China's warhead totals are not fully known as a result of military secrecy, but Ashley said the estimate is that the current arsenal includes "low, couple hundred" warheads.

Other estimates have put the number of warheads hidden in underground bunkers to be from several hundred to as many as a thousand.

China's nuclear forces are shrouded in secrecy and include a network of nuclear storage and production facilities dubbed the Great Underground Wall that is estimated to be some 3,000 miles long.

The DIA director also stated, in a setback for arms control advocates who have pushed for U.S. ratification of a nuclear test ban treaty, that intelligence indicates both China and Russia have facilities and have conducted small nuclear tests in apparent violation of a commitment to zero nuclear tests under the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or CTBT.

Asked if Chinese nuclear modernization is not in compliance with CTBT curbs, Ashley said: "That's our belief in terms of what we're seeing with the testing regime."

China's military is attempting to rapidly advance its nuclear forces, which in the past were limited. The first Chinese mobile intercontinental-range missile was deployed around 2000, he said.

"So part of that rapid growth is because the capability did not exist in the kind of capacity that Russia or the U.S. has had in the past," Ashely said. "So that has been a significant investment that they've made in terms of them catching up [with] capacity over the course of the last 15 years."

China's new strategic arms include a new road-mobile ICBM, a new multi-warhead variant of its silo-based ICBMs, and new submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

The Chinese also are building a new strategic bomber that will give Beijing its first triad of weapons—land-based, sea-based, and bomber-delivered strike weapons.

Ashley said the buildup shows "China's commitment to expanding the role and centrality of nuclear forces in Beijing's military aspirations."

Its forces also include nuclear-tipped short-range precision strike weapons similar to those being developed by the Russians.

"While China's overall arsenal is assessed to be much smaller than Russia's, that does not make this trend any less concerning," Ashley said.

China has announced it will not be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict and also would not use nuclear arms against non-nuclear states.

Ashely, however, said the no-first-use policy is questionable.

"But at the end of the day if something becomes an existential threat, it's difficult to say that [using nuclear weapons first] would not become something in their decision calculus because they have not specifically stated it," he said.

China is also increasing the reliance in their strategy on using nuclear weapons.

"And it's not just in the nuclear," he said. "If you look at all the domains, what they have done in terms of modernizing the military across aviation, and a big area not the subject of this topic is really the space/counterpace aspect of how the Chinese are approaching warfighting from every domain. But there is a significant investment in their nuclear forces."

Of their main nuclear testing facility, known as Lop Nur, in western China, Ashley revealed the Chinese are preparing to operate the site year round—an indication of "China's growing goals for its nuclear forces."

Also, China has continued to conduct tests using explosive containment chambers at its nuclear test site and Chinese leaders in the past joined Russia in watering down language in a declaration by nuclear weapons states that undermined a widely understood concept of "zero yield" nuclear tests.

"The combination of these facts and China's lack of transparency on their nuclear testing activities raise questions as to whether China could achieve such progress without activities inconsistent with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty," Ashley said.

Russian covert underground testing is part of the overall nuclear modernization program.

The small underground nuclear tests have been detected as early as 1996 at a facility in northern Russia called Novaya Zemlya. The testing violations at the time were covered up by the State Department during the administration of President Bill Clinton. The department claimed there were no CTBT violations by Moscow.

Ashley also said that, in addition to the nuclear modernization, both China and Russia are developing weapons based on advanced and emerging technology with the potential to "revolutionize undersea warfare and challenge U.S. superiority in the maritime domain."

-MORE-

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/dia-china-doubling-nuclear-warhead-arsenal/

Thousands of devices from Huawei, ZTE and other foreign makers that were explicitly banned in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2019 are still operating in government networks, according to new data from the security firm Forescout.

The company recently counted 2,712 Huawei and 1,374 ZTE devices currently deployed in the public sector from local, state and federal government clients who opted to share their data.

But the NDAA’s Aug. 13 deadline to have those devices removed from federal networks is approaching.

“The bottom line is that they are not allowed to have these manufacturers on their networks so they’ll have to get on track to do that by the deadline,” Katherine Gronberg, Forescout’s vice president of government affairs, told Nextgov.

She said Forescout manages millions of federal devices and the number of those prohibited but still being used by the government are only in the thousands.

“In the grand scheme of things, if you are thinking about how large the agency environments are, this is probably progress,” she said. “But I am not going to say it’s not that much, because any potentially vulnerable piece of equipment is concerning.”

Security experts warn the banned companies’ devices could have pre-existing vulnerabilities that would allow the Chinese government to access their data or use them as doors to the networks they touch.

While the NDAA does not prohibit devices being used by state and local governments, Gronberg said security and telecommunications insiders are eager to see how expansive President Trump’s new executive order will reach in further banning the risky equipment. This will be determined in the coming months by the Commerce Department and other agency leaders.

Gronberg said she knows of some agencies that are working to enforce new controlling actions and processes like segmentation to mitigate the issues, but it is no easy feat. Agencies have to detect the equipment, determine the functionality and mitigate the risks efficiently until they can actually replace the devices, which they are now required to do by the law.

“It’s not something that happens overnight that an agency can just go in and rip everything out,” she said.

https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2019/05/security-firm-says-huawei-zte-devices-still-run-government-networks/157370/

By Julian E. Barnes and William J. Broad

May 29, 2019

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration believes Russia has restarted very low-yield nuclear tests, officials said on Wednesday in a finding that could be used to renew in earnest the arms race between Moscow and Washington.

But the significance of the statements by the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a senior National Security Council official was immediately debated by nuclear weapons experts.

Some experts said claims of low-yield tests would be nothing new. Intelligence officials and nuclear analysts in Washington have long raised the possibility of such violations going back nearly two decades, to when Russia ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 2000.

Other nuclear weapons experts have argued that significant Russian cheating on the treaty is unlikely because the designs of the country’s nuclear warheads tend to be very robust. The small returns, they have said, would make the geopolitical costs of getting caught prohibitively high.

Lt. Gen. Robert P. Ashley Jr., the director of the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, said Russia appeared to have enhanced its ability to develop new nonstrategic nuclear weapons and to manage its existing stockpile by its testing capability.

“The United States believes Russia is probably not adhering to the nuclear testing moratorium in a manner consistent with the zero-yield standard,” General Ashley said in prepared remarks at the Hudson Institute.

-MORE-

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/29/us/politics/russia-nuclear-tests.html

Snapchat employees have been using internal tools — which offer them privileged access to user data — to spy on people’s pages, a report says.

Two workers who are no longer with the app’s parent company, Snap, spoke to Motherboard about the alleged abuse of power — which included breaches of location info and other sensitive data.

In some cases, employees allegedly accessed old photos and videos that users had saved, according to the Motherboard sources.

Two other ex-workers and a current employee described how Snapchat’s data access tools allowed them to peel back the curtain on people’s pages. They said one of the tools is called SnapLion and was originally used to gather info at the request of law enforcement or a court subpoena.

According to Motherboard’s sources, there are at least two departments in Snap that use SnapLion. They include the “Spam and Abuse” team, which deals with bullying and harassment, and the “Customer Ops” crew, which deals with user issues.

Until now, nobody had ever revealed the tool’s existence. Internal emails reportedly confirmed its usage.

One former Snapchat worker told Motherboard that SnapLion ultimately gave employees “the keys to the kingdom.” The app currently has more than 185 million users. It’s unclear if the company has reached out to any of the accounts affected.

https://www.foxnews.com/tech/snapchat-employees-abused-data-access-spied-on-users-report