The Battle the FBI is Waging Every Day

OPINION — FBI Director Christopher Wray’s talk at the Reagan Library on January 31 was titled “Countering Threats Posed by the Chinese Government Inside the U.S.”

However, when the first question after his presentation was, “What is the Bureau’s number one priority?” Wray easily moved from his earlier subject and admitted, “Certainly for us, counterterrorism is and has to remain our number one priority.”

I find that Wray, whether before Congress or at events like the Reagan Library appearance, often provides a certain kind of refreshing honesty about his job and surrounding issues, showing he’s willing to cover many subjects and unlike some public officials, does not try to sell one particular story.

For example, while he spent his first 30 minutes making the strong case, as he has done before, that, “there is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation, and our economic security than China,” he spent the last half hour answering questions on a wider variety of other subjects that hardly involve China.

He expanded on the counterterrorism threat which he said since 9/11, has become “more vexing [and] more challenging.”

He said that after 9/11, terrorist groups had meetings together, training sessions and even fundraising, all of which created for investigators, “a lot of dots out there to connect, all the interaction between them.”

“What worries us now is the homegrown extremists,” Wray said, “people here, largely lone actors inspired typically online, maybe radicalized by some jihadist movement like ISIS or domestic extremists…who don’t have a lot of confederates, are acting largely alone, who choose to attack soft targets with crude, easily accessible weapons.”

Wray then noted, “In that kind of situation, there are not a lot of dots out there. In that kind of situation, as the professionals say, there’s not a lot of time from flash to bang: Fewer dots to connect and less time to connect them.”

He talked about, “how challenging it is to try to figure out…based on something they just saw, to drive their car through a pedestrian walkway. So that kind of threat is what keeps us on the balls of our feet now.”

It is a threat worth considering. Back in October 2021, the Boston Globe published an analysis that found, “at least 139 instances of what researchers called vehicle rammings between the date of [George] Floyd’s death [on May 25, 2020] and Sept 30, 2021. At least 100 protesters were injured and three were killed when cars hit them,” the newspaper reported.

These all happened after June 2019, when James A. Fields Jr., was sentenced to life in prison. He is the man who – during the 2017 Charlottesville demonstrations – drove his vehicle into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a 32-year-old paralegal, and injuring more than two dozen people.

Illustrating another side of this ramming problem, Republican legislators in Oklahoma and Iowa last year, passed bills granting immunity to drivers trying to leave the area of a demonstration whose vehicles strike and injure protesters. A new Florida statute grants civil immunity to drivers who injure or even kill demonstrators if they claim the protests made them concerned for their own well-being in the moment.

Another question for the FBI Director dealt with encryption of devices used by suspected criminals.

Wray was asked if he was getting cooperation from software code designers to go through back doors to detect criminal activity,  He responded that the question raised, “a major public safety issue and, more and more, it’s a national security issue.”

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“We are big believers in encryption and we are not asking for back doors into anybody’s infrastructure,” Wray said. “But what we are asking companies to make sure that when they design their platforms and devices, they preserve a way to respond to a warrant.”

Wray then laid out a problem that really has not gotten the attention it deserves.

“It is important for people to understand this — we are rapidly heading in a direction where devices and messaging platforms will be constructed in a way where they are essentially warrant-proof,” the FBI Director explained.

“Picture the most awful crime you can imagine,” he said. “Picture the most grave threat to national security you can imagine. Picture the most heartbreaking victims or numbers of victims. And then picture the most bulletproof, ironclad, rock solid court order and then process the fact that we will not be able to get access to the content to protect people. That will be beyond reach for law enforcement or national security agencies and I hear about this issue from my state and local partners all the time. And I hear about it from my national security partners all the time.”

The FBI knows firsthand the danger of criminal use of encrypted devices via a sting enterprise they ran called Operation Trojan Shield.

In 2019, the Bureau, in cooperation with Australian Police and Europol, set up its own company, called ANOM, which sold a pre-installed, end-to-end, encrypted messaging app to supposed criminals. In fact, however, the ANON messages could be intercepted and decrypted by law enforcement officials worldwide.

By June 2021, 12,000 ANOM devices had been sold to suspected criminals. As a result, when  Operation Trojan Shield was ended, some 800 people around the world were arrested, eight tons of cocaine and 22 tons of marijuana and two tons of methamphetamines were seized, along with 250 firearms and more than $8 million.

Successful as it was, that type of law enforcement, encrypted device sting operation could not be repeated.

Wray told the Reagan Library audience, “So, we as a country have to find a way to work together to solve this issue, otherwise we are going to wake up one day, and it is rapidly happening, where suddenly we can’t protect people anymore,” because encrypted devices and platforms will have become warrant proof.

