community weblog - [ Cybersecurity Public ]

Beijing moves to preempt flash mob behavior for any purpose, be it civil, commercial, nationalistic or anti-state, during the Olympics

As part of an all-state asset effort to produce a Disney-like Olympics experience to the world, Beijing is preempting flash mob/smart mob behavior for any purpose, be it civil, commercial, nationalistic or anti-state during, and perhaps after, the August venue. The tell tale is in a Fallows' Atlantic article:

[N]ew limits will apply on how many messages can be sent from each phone each hour. The limits are high enough that they won't affect ordinary users but would make it harder to send a mass broadcast... Short messages are the main way people can react to news in a hurry -- or organize actions in response. If you want to hold a meeting or rally or just get a lot of people to the same place at the same time, SMS is the way to go. So if you limit SMS, you've cut the main communication tool for individuals trying to act as a group...

The surprise is that the authorities have waited so long. China has a rising and vibrant protest movement that the authorities have spent considerable effort to suppress both in the field and in the press:

These "sudden incidents" or "mass incidents," in official parlance, are presenting Chinese officials with a serious problem that goes beyond the negative image of China they project to the outside world. The sheer numbers are noteworthy. In August 2005, the country's public security minister, Zhou Yongkang, announced that some 74,000 such events had taken place in 2004, an increase from 58,000 the year before. According to Zhou, 17 of the 74,000 involved more than 10,000 people, 46 involved more than 5,000 people, and 120 involved more than 1,000 participants. But many believe the actual figures are higher.

While many of these are lesser events, rising locally by word of mouth without communications technology, many are extremely potent in terms of their public reaction. See The Case of Dai Haijing for the public reaction to the obtuse official handling of the gruesome murder of a favorite teacher. The number of total incidents are now put over 100,000 per annum. It is this volume that forms the backdrop of uncertainty for the CCP.

The 2005 anti-Japanese watershed: state sponsorship loses control

The CCP found that even when it instigated a nationalistic street response to Japanese application for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Japanese history textbook minimizing Japanese wartime atrocities, and Japanese objection to a tripartite agreement between national oil companies of China, the Philippines and Vietnam for seismic exploration of the contested Spratly Island Group (also here, here and here), that it could not contain the public fury of a population armed with cell phones offering voice, email and SMS. (Readers wanting to reprise these events are recommended to look at the endnote bibliography, starting here and here for events and here for the longer term context.)

Writing in Autonomous Chinese 'smart mobs' outside of Party control, 4/26/2005:

While many have noted the risk to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of promoting nationalism as a distraction to social and economic matters, the recent near miss of nearly "losing control over xenophobic crowds" in promoting anti-Japanese protests must have driven home the risk to both the CCP as governor of the nation and to personages and factions within the CCP... I submit that technology stole a march on CCP leadership:

[While] police and Ministry of State Security agents had closely monitored the activities of various "anti-Japanese" NGOs – which were responsible for organizing protests and internet petitions – Beijing had far from adequate control over the extent to which such "people-level" organizations would go… "Hu and a number of his PSC colleagues have come to the conclusion that the authorities' ability to control nationalistic outbursts has declined markedly compared to [1999 when Beijing was] largely successful [in stopping] the anti-U.S. protests a few days after the embassy-bombing incident."

Diplomatic analysts in the Chinese capital said Beijing was nervous over the fact that, owing to the internet and other sophisticated forms of organization and mobilization, several relatively new and inexperienced groups were so successful in turning out the crowds. The analysts said many protests in recent Chinese history… started out as expressions of patriotism. Once the genie is out of the bottle, however, it would be difficult even for the CCP to prevent mass movements from suddenly becoming anti-government in nature.

Spontaneous smart mobs independent of government control have come to China's youth where an approximate 100 million internet users grow at 30% per annum and 350 million (27% of China's 1.3 billion people) own cellphones for voice and text messaging...

Even the most benign organized public events give an order-obsessed public security apparatus concern. Take this modest flash mob event:

On Sunday afternoon, a small group of young people gathered at the Hongqi Street in city Changchun, northest China's Jilin Province. These young people, in matching clothes, and each holding a guitar, stood in line and began to sing a pop song. And suddenly, they dispersed.

