[Freebeacon] A senior U.S. counterintelligence official recently said publicly what many officials and experts have been warning privately for years: China is using its large student population in the United States to spy.Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, a DNI agency, said recently that China poses a broad-ranging foreign intelligence threat that includes the use of academics, students, cyber espionage, and human agents to steal secrets from the government and private sectors.
"I look at the China threat from a counterintelligence perspective as a whole-of-government threat by China against us," Mr. Evanina told a conference last week at The Aspen Institute.
"We allow 350,000 or so Chinese students here every year," he said. "That's a lot. We have a very liberal visa policy for them. Ninety-nine point nine percent of those students are here legitimately and doing great research and helping the global economy. But it is a tool that is used by the Chinese government to facilitate nefarious activity here in the U.S."