a more restrained foreign policy.A failed challenger to Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, Rubio had been rumored to be one of the leading contenders for Trump’s vice-presidential pick before JD Vance was announced.Since his failed run for president, Rubio has served as an informal foreign policy adviser and helped Trump prepare for his first debate against Biden in 2020.Trump has not confirmed the planned appointment, which was first reported by the New York Times. If confirmed, Rubio would be the first Latino to serve as America’s top diplomat once the Republican president-elect takes office in January.While the famously mercurial Trump could always change his mind at the last minute, he appeared to have settled on his pick as of Monday, sources told Reuters.While Rubio was far from the most isolationist option, his likely selection nonetheless underlines a broad shift in Republican foreign policy views under Trump.Once the party of hawks who advocated military intervention and a muscular foreign policy, most of Trump’s allies now preach restraint, particularly in Europe, where many Republicans complain US allies are not paying their fair share on defense.“I’m not on Russia’s side – but unfortunately the reality of it is that the way the war in Ukraine is going to end is with a negotiated settlement,” Rubio told NBC in September.Waltz, a Republican congressman and Trump loyalist who served in the national guard as a colonel, has criticized Chinese activity in the Asia-Pacific and voiced the need for the US to be ready for a potential conflict in the region.Last week, Waltz won re-election to the US House seat representing east-central Florida, which includes Daytona Beach. He defeated the Democrat James Stockton, a pastor and former president of a local NAACP branch.Waltz is a combat-decorated Green Beret and a former White House and Pentagon policy adviser. He was first elected in 2018, replacing the Republican Ron DeSantis, who ran for governor, in Florida’s sixth congressional district.Waltz served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan, and he was awarded four Bronze Stars. He was one of the lawmakers appointed in July to serve on a bipartisan congressional taskforce to investigate the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.After Waltz left the US army, he worked in the Pentagon in the George W Bush administration as policy director for former defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates.Under the former vice-president Dick Cheney, Waltz served as a counter-terrorism adviser.In 2021, after Joe Biden ordered a chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan, Waltz asked Biden to reverse course and relaunch military operations in the region. The war in Afghanistan began under Bush after the 11 September 2001 attacks.The Intercept reported that before his run for Congress in 2018 Waltz managed a lucrative defense contracting firm with offices in Afghanistan.Waltz has consistently expressed the need for protecting the Afghan people, saying that US “soldiers will have to go back”. Government reports have stated that US nation-building efforts resulted in the deaths of more than 48,000 civilians and 66,000 Afghan police and military, and widespread torture.In other developments on Trump’s appointments, the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, has been picked to become the next secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, CNN reported on Tuesday, citing two sources.Earlier this year, Noem was widely seen as a potential presidential running mate for Trump. She lost out after recycling a two-decade-old story designed to illustrate decisive leadership that involved her shooting dead a puppy that did not hunt and had bitten members of her family.Reuters contributed to this report More