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    China’s Spy Agencies Are Investing Heavily in A.I., Researchers Say

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    A new report comes amid rising concern about how China will use new tools to power covert actions, as Western intelligence services also embrace the technology.Chinese spy services have invested heavily in artificial intelligence to create new tools to speed analysis, provide early warning of threats and potentially help shape operational plans during a war, according to a new report.China, like the United States, hopes that artificial intelligence will improve the efficiency and accuracy of its intelligence analysis, allowing it to collect more intelligence and analyze it faster and more cheaply.The study, by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group, which studies cybersecurity and other threats from nation-states, terrorists and criminal groups, comes amid rising concern about how Chinese spy agencies will use A.I. to power covert actions, as Western intelligence services also embrace the technology.The researchers reviewed patent applications by the People’s Liberation Army, publicly available contracts and other material to better understand how China’s military and intelligence services have invested in artificial intelligence.Recorded Future found that China is probably using a mix of large language models, technology that can analyze huge amounts of data and communicate its results in human language. Meta and OpenAI are thought to be among the American models that China is using, along with Chinese models from DeepSeek, Zhipu AI and others.The C.I.A. and other American spy agencies have stepped up their use of artificial intelligence, both to improve analytic work and to help overseas operatives remain undiscovered. One tool developed by the C.I.A. is designed to help analysts assess the positions of foreign leaders, creating virtual versions of the officials that are powered by artificial intelligence.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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      John L. Young, 89, Dies; Pioneered Posting Classified Documents Online

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      His site, Cryptome, was a precursor to WikiLeaks, and in some ways bolder in its no-holds-barred approach to exposing government secrets.John L. Young, who used his experience as a computer-savvy architect to help build Cryptome, a vast library of sensitive documents that both preceded WikiLeaks and in some ways outdid it in its no-holds-barred approach to exposing government secrets, died on March 28 at a rehabilitation facility in Manhattan. He was 89.His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was from complications of large-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife, Deborah Natsios, said.Cryptome, which Mr. Young and Ms. Natsios, the daughter of a C.I.A. officer, founded in 1996, offers up a grab-bag of leaked and obscure public-domain documents, presented in reverse chronological order and in a bare-bones, courier-fonted display, as if they had been written on a typewriter.The 70,000 documents on the site range from the seemingly innocuous — a course catalog from the National Intelligence University — to the clearly top secret: Over the years, Mr. Young exposed the identities of hundreds of intelligence operatives in the United States, Britain and Japan.“I’m a fierce opponent of government secrets of all kinds,” he told The Associated Press in 2013. “The scale is tipped so far the other way that I’m willing to stick my neck out and say there should be none.”Though he received frequent visits from the F.B.I. and his internet service providers occasionally cut off his website for fear of legal entanglements, he was never charged with a crime, and Cryptome was always soon back online.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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      Official Pushed to Rewrite Intelligence So It Could Not Be ‘Used Against’ Trump

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      An assessment contradicted a presidential proclamation. A political appointee demanded a redo, then pushed for changes to the new analysis, too.New emails document how a top aide to Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, ordered analysts to edit an assessment with the hope of insulating President Trump and Ms. Gabbard from being attacked for the administration’s claim that Venezuela’s government controls a criminal gang.“We need to do some rewriting” and more analytic work “so this document is not used against the DNI or POTUS,” Joe Kent, the chief of staff to Ms. Gabbard, wrote in an email to a group of intelligence officials on April 3, using shorthand for Ms. Gabbard’s position and for the president of the United States.The New York Times reported last week that Mr. Kent had pushed analysts to redo their assessment, dated Feb. 26, of the relationship between Venezuela’s government and the gang, Tren de Aragua, after it came to light that the assessment contradicted a subsequent claim by Mr. Trump. The disclosure of the precise language of Mr. Kent’s emails has added to the emerging picture of a politicized intervention.The final memo, which is dated April 7 and has since become public, still contradicts a key claim that Mr. Trump made to justify sending people accused of being members of the gang to a notorious Salvadoran prison without due process.Emails on the topic from Mr. Kent, who is also Mr. Trump’s pending nominee to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, have circulated within the intelligence community and were described by people briefed on them. Mr. Kent’s interventions have raised internal alarms about politicizing intelligence analysis.Defenders of Mr. Kent have disputed that his attempted intervention was part of a pressure campaign, arguing he was trying to show more of what the intelligence community knew about the gang.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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      Biden’s Interview With Hur Confirms What Many Suspected

