Conversation with Jack Burnham of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy is about how the

Minister of State Security, China's Intelligence and Surveillance Agency, does not directly employ

the cyber crime criminals that we encounter stealing secrets or causing trouble.

No, they're, they farmed them out.

This is piecework.

They go private.

They get deniability.

Here Jack explains.

MSS is not the same old MSS.

No, I think you're right.

But I think what's interesting about the Chinese case is that China often tries to set up this way in a way that there is possible deniability.

And that's why particularly in this indictment, this individual was not worked on direction of the MSS, but didn't work directly for them.

And I think that's an important note.

And that's something that a lot of other Chinese operations and even other types of cyber operations really

involved. It's this effort of you have state security services like the MSS and others, you know,

really essentially farming out some of its more aggressive cyber operations to these private actors or these state

aligned actors, whether they be front companies or other types of actors. And then they are the ones

that really go in and conduct the types of cyber operations often for money or under duress

or other things like that. And so it's creating this obviously fictional, but still

demonstrable or apparent wall between what the the Chinese state and these private

individuals. And that's something that's also really notable in the way the United States

legal system looks at it. It's often, particularly when it comes to doing these indictments and doing these

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