XPost: alt.security.espionage, alt.politics.trump, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns, sac.politics   
   From: democrat-criminals@mail.house.gov   
      
   https://fortune.com/2024/07/08/chinese-self-driving-cars-us-roads-data-   
   collection-surveillance-national-security-concerns-investigation/   
      
   ON FEB. 1 LAST YEAR, Montana residents gawked upward at a large white   
   object hovering in the sky that looked to be another moon. The airborne   
   object was in fact a Chinese spy balloon loaded with cameras, sensors, and   
   other high-tech surveillance equipment, and it set off a nationwide panic   
   as it drifted across the midwestern and southern United States. How much   
   information the balloon gathered—if any—remains unknown, but the threat   
   was deemed serious enough that an F-22 U.S. Air Force jet fired a   
   Sidewinder missile at the unmanned balloon on a February afternoon,   
   blasting it to pieces a few miles off the coast of South Carolina.   
      
   At the same time that the eyes of Americans were fixed on the Chinese   
   intruder in the sky, around 30 cars owned by Chinese companies and   
   equipped with cameras and geospatial mapping technology were navigating   
   the streets of greater Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose. They   
   collected detailed videos, audio recordings, and location data on their   
   surroundings to chart out California’s roads and develop their autonomous   
   driving algorithms.   
      
   Since 2017, self-driving cars owned by Chinese companies have traversed   
   1.8 million miles of California alone, according to a Fortune analysis of   
   the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles data. As part of their basic   
   functionality, these cars capture video of their surroundings and map the   
   state’s roads to within two centimeters of precision. Companies transfer   
   that information from the cars to data centers, where they use it to train   
   their self-driving systems.   
      
   The cars are part of a state program that allows companies developing   
   self-driving technology—including Google spinoff Waymo and Amazon-owned   
   Zoox—to test autonomous vehicles on public roads. Among the 35 companies   
   approved to test by the California DMV, seven are wholly or partly China-   
   based. Five of them drove on California roads last year: WeRide, Apollo,   
   AutoX, Pony.ai, and DiDi Research America. Some Chinese companies are   
   approved to test in Arizona and Texas as well.   
      
   Fitted with cameras, microphones, and sophisticated sensors, self-driving   
   cars have long raised flags among privacy advocates. Matthew Guariglia, a   
   policy analyst at the digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier   
   Foundation, called self-driving cars “rolling surveillance devices” that   
   passively collect massive amounts of information on Americans in plain   
   sight.   
      
   In the context of national security, however, the data-hungry Chinese cars   
   have received surprisingly little scrutiny. Some experts have compared   
   them to Chinese-owned social media site TikTok, which has been subjected   
   to a forced divestiture or ban on U.S. soil due to fears around its data   
   collection practices threatening national security. The years-long   
   condemnation of TikTok at the highest levels of the U.S. government has   
   heightened the sense of distrust between the U.S. and China.   
      
   Some Chinese self-driving car companies appear to store U.S. data in   
   China, according to privacy policies reviewed by Fortune—a situation that   
   experts said effectively leaves the data accessible to the Chinese   
   government. Depending on the type of information collected by the cars,   
   the level of precision, and the frequency at which it’s collected, the   
   data could provide a foreign adversary with a treasure trove of   
   intelligence that could be used for everything from mass surveillance to   
   war planning, according to security experts who spoke with Fortune.   
      
   And yet, despite the sensitivity of the data, officials at the state and   
   federal agencies overseeing the self-driving car testing acknowledge that   
   they do not currently monitor, or have any process for checking, exactly   
   what data the Chinese vehicles are collecting and what happens to the data   
   after it is collected. Nor do they have any additional rules or policies   
   in place for oversight of Chinese self-driving cars versus the cars in the   
   program operated by American or European companies.   
      
   “It is literally the wild, wild West here,” said Craig Singleton, director   
   of the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a   
   conservative-leaning national security think tank. “There’s no one in   
   charge.”   
      
   The lack of safeguards raises concerns not just because of the vast   
   amounts of data that autonomous cars collect in the ordinary course of   
   their operations, but also because of the ability of roaming vehicles to   
   surreptitiously collect other types of data. The potential for such   
   mischief was demonstrated back in 2010 when Google acknowledged that its   
   manually driven Street View mapping cars had for years hoovered up private   
   user data, including entire email communications and passwords, shared   
   over unsecured Wi-Fi networks by residents in more than 30 countries   
   (Google blamed the incident on a rogue employee).   
      
   There is no evidence that any of the Chinese companies testing self-   
   driving cars are doing any such things in the U.S. or that the data they   
   collect is being used by the Chinese government. But in the event that any   
   of the cars were doing so, security experts said American authorities   
   might not even know it given what many described as an astoundingly lax   
   system of oversight of the Chinese cars.   
      
   1.8 million   
      
   THE NUMBER OF MILES THAT CHINESE-OWNED AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES HAVE TRAVELED   
   IN CALIFORNIA SINCE 2017   
   At a time when U.S. fears of espionage have fueled high-profile efforts to   
   ban China-owned firms like TikTok and telecommunications equipment maker   
   Huawei, the Chinese self-driving cars roaming American roads represent a   
   little-noticed loophole that highlights the countless apertures for   
   surveillance in today’s tech-permeated landscape and the challenge of   
   mitigating all the risks.   
      
   To report this story, Fortune spoke with more than two dozen experts in   
   autonomous cars, data security, and U.S.-China relations. It also reached   
   out to representatives from all Chinese companies that test their   
   autonomous technologies in the U.S., as well as those of government   
   agencies related to vehicle safety, privacy, and national security. Most   
   experts agreed that while the U.S. government is beginning to take action,   
   it is significantly behind in regulating data security involving the   
   Chinese self-driving cars, including information transferred to   
   adversarial countries.   
      
   “We just don’t have a government in place now that has the technical   
   literacy—at all agencies—to deal with the autonomous functionality plus   
   data privacy plus cybersecurity,” said Missy Cummings, engineering   
      
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