Protests from fenqing to middle class

The authorities are highly attentive to young nationalists known as fenqing, or the 'angry youth' among other translations:

"These people have been trained in an authoritarian system. They are at the same time victims of an authoritarian system, but they also behave in an authoritarian way towards others and are incredibly self-righteous... We should be more tolerant and respect the right of people to disagree with us but these people do not understand such values."

The definition of fenqing has morphed:

• Cultural Revolution: urban-dwelling students who were sent to the countryside to toil with peasants and became embittered towards a society that had stolen their futures.
• 1980s: students and intellectuals who shaped the movement for greater social and political freedoms that ended when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square
• 2000s: patriotic, xenophobic, nationalistic and, in some cases, violent in their defence of the motherland. This latest incarnation has partly emerged as the result of government policies implemented in reaction to the events of 1989, after which “patriotic” indoctrination became an even more important element of the education system.

Beyond the fenqing, the Chinese middle class are rising, albeit more politely, against what they see as local government inattention and inaction to their needs.

The CCP in Beijing was forced to take notice, overruling local party cadres in the process, of a 2007 popular middle class resistance in Xiamen that, in the face of local party control of the press, used blogs, cellphones and text messaging to oppose a multi-billion dollar chemical plant believed to be harmful to the environment. (Also here)

Mere months later, the bourgeoisie of Shanghai emulated Xiamen in 2008 to express its "discontent over a planned extension of the city's magnetic levitation, or maglev, train" through residential neighborhoods, and at excessive cost.

This author doubts that the state security apparatus could have failed to notice that an "online 'flash mob' and not the Russian government" was responsible for DDoS attack against the Estonian state.

Bulletin boards, SMS and the Human Flesh Search Engine

Bulletin boards do much of the heavy lifting before SMS takes over:

[A] large part of the organization is done on the Internet in China, specifically on BBSes. While the BBS (bulletin board system) is something outdated and antiquated in the US Internet, it has been a very important part of the Chinese Internet, and I would argue, it is growing and becoming more influential. For the Chinese government, it is a headache because in spite of Chinese government regulations, it is largely unregulated. For western corporations it is a good place to gather information but is useless for advertising, but for many Chinese it is the most important part of the Internet (along with online gaming and their IM client, which is most likely to be QQ or MSN Instant Messenger depending on their age and demographics).

Most westerners who come into the China Internet market have no idea of its power and influence, and instead think that the Chinese Internet is largely the same as the US market, but it isn’t. The Chinese government doesn’t really like BBSes because it really is free (as in free speech), and is the breeding ground for all kinds of weird stuff. And while it is important for gathering buzz on products (as CIC, based in Shanghai, does) for corporations, nobody has really been able to monetize it. And, western journalists fail to monitor it, which is why they miss on so many big stories, and end up giving credit to some sinister Chinese government policies.

And China’s Human Flesh Search Engine:

The types of group-forming [Clay Shirky] describes are sometimes called crowdsourcing and flash mobs. For those of us in China, we might better know crowdsourcing as the Human Flesh Search Engine, the increasingly frequent phenomenon of online crowds gathering via China’s bulletin board systems, chat rooms, and instant messaging to collaborate on a common task. The Human Flesh Search Engine shares many of the same characteristics of Shirky’s networked social collaboration: Enabled and made cost-effective by technology, channeling an existing motivation that was not possible to act upon as a group before...

 

China’s Human Flesh Search Engine is a poor translation (yet a popular and visceral description) of the Chinese phrase ren’rou sou’suo... and was, for a day, Google’s homepage for its Chinese edition Googrle.cn (the page can still be found online here). The fact that day was April 1st should tell readers it was meant as tongue-in-cheek (and may not entirely be a joke - a number of search engines have tried human-assisted search and relevance checking), but it put a name to a movement that has been happening online in China for some time: Online collaboration by Netizens to search via the power of China’s massive 225 million Internet users.

It remains to be seen if a resourceful Chinese interest group will find a way around the SMS limitation imposed by the authorities, but Beijing has increased its odds of a Disney production.

Everything changes tomorrow

James Fallows

The Atlantic

19 Jul 2008 12:01 am

Congressional Quarterly's remarkable recap of Israeli espionage

Congressional Quarterly (CQ) recently released a startlingly candid analysis of Israeli espionage, including the process of Mossad's seeking "spotters" able to identify members of the Jewish-American community susceptible to recruitment:

Mossad agents also scout for people to help them in the Jewish-American community, he said, based on their religious and political commonality. It’s a vast community of potential “spotters,” who can point them to other Jewish Americans in government, law, finance and banking who might be susceptible to recruitment, as is the case with potential Chinese and Cuban recruits.

