REACHING OUT

China Is Using LinkedIn to Recruit Americans, Says U.S. Chief Spy Catcher

Beijing’s use of the job networking site said to be “super aggressive.”

Most people only use LinkedIn to reject annoying networking requests from people you haven't seen since high school—but China has apparently managed to find a different use for it. America’s top spy catcher told Reuters that Beijing is using the networking site to track down and try to recruit Americans who have access to government and commercial secrets. William Evanina, the U.S. counterintelligence chief, said LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, has been informed about China’s “super aggressive” use of the site. “I recently saw that Twitter is canceling, I don’t know, millions of fake accounts, and our request would be maybe LinkedIn could go ahead and be part of that,” said Evanina. LinkedIn confirmed the espionage efforts, with spokesman Paul Rockwell saying: “We are doing everything we can to identify and stop this activity. We’ve never waited for requests to act and actively identify bad actors and remove bad accounts using information we uncover and intelligence from a variety of sources including government agencies.” China’s foreign ministry described the report as “complete nonsense.”