Cato Institute senior fellow Patrick Eddington, a former CIA analyst, authored the forthcoming book, “The Triumph of Fear,” which reveals the American government’s surveillance efforts using primary source materials that were previously unavailable to federal investigators and researchers alike.

Those materials include “literally hundreds of thousands of pages” of federal records, first-person accounts, congressional hearings and reports, and more secondary sources, according to a copy of the book obtained by Threat Status.

After years spent fighting with government officials and battling in federal courts to unearth the records, Mr. Eddington wrote that all past efforts to restrain the government’s spying powers have proven unsuccessful. He told Threat Status that the incoming leadership of the intelligence community and FBI should support “real restraints on their activities as it pertains to collecting data on or investigating Americans.” 

The Austin, Texas-based cyber firm CrowdStrike observed a massive increase in China-linked cyberattacks and digital espionage in 2024, demonstrating that the Chinese communist regime’s offensive cyber operations have achieved a new level of sophistication.

China-linked malicious cyber activity rose 150% year-over-year across all sectors that CrowdStrike tracks, according to a draft of the firm’s 2025 Global Threat Report made public Thursday. While China’s Typhoon hacking groups grabbed international headlines for breaking into American infrastructure and Western telecommunications companies, CrowdStrike detected China’s hackers across many other sectors.

The annual report showed the most dramatic upticks of China’s malicious cyber activity hit the media, manufacturing, financial services, and industrials and engineering sectors. China’s hacks and attacks rose from 200 to 300% against these sectors. National Security Tech Correspondent Ryan Lovelace takes a more detailed look at the report.

New details about how China relies on private sector partners to censor the internet have spilled into public view via a data leak analyzed by the Mountain View, California-based cybersecurity firm SentinelOne.

The leak from Chinese cyber firm TopSec included more than 7,000 lines of work logs and code that SentinelOne analysts used to trace the Chinese government and the ruling Communist Party’s coordination with the tech sector.

“TopSec is likely enabling content-moderation for internet censorship purposes, a key strategy used by the Chinese Communist Party to monitor and control public opinion on issues that the state deems contentious or antisocial,” SentinelOne’s Alex Delamotte, Aleksandar Milenkoski and Dakota Cary said in a new report.

The company reached this conclusion, in part, by studying the leaked data on TopSec’s web content monitoring capabilities believed to be used for a project of China’s Ministry of Public Security, one of Beijing’s top intelligence agencies. TopSec’s tools enabled Chinese authorities to hunt for sensitive words.

The Chinese government this week appeared to throw cold water on a proposal by President Trump for nuclear arms talks with Moscow and Beijing, and what Mr. Trump hopes will be an eventual halving of defense spending by all three nations.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded to the Trump proposal by saying Moscow is ready to discuss the prospect of mutual defense budget cuts of 50% and that he believed China could join three-way talks on the reductions.

However, when asked about Mr. Putin’s comment during a press briefing in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian did not answer directly and defended the pace of Beijing’s defense spending and its buildup of weapons and forces.

China denies providing weapons to Russia, but “reportedly provides dual-use critical components, estimated at $300 million monthly, enabling Russia to produce munitions, tanks, armored vehicles, missiles and drones,” writes Joseph R. DeTrani, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and opinion contributor to Threat Status. 

“China’s allied relationship with Russia, which invaded a sovereign and independent Ukraine, has adversely affected China’s credibility with the European Union and other countries,” writes Mr. DeTrani. “Foreign direct investment in China fell $168 billion in 2024. International companies are leaving China, and Chinese firms are moving money abroad for better returns.”

“Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine could be the beginning of his effort to re-create the Russian empire. Although it’s in China’s interest to see an end to the war in Ukraine, it is not in China’s interest to maintain a close allied relationship with a revanchist Russian Federation,” he writes. “The impact on China’s economy and international credibility will be profound. Without China’s support, Russia will find it difficult, if not impossible, to persist with its invasion of Ukraine.”

• Feb. 26-27 — Global Space & Technology Convention & Exhibition, Singapore Space & Technology

• March 3-8 — SANS Security East, SANS

• March 4 — How Terrorists Use the Internet and Online Networks for Recruitment, House Homeland Security Committee

• March 5 — Investigating the Threat to U.S.-funded Research, House Science Committee

• March 6 — Iran on the Brink: Resistance, Repression, and Global Power Shifts, Hudson Institute

• March 17-19 — 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit, ARPA-E