Furthermore, the level of Israeli penetration is so great that many or all trials on the topic may be hamstrung:

A former senior CIA counterintelligence operative believes the [Ben-Ami Kadish] case “will never go to trial, because of all the ugly stuff that would come out” about Israeli activities in the United States. Indeed, Justice Department attorneys have fought to keep “ugly stuff” from emerging in the trial of two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, charged with accepting classified documents from Pentagon official Larry Franklin.

NOTE TO READERS: If you are already aware of pro-Israeli efforts to deflect frank discussions of US geopolitical interests, or are immune to comments critical of Israel, skip down to the full text mirror of the CQ article by Jeff Stein. If you are unfamiliar with Congressional Quarterly or the efforts to stifle debate I submit the next comments are worth the read as a follow-on to Israel was planting malicious chips in US assets before China.

For those unfamiliar with CQ, it is the gold standard in Capitol Hill and congressional reporting, fielding more than 150 reporters and researchers while maintaining substantial databases on both Congress and government. Founded in 1945 by husband-wife team of Nelson and Henrietta Poynter as a explanatory link between newspapers and the opaque operations of DC, Nelson Poynter stated that “government will never set up an adequate agency to check on itself,” foundations were “too timid,” thus client-driven commercial effort was needed. (Most of CQ's products are subscription based but the espionage item was among the subset flagged for public release.)

One would think, but cannot be certain, that CQ is above reproach from the hyper-Israeli press sentinels of which I have written:

A month has elapsed since the CQ National Security Editor, Jeff Stein, released Israel Might Have Many More Spies Here, Officials Say and as of today neither CAMERA or HonestReporting has attacked CQ, Stein or the article so there may be limits after all. If so, it is the first in recent memory. As the UK's Financial Times observed in its 2006 American and Israel:

Stauffer suffered the same withering criticism as did any source mirroring his conclusions as the very reliable Christian Science Monitor (CSM) found when it attempted to cover the topic.

Preface concluded, here is Stein's article: 

Israel Might Have Many More Spies Here, Officials Say

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

CQ Homeland Security

Congressional Quarterly Inc.

April 25, 2008 – 8:13 p.m.

The elderly New Jersey man arrested last week on charges of spying for Israel years ago was probably still working for the Jewish state’s espionage service in tandem with another, as yet unidentified spy, former American intelligence officials say.

Ben-Ami Kadish, now 84, was employed as a mechanical engineer at a U.S. Army weapons center in New Jersey when he allegedly supplied his Israeli handler with classified military documents, according to charges filed last week.

The handler was named only as “CC-1,” or co-conspirator 1, in the criminal complaint. But its description of him as the same man who was handling the notorious Israeli mole Jonathan Pollard all but identified him as Yosef Yagur, formerly the consul for scientific affairs at the Israeli consulate in New York.

Pollard, who gave Yagur thousands of highly classified documents while working as a navy intelligence analyst in the 1980s, is in the 21st year of a life sentence for espionage.

Kadish, who worked at the U.S. Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, N.J., from 1963 to 1990, could also spend the waning years of his life in jail if he is convicted.

A former senior CIA counterintelligence operative believes the case “will never go to trial, because of all the ugly stuff that would come out” about Israeli activities in the United States.

Indeed, Justice Department attorneys have fought to keep “ugly stuff” from emerging in the trial of two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, charged with accepting classified documents from Pentagon official Larry Franklin.

But the federal judge in the case has indicated he might not go along with their strategy. Last month Judge Thomas Ellis III indefinitely postponed the trial of AIPAC officials Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, which was scheduled to open next week.

Neither the United States nor Israel, strategic allies struggling with Middle East terrorism, the war in Iraq and the rising threat of Iran, can afford a breech in relations triggered by either case.

The Justice Department said Kadish brought home briefcases full of classified documents, which “CC-1” photographed in his basement. Among the documents was “restricted data” on nuclear weapons, classified information on a modified F-15 fighter that was sold to an unnamed foreign country (most likely Saudi Arabia), and a document relating to the Patriot anti-missile system, which the United States deployed to Israel during the first Gulf War in 1990.

