FBI Director Christopher Wray opened up with Americans about a grave double threat on Wednesday, giving a textbook example of using his power and position to get attention.
His stunning warning about China’s capacity to “wreak havoc” on US infrastructure and directly harm Americans shed new light on the ambition of America’s new superpower foe and helps give context to the fragile relations between Washington and Beijing that are already showing up as an issue in the 2024 campaign.
And, experts said, Wray’s bombshell assessment about the vulnerabilities of the systems that underpin daily life reflected a growing issue – the interconnected nature of new transport, power and energy networks that could mean a future cyberattack on a single node could paralyze the entire country.
Rick Geddes, director of Cornell University’s Infrastructure Policy Program, said he was surprised by the “clarity and intensity of Wray’s statements regarding this threat and how much more resources the Chinese Communist Party is putting into this relative to the United States.” He said that Wray, despite his stark language, may have underplayed the gravity of an issue that raises “a lot of warning signals regarding the potential threats to our critical infrastructure.”
The scenario the FBI director painted in congressional testimony was a striking public accounting of the capacity of China, its Communist Party (CCP) leaders and sprawling intelligence agencies to target America’s way of life with a hacking operation that is bigger than that of all other nations combined. It raises the possibility that any conflict over Taiwan or territorial claims in the South China Sea that drags in the US could spread far beyond its epicenter on the other side of the globe. And it is a sign of the ambition and aggression of Xi Jinping’s…
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