Episode 387 Deep Dive: Dr Ahana Datta Fasel | China Doesn't Want What You Think It Wants

Dr. Ahana Datta Fasel has spent years mapping 30 years of China’s cyber operations, and she opens by dismantling the story most of us have absorbed. China isn’t only hunting our secrets. Sometimes it wants to know what we know about them, sometimes it’s watching its own diaspora, and often the intent behind an operation is genuinely hard to read.

She walks KB through why cyber has become inseparable from live conflict, from Ukraine’s power grids to the CCTVs of Tehran, and why the line between spying and preparing for war keeps moving. She explains the operation sitting inside America’s major telecom networks, where hackers have held access for three years and done nothing with it, and what that patience might mean. We also get into Five Eyes politics, the Huawei decisions, and why the West still doesn’t have a coherent China strategy.

Ahana’s book, Full Stack Spies: Cyber Espionage in the Age of US-China Competition, is out in North America on 1 October. Grab it on Amazon (https://a.co/d/01aovOFW) or from Oxford University Press (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/full-stack-spies-9780197871386), where the code ADISTA5 takes 30 percent off.

About Ahana: A former UK Government cyber leader and Financial Times cyber chief, Dr. Ahana Datta Fasel advises global governments and industry on geopolitical, AI and systemic risk strategies.

She serves as non-executive director at a leading global digital rights charity, adviser to deep tech start-ups, and a strategic adviser on national security and resilience to the UK body for research, innovation and international partnerships. She has held fellowships at Cornell, Cambridge, Imperial and Durham, and her op-eds have appeared in the FT, Foreign Policy, Euractiv and the Columbia Journalism Review.

Keywords: China cyber operations, cyber espionage, US-China competition, Full Stack Spies, geopolitics, Five Eyes, telecom breach, act of war, Taiwan, national security, hybrid warfare, Huawei