Kim Hjelmgaard

You know, just to get more concrete for you, one former head of a major intelligence agency in the United States told me that the Chinese currently send about 30,000 LinkedIn messages daily.

every hour to sort of engineers, coders, Silicon Valley types, all the kind of brain trusts of America, hoping that there will be some people that respond and that eventually kind of get lured to conferences in China where they give presentations and hopefully the Chinese can learn something about their research as a first step.

And then over time, they try to sort of collect more and more information in the hope that eventually they get

to something that is proprietary, confidential.

It's in the private sector often, so it's not necessarily classified, but it's still illegal to steal it.

Well, the official version is that they don't do it.

That said, there are some historical examples, mostly during the Cold War.

The U.S.

intelligence agencies, the U.S.

government, current and former, will say that in the West, we're bound by moral codes and regulatory environments, and we just don't do that.

Should we believe them?

Maybe, maybe not.

Thanks so much for having me.