Yagur fled New York in 1985 as U.S. counterintelligence agents closed in on Pollard. He has not been back since, U.S. officials believe.

They thought that was the end of his espionage operations here.

But Yagur evidently kept in touch with Kadish, exchanging e-mails and telephone calls with him long after he returned to Israel. Kadish went to Israel in 2004 and met with his former spy master, authorities said.

Just last month, on March 20, “CC-1” told Kadish to lie to FBI agents who had questioned him about the documents, according to a wiretap transcript produced by federal prosecutors.

“Don’t say anything. Let them say whatever they want. You didn’t do anything,” CC-1 told Kadish. “What happened 25 years ago? You didn’t remember anything.”

Ron Olive, the navy investigator in charge of the Pollard case, said he was shocked when he heard about Kadish’s arrest.

The description of CC-1 as Pollard’s handler meant that “it has to be” Yagur, he said by telephone from Arizona, where he was giving a counterintelligence lecture to federal officials.

“I was like, ‘holy cow, this is unbelievable,’” he said.

Olive said the arrest meant that Kadish was still working for Israeli intelligence.

“It means Israel still has an agent in place in the U.S. who can ferret out someone who has access to information they want,” Olive said.

One role Kadish could play was as a “spotter,” who could size up possible recruits for Israeli intelligence, even while living in a retirement community in Monroe Township, N.J., said Olive and another former federal agent.

“That jumped out at me,” said Harry B. “Skip” Brandon, a former deputy assistant director of counterintelligence at the FBI.

“It is very unusual for a former agent handler and his former agent to remain friends. And it’s dangerous for both,” he added. Any communication between the two, no matter how innocent, raises the risk of detection and exposure.

Other aspects of the case suggest that Jerusalem has at least one, and maybe several more spies embedded in U.S. military services or intelligence agencies: As with Pollard, the Israelis asked Kadish for specific documents, indicating they knew what they were looking for, supplied by another spy.

“You know, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” said Olive, who in 2006 published a memoir about the case, “Capturing Jonathan Pollard: How One of the Most Notorious Spies in American History Was Brought to Justice”.

Olive said Pollard stole “360 cubic feet” of classified documents during his six years as an Israeli mole. “It was the most devastating spy case I ever saw,” he said. “No other spy in the history of the United States has stolen so many secrets, so highly classified, in such a short period of time.”

“No other spy in the history of the United States has stolen so many secrets, so highly classified , in such a short period of time,” he said.

There have long been rumors of a “Mr. X,” Olive said, “another unknown government employee who had access to information that the Israelis could use.”

Israeli intelligence had a spy, code-named MEGA, high up in the Reagan administration at the same time Pollard, and now allegedly Kadish, were stealing documents, according to a Washington Post story years ago that has never been confirmed.

In fact, according to past and present U.S. counterintelligence officials, Israeli agents were so aggressive even after the Pollard case that an FBI counterintelligence boss in the late 1990s, David Szady, summoned Mossad’s top official for a tongue lashing.

“Knock it off,” Szady said, according to a reliable source on condition of anonymity.

Szady has been pilloried in pro-Israel circles for pursuing the AIPAC case, which many critics say amounts to trumping up espionage charges against officials who were merely engaging in the kind of transaction officials and journalists conduct every day.

But the Israelis here have never stopped practicing the “world’s second oldest profession,” as espionage is sometimes dubbed, despite years of rote denials, many officials say.

“I guarantee you the same thing is happening now,” said Olive, who trains Department of Energy security officials on detecting signs of espionage.

One effective espionage tool is forming joint partnerships with U.S. companies to supply software and other technology products to U.S. government agencies, intelligence officials say.

But Brandon, who retired in the mid-1990s but retains many intelligence contacts for his global security consulting business, says the Israelis are interested in commercial as much as military secrets. They have a muscular technology sector themselves.

“They are always looking for a leg up,” he said.

Congress is a major target, too, Brandon said.

“God, they would work the Hill, ” he said. “They really worked the Hill. They were not necessarily interested in collection [of information] so much as they were in influence.”

Influencing Congress is usually the domain of foreign diplomats, he said, but in Israel’s case there was “very little distinction between Mossad and the diplomats.”

“They were very sharp,” he added. “Their best and brightest.”