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      The former president’s halting responses to questions by a special counsel show him exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be — and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.For much of his time in the White House, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. offered a quick rebuttal to those raising concerns about his age: “Watch me,” he said.Yet, in the end, it may be the sound of Mr. Biden’s own voice that proves what his aides worked furiously, and spent hundreds of millions of campaign dollars, to try to keep the public from seeing with its own eyes.The five-hour-and-10-minute audio recording of a special counsel’s interview with Mr. Biden on Oct. 8 and 9, 2023, shows a president struggling to recall dates and details, whose thoughts seem jumbled as he tries to recreate events that had occurred just a few years earlier.The information in the audio recording, which Axios published on Saturday, is not new. The 258-page transcript of the interview of Mr. Biden by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified documents, was released in March 2024. His report set off a political firestorm in the midst of the president’s re-election campaign.But the sound of Mr. Biden’s fragile voice and unsteady responses offers a revelation of its own. The Hur tapes reveal the president exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be — and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.In the days after Mr. Hur released his report, Democrats fanned out across the news media to vouch for the president, assuring the public of their eyewitness vantage point on his deep knowledge and sure-handed command of the nation and the world. He was “sharp” and at the “top of his game,” they said almost in unison. He was “focused, impressive, formidable and effective,” as Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, one of the youngest leading Democrats, put it memorably. Biden administration officials declined to release the audio recording of his interview, asserting executive privilege.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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      Ex-Army Sergeant Gets 7 Years for Selling Military Secrets to Chinese Conspirator

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      Korbein Schultz, 25, who was an intelligence analyst, accepted $42,000 in bribes for sensitive documents, prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty in 2024.A former U.S. Army intelligence analyst with top secret security clearance was sentenced to seven years in prison on Wednesday for selling classified military information to a foreign national who was most likely connected to the Chinese government, federal prosecutors said.The analyst, Sgt. Korbein Schultz, 25, sent at least 92 sensitive documents to a conspirator, who was not named, in a period of less than two years, the authorities said. The material included technical manuals for intercontinental ballistic missile systems and information on Chinese military tactics, they said.Mr. Schultz, of Wills Point, Texas, received $42,000 in exchange for the information, according to the Justice Department.He pleaded guilty last August to six criminal counts that included conspiracy to obtain and transmit national defense data, bribery of a public official and exporting technical defense data. The counts all together could have brought a sentence of up to 65 years in prison.Mr. Schultz will also be required to complete three years of supervised release as part of his sentence, which was handed down in federal court in Nashville.“Protecting classified information is paramount to our national security, and this sentencing reflects the ramifications when there is a breach of that trust,” Brig. Gen. Rhett R. Cox, the commanding general of the Army Counterintelligence Command, said in a statement on Wednesday. “This soldier’s actions put Army personnel at risk, placing individual gain above personal honor.”Mary Kathryn Harcombe, a federal public defender who represented Mr. Schultz, declined to comment on the sentence.Mr. Schultz, who was assigned to the 506th Infantry Battalion, was arrested in March 2024 at Fort Campbell in Kentucky.Prosecutors said that he had shared his Army unit’s operational order with the conspirator before the unit was deployed to Eastern Europe to support NATO operations. The conspirator contacted him shortly after he had received his top secret security clearance, they said.He also supplied the person with details on U.S. military exercises in South Korea and the Philippines, in addition to lessons learned by the U.S. Army from the Ukraine-Russia war that are applicable to Taiwan’s defense, the authorities said.Military officials said that Mr. Schultz had given his contact in China technical manuals for the HH-60 helicopter and the F-22A fighter aircraft, along with a tactical playbook on how to counter unmanned aerial systems in large-scale combat operations.According to the indictment, Mr. Schultz unsuccessfully tried to recruit another Army intelligence officer to help him obtain more sensitive documents for the conspirator, who reportedly lived in Hong Kong and worked for a geopolitical consulting firm overseas. More

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      Trump Administration Continues to Defy Judge’s Orders in Abrego Garcia Case, Lawyers Say

