MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
As we end this hour, I want to introduce a new podcast from NPR. We are calling it Sources & Methods. Greg Myre is one of the NPR reporters who will be joining me - I'm hosting - on Sources & Methods, so I got him to explain the name of the show on the first episode, which drops this afternoon.
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GREG MYRE: Magicians don't tell you how they do their magic tricks, and spies don't tell you about their sources and methods.
KELLY: Every Thursday, we're going to dig into the biggest national security stories. This week, Greg Myre and NPR Moscow correspondent Charles Maynes join me in looking at the stalled diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia, also the National Guard patrolling the streets here in Washington, and an avalanche of firings throughout the U.S. intelligence community. And every week, we end the podcast talking about OSINT.
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KELLY: If you track the intelligence world, you probably know HUMINT - human intelligence. You may know SIGINT - signals intelligence. OSINT is open source intelligence, meaning it is publicly available, it is not classified, but you might miss it if you're not looking. Greg, what struck you this week?
MYRE: Two words - Salt Typhoon. This is, according to the U.S. government, a Chinese espionage campaign that was absolutely massive. It started around 2019, as the Chinese allegedly began hacking into big U.S. phone companies - AT&T, Verizon and others - looking, apparently, to get information from a few key people.
Now, this came out publicly. The U.S. law enforcement and intel agencies started talking about it last fall shortly before the '24 elections and said that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were among those being targeted. So we knew this was going on. It was not clear that it had been stopped. In fact, it seemed that the Chinese were continuing to do it, even after all these years and even after the U.S. was talking about it publicly. FBI came out this week, said that actually more than 80 countries worldwide have been targeted as part of this program. It's much broader than initially thought. The U.S. may be getting a handle on it, but it seems other countries probably know very little about what's happening in their homeland.
KELLY: More than 80 countries, same operation? That's huge.
MYRE: Absolutely. No, they figured out - and you could see how easily it would be to repeat it. If you figured out a way to hack into the big telecoms company in one country - in the U.S. - you could probably do it in other countries as well.
KELLY: Wow. Salt Typhoon. OK, Charles, can you top it?
CHARLES MAYNES: (Laughter) Yeah, I can top it with one word - Max. This is the Russian state-backed messaging application. It's a rival to WhatsApp, which has been banned here recently. So, for example, you can no longer make phone calls or video calls on WhatsApp. It comes up all scrambled. Now, Max, this is the Russian-backed version. It's a Kremlin-backed version. It will be pre-installed on all electronic devices in Russia, starting in September.
Now, critics would say that's also used to track users. In other words, we can track what we're saying and what we're doing. And for those who would say, well, look, I'll just keep it off my device, well, they're also planning to kind of integrate it with all sorts of e-government services. So it seems like eventually, somehow, Max will get you.
KELLY: Sounds like so many things in the tech world - that if the world were run by a benign dictator, it would be such a good idea - by a benign, benevolent dictator. However (laughter), I'm not sure I have great faith that you won't be tracked everywhere you go come September.
MAYNES: (Laughter) We'll see.
KELLY: All right, I will throw in the thing that got me curious and wondering this week, which is a renaming - a possible renaming. We know that President Trump likes to rename things. We saw that with various military bases here in the U.S. We've seen it with the Gulf of Mexico, which he's directed the U.S. government to call the Gulf of America going forward. And now he is expressing interest in renaming the Department of Defense - the Pentagon. He would like it to go back to being called the Department of War.
I went back and looked 'cause I knew it had been called the Department of War, indeed, for many, many years. It was President Truman who changed it - came along at the end of World War II and said, you know, among other things, maybe we should have an institution that's focused more on keeping the peace and try to avoid war going forward. So it was renamed the Department of Defense. And so I am interested in - and I'm going to be asking some questions and trying to report on - why a president who is openly campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize wants to have a Department of War.
So that's a little taste from our new podcast Sources & Methods. It premieres today. You'll find a new episode each Thursday on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