Mossad agents also scout for people to help them in the Jewish-American community, he said, based on their religious and political commonality. It’s a vast community of potential “spotters,” who can point them to other Jewish Americans in government, law, finance and banking who might be susceptible to recruitment, as is the case with potential Chinese and Cuban recruits.

Or just useful conversation. Israeli agents, Brandon said, are skilled at eliciting information from unwary Jewish Americans in strategically important positions.

“They make you feel good, feel important,” he said. “They don’t even realize they’re giving up something” sensitive, or even classified — until it’s too late.

At the same time, U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials have worked hand in glove on numerous fronts since 1948, when the Jewish state was founded.

Mossad had access to Russian Jews who supplied the West with Soviet military, scientific and technical secrets. American and Israel intelligence have always worked closely in counterterrorism.

But they don’t tell each other everything, which is why the relationship sometimes veers from friendship to competition.

“They were never, ever allowed in our facilities,” says a former CIA officer who was sometimes assigned a liaison role with Israeli counterterrorism agents.

Likewise, when CIA or other U.S. intelligence operatives visited Israel, Israeli security agents would “toss their room,” he said, “just to show who’s in charge.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Source: CQ Homeland Security
© 2008 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved.

FAIR USE NOTICE:

Materials cited in this feed are found primarily on the Internet and email newsletters/publications.  Some content may be copyrighted. These materials, including copyrighted materials,  are intended for "fair use" as permitted under Title 17, Section 107 of the United States Code (“The Copyright Law”).  Such “fair use” includes: criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research, or situational awareness and intelligence by members of the United States Government, Government contractors, and postsecondary academic institutions for non-profit official purposes.  Use of copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” or purposes other than provided by law requires permission from the copyright owner."

In fair disclosure, following is my AIPAC series:

• A note on sources to the forthcoming “No Nation Left Behind” program, Part 4
• “No Nation Left Behind” program, Part 4, AIPAC 1
• “No Nation Left Behind” program, Part 5, AIPAC 2
• “No Nation Left Behind” program, Part 6, AIPAC 3
• Jewish American and Israeli perspectives on AIPAC and its marriage of convenience with Evangelicals
• Confluence of anti-Semitic, pro-Fascist sentiments of the “Radio Priest” and Nazi-tolerant sentiments of US business

Israel Might Have Many More Spies Here, Officials Say

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

CQ Homeland Security

Congressional Quarterly Inc.

April 25, 2008 – 8:13 p.m.

Molly Ivins: Pro-Israel ‘Nutjobs’ on the Attack

By Molly Ivins

TruthDig

Posted on Apr 25, 2006

America and Israel

Financial Times

Published: April 1 2006 03:00 | Last updated: April 1 2006 03:00

Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US

By David R. Francis

Christian Science Monitor

December 09, 2002 edition

Editor's note to Economic tallies

Christian Science Monitor

posted December 16, 2002

Gordon Housworth

Israel was planting malicious chips in US assets before China

Reporting on the FBI investigation of Chinese counterfeit, some possibly malicious, electronics has made no mention that Israel had embedded malicious chips in nothing less than the White House phone system by 2000. Outside of members of the intelligence community and attentive technical readers of the period, this will come as a surprise, possibly coupled with the erroneous assumption of anti-Israeli bias, to many readers.

Telco supply chain analysis has again been reduced to function at lowest cost with the assumption of low risk. All tier providers from whatever state actor need to be examined and risk assessed in the design, fabrication, installation and maintenance phases. See Foreign vulnerability inherent in US globalization of its commercial and defense supply chains, 5/6/2008.

Israel as independent actor, often counter to US interests, not unlike China

From Palmerston, interests, and forms of governance, 5/22/2004:

Israel pursues an independent diplomatic policy at odds with US interests. Israel is a modest cooperative partner in the US war against terrorism. Just as the Russians, the Pakistanis, the Chinese and others did in the post 11 September period, Israel immediately offered the US data that painted their parochial adversaries as the architect or participant of the air liner assault so that we might attack them. Each country offers or withholds information so as to advance its national interests, and attempts to influence where it cannot command. Israel is no exception and I think that it applies Palmerston better than the US.