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      Continuing a pattern of stonewalling, the Justice Department has defied a judge’s order to explain what the Trump administration has done, and plans to do, to seek the release of a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador last month, according to court papers filed on Tuesday.In refusing to reveal much of anything about the administration’s role in improperly sending the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador or its subsequent efforts to seek his freedom, department lawyers repeatedly claimed that the information constituted state secrets that needed to be protected, the papers said.“The government responded to plaintiffs’ discovery requests by producing nothing of substance,” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers wrote on Tuesday morning to Judge Paula Xinis, who is handling the case in Federal District Court in Maryland.In their letter, the lawyers asked Judge Xinis to hold a hearing as early as 1 p.m. on Wednesday to discuss how to proceed with what they described as the “government’s failure to comply with this court’s orders.”The White House’s repeated resistance to court orders — not only in Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case, but in other legal proceedings as well — has edged the administration ever closer to an open showdown with the judicial branch in a way that could threaten the constitutional balance of power.Three courts — including the Supreme Court and the federal appeals court that sits over Judge Xinis — have directly told the Trump administration to “facilitate” the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia. They have instructed the administration to devise a way of handling his case as it should have been handled if the government had not erroneously flown him to El Salvador on March 15 in violation of an earlier court order.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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      Hegseth Said to Have Shared Attack Details in Second Signal Chat

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      The defense secretary sent sensitive information about strikes in Yemen to an encrypted group chat that included his wife and brother, people familiar with the matter said.Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.Mr. Hegseth’s brother Phil and Tim Parlatore, who continues to serve as his personal lawyer, both have jobs in the Pentagon, but it is not clear why either would need to know about upcoming military strikes aimed at the Houthis in Yemen.The previously unreported existence of a second Signal chat in which Mr. Hegseth shared highly sensitive military information is the latest in a series of developments that have put his management and judgment under scrutiny.Unlike the chat in which The Atlantic was mistakenly included, the newly revealed one was created by Mr. Hegseth. It included his wife and about a dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle in January, before his confirmation as defense secretary, and was named “Defense | Team Huddle,” the people familiar with the chat said. He used his private phone, rather than his government one, to access the Signal chat.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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      Under Trump, National Security Guardrails Vanish

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      America’s adversaries have more room to operate, at least in the disinformation space, cybersecurity experts say.This month, a network of pro-Russian websites began a campaign aimed at undermining confidence in the U.S. defense industry, according to disinformation analysts.The F-35 fighter jet was one target. The effort, coordinated by a Russian group known as Portal Kombat, spread rumors that American allies purchasing the warplanes would not have complete control over them, the analysts said.In the past, U.S. cybersecurity agencies would counter such campaigns by calling them out to raise public awareness. The F.B.I. would warn social media companies of inauthentic accounts so they could be removed. And, at times, U.S. Cyber Command would try to take Russian troll farms that create disinformation offline, at least temporarily.But President Trump has fired General Timothy D. Haugh, a four-star general with years of experience countering Russian online propaganda, from his posts leading U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency.The F.B.I. has shut down its foreign influence task force. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ended its efforts to expose disinformation. And this week the State Department put employees who tracked global disinformation on leave, shutting down the effort that had publicized the spread of Chinese and Russian propaganda.Almost three months into Mr. Trump’s second term, the guardrails intended to prevent national security missteps have come down as the new team races to anticipate and amplify the wishes of an unpredictable president. The result has been a diminished role for national security expertise, even in the most consequential foreign policy decisions.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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      Judge Says One DOGE Member Can Access Sensitive Treasury Dept. Data

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      Nineteen state attorneys general had sued to block Elon Musk’s government efficiency team from accessing Treasury systems that include Americans’ bank account and Social Security information.A Manhattan federal judge ruled on Friday that one member of Elon Musk’s government efficiency program could have access to sensitive payment and data systems at the Treasury Department, as long as that person goes through appropriate training and files disclosures.The order by the judge, Jeannette A. Vargas, came nearly two months after she had ruled that Mr. Musk’s team, members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, would be banished from the agency’s systems until the conclusion of a lawsuit that claims the group’s access is unlawful.Friday night’s order partly dissolves the earlier preliminary injunction by granting Ryan Wunderly, who was hired as a special adviser for information technology and modernization, access to the Treasury systems in dispute, Judge Vargas wrote.To gain the access, however, Mr. Wunderly will have to complete hands-on training “typically required of other Treasury employees granted commensurate access” and submit a financial disclosure report, the judge wrote.The case stems from a lawsuit filed in February by 19 state attorneys general, led by Letitia James of New York, who sued to block the Trump administration’s policy of allowing political appointees and “special government employees” who work with Mr. Musk to access the systems. The systems contain some of the country’s most sensitive information, including Americans’ bank account and Social Security data.The attorneys general argued that only career civil servants who have received training and security clearances should have access. The untrained members of Mr. Musk’s team should not have “unfettered access,” they said.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