Asked whether crypto currency creates a similar problem, Wray said it made the adage “follow the money” more difficult, but he also said the Bureau has developed tools to help deal with it and was trying to stay ahead of developments.

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“There is a similarity between the crypto currency issue and warrant-proof encryption in the sense of blinding law officers in their ability with proper legal process to keep people safe,” Wray said.

Another issue Wray focused on was public frustration over the lack of information about whether the FBI or other government agencies are pro-actively reacting to cyber bad actors.

Wray at first diplomatically responded, “We and our partners across the intelligence community and other agencies work very closely together to try to disrupt, say the cyber threats for example, and a lot of what we and they do together, is the kind of thing I can’t discuss in an open setting like this, other than to reassure people that there are a lot of impactful things that we do.”

When pressed for details, he finally said, “We have taken down the bad guys’ infrastructures,” but he added, “We don’t engage in indiscriminate hacking or gobbling up all their personal data.”

I was impressed with Wray’s handling of a question that called for comparing the heavily publicized FBI investigation of the persons involved in the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol to the less publicized FBI actions against the bad actors who attacked federal buildings and local police during the summer of 2020 demonstrations that followed the death of George Floyd.

“We have one standard,” Wray said, “which is, I don’t care if you are upset about an election, upset at our criminal justice system, whatever it is you’re upset about. There’s a right way and a wrong way to express your being upset in this country and violence against law enforcement, destruction of property is not it. That’s what the rule of law is about.”

Wray said that hundreds of cases have been opened in both instances along with hundreds of arrests.

“There are some differences,” he pointed out. “In the January 6 instance, it happened in broad daylight and has been photographed extensively, people’s faces eminently visible and involved the fairly unmistakable breach and entry into the Congress while they were in the middle of conducting one of their most sacred responsibilities.”

“Contrast that,” Wray continued, “with a lot of what we saw over the summer under cover of darkness with people’s faces concealed, often attacking buildings which might not be federal property, some cases courthouses but not while people were in operation, so the federal hook, the federal jurisdiction is a little different.”

But, Wray concluded, “We’re aggressively pursuing both.”

In his main presentation about China, Wray presented an interesting difference between today and the Cold War situation.

He pointed out, “The Soviet Union didn’t make much that anyone in America wanted to buy. We didn’t invest in each other’s economies or send huge numbers of students to study in each other’s universities. The U.S. and today’s China are far more interconnected than the U.S. and the old U.S.S.R. ever were, and China is an economic power on a level the Soviets could never have dreamed of being.”

Beijing is “trying to steal our information and technology,” Wray said, pointing out there are currently 2,000 China-related investigations.

“What makes the Chinese government’s strategy so insidious is the way it exploits multiple avenues at once, often in seemingly innocuous ways,” Wray said. As an example, he said, “They identify key technologies to target. Their “Made in China 2025” plan, for example, lists 10 broad ones—the keys to economic success in the coming century—spanning industries like robotics, green energy production and vehicles, aerospace, biopharma, and so on. And then—and then, they throw every tool in their arsenal at stealing that technology to succeed in those areas.”

Chinese hacking in the U.S. “is bigger than those of every other major nation combined,” Wray said.

One example Wray cited involved Yanjun Xu, a Chinese intelligence officer working for Beijing’s Ministry of State Security, who federal authorities say targeted an advance engine made by General Electric and a foreign joint venture partner.

Starting back in 2013, Xu identified and recruited experts in the companies by paying their way to China to give talks and also paying them financial stipends. One of Xu’s recruits helped him plant malware on a joint venture company laptop. Xu then made sure Chinese hackers could access the implant in order to steal a particular composite fan blade technology that only GE possessed, according to Wray.

In March 2017, Xu met another GE aviation employee who was in China to speak at a university. In January 2018, Xu asked that employee for a specific, proprietary design process. That GE employee, however, informed GE and the FBI. The employee, with GE and FBI approval, emailed a document to Xu, according to a subsequent Justice Department release.

In February 2018, Xu asked another favor from the GE employee and arranged to meet the employee in Europe. When they met in Belgium, Xu was arrested and eventually extradited to the United States to stand trial. On November 5, 2021, Xu was convicted of conspiring to and attempting to commit economic espionage and theft of trade secrets, according to the Justice release.

Referring to the Xu situation during his Reagan Library talk, Wray said, “In this case, at least, because of GE’s quick work and cooperation, China was not able to leapfrog over a decade of hard work and billions in investment to undercut a major U.S. employer with nearly 50,000 employees. But we’re waging this battle every day.”

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