Israel ran Jonathan Pollard, a US Navy civilian analyst, as a spy to enormous and ongoing harm to the US. Israel not only used that information to US disservice but further went on to sell or broker that information to the Russians and the Chinese, perhaps others. The impact on the US is still being felt to this day and none of the attempts of his apologist spouse, Esther, will wipe that away. The effects of Pollard's espionage is so great that Director CIA threatened to resign if Clinton pardoned Pollard. (If a US national has strong loyalties, be it religious, tribal, cultural or geographic, that work to the detriment of US interests, then I am also at odds with them.)

Israel is not a devoted friend of the US and it has nothing to do with religion or its democratic governance. (We forget that France was the principal post-partition mentor of Israel before the US.) It is a nation state acting in its best interests, some of which correspond to our own...

Yes, there are tactical interests between the US and Israel. Examples being the identification of certain Palestinian assets to the Israelis... I was in some briefings by Israeli officers in which they used a metaphor that I think circulates within the IDF, as others have heard it, that Israel is like the man atop a burning building that can neither put out the fire or get down off the building. All actions are conducted within that narrow range of options.

Commentary follows on related Israeli collection efforts and how those events receded from the public consciousness. The note on sources for a series on the interaction of AIPAC, American Jews, the State of Israel and the Christian Right also applies here.

Recognition of intel collection events obscured by fog facts

Larry Beinhart, author of American Hero [snippets here] filmed as Wag the Dog, describes "fog facts" as an overlooked class of information that become increasingly obscure with the passage of time. (This analyst would add lack of simple search tool access by scrolling off of the original source, lack of mirroring or mirroring at sites that have an otherwise offensive character, original foreign or foreign language sources, or pre-2004 topical information before the advent of the web that is still less well captured than post-2004 data.):

Diplomatic "dead air," from both the embarrassed target and successful collector, combined with dissuasion of national reporting creates fog facts in record time. In the case of Israel, two events have persisted in the public consciousness, out of the fog bank: the Jonathan Pollard and USS Liberty affairs. Almost all other Israeli intel collection efforts against the US have receded into fog facts as if they never existed.

Espionage at the pinnacle of impunity

Consider Bush43 standing before the State Duma (lower house) or the Federation Council (upper house) of the Russian Federation or the PRC's National People's Congress (NPC) or Central Committee of the CCP and making the equivalent declaration:

I have been fortunate to see the character of Israel up close. I have touched the Western Wall, seen the sun reflected in the Sea of Galilee, I have prayed at Yad Vashem. And earlier today, I visited Masada, an inspiring monument to courage and sacrifice. At this historic site, Israeli soldiers swear an oath: "Masada shall never fall again." Citizens of Israel: Masada shall never fall again, and America will be at your side.

Given the level of espionage directed against the US by the State of Israel, the comparison is pointedly appropriate.

Israel's espionage efforts against the US, despite Israeli diplomatic statements to the contrary, are long standing, and all too effective. From Who's on the National Security Threat List and why?, 4/27/2004:

The 2000 Annual Report to Congress on Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage uncloaked to identify six greatest offenders as China, Japan, Israel, France, Korea, Taiwan, and India. I surmise the temporary Russian absence was due to the disruption from the breakup of the former Soviet Union. Taiwan was greatly exercised by being publicly placed among 13 nations designated as a threat to US national security, "including Russia, China, North Korea"... Who doesn't get publicized on the list are our closest allies such as the UK, (then West) Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada.

Commercial enterprises and individuals account for the bulk of international industrial espionage activity, roughly three times the percentage due to foreign government-sponsored efforts.  Even developing countries pose a threat as their intel agencies profited from training provided by the USSR, DDR (East Germany), Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and even the US and so have created a "reservoir of professionally trained intelligence mercenaries."

Israel's espionage efforts are rivaled by their technology diversion efforts. From the 2005 Israel as serial violator, temporarily the chicken killed to scare the monkeys:

Whatever one's opinion is of the State of Israel, the state is certainly unique in its ability to target US assets while retaining a more than cooperative relationship with the US.

Security risks in telco supply chains

This analyst would have the same concerns of employing a Chinese telco to build and/or maintain sensitive telecommunications systems, or provide service via their systems, as I would an Israeli firm as we have already had three significant, verified breaches courtesy of Tel Aviv, most notably the breach (also here) of the White House phone system by Telrad during the Clinton administration. I would have equal interest in the master purchase agreement between Sprint and ZTE, and the presence of Huawei of Telrad in telco installations.