Congress received their unclassified Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage report (pdf) detailing activities from around the world (particularly in the cyber realm) and their impact on the US. The report directly insinuates the Chinese and Russians are the top offenders for building their economies on American research and technology, excerpted directly as “the nations of China and Russia, through their intelligence services and through their corporations, are attacking our research and development.” China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman rejected the claims stating, “online attacks are notable for spanning national borders and being anonymous. Identifying the attackers without carrying out a comprehensive investigation and making inferences about the attackers is both unprofessional and irresponsible. I hope the international community can abandon prejudice and work hard with China to maintain online security.”

Of course, it’s not without precedent that the United State’s own intelligence gathering efforts are making the news. The CIA has been outed for its scouring of social media sites and local news sources. It’s an effort more or less described as a crossing of librarians, linguists and nerds that has yielded many successes in discovering up and coming intelligence events.