If you like American Thinker’s content, please consider subscribing here for an ad-free experience and access to an exclusive, weekly newsletter offering insight from the editorial staff.

What an ironic reality that bureaucrats are a substantial threat to the American people and the nation’s security whether they’re “working” in the bureaucracy or out of it.

According to a new report from Newsmax yesterday, the U.S. intelligence community, specifically the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, is sounding the alarm and alerting the American public to a new scheme of the Chinese—they’re dangling fake jobs in front of newly-unemployed and disgruntled federal workers for access to sensitive information.

‘Foreign intelligence entities, particularly those in China, are targeting current and former U.S. government (USG) employees for recruitment by posing as consulting firms, corporate headhunters, think tanks, and other entities on social and professional networking sites,’ the center said in a bulletin.

An item at Reuters reported that Max Lesser, a senior analyst at a D.C. think tank, was involved in uncovering the ploy, which looked like this:

Little information is publicly available on the four consultancies and recruitment companies allegedly involved in the network, which in some cases shared overlapping websites, were hosted on the same server, or had other digital links, according to Reuters’ reporting and Lesser’s research.

The four companies’ websites are hosted at the same IP address alongside Smiao Intelligence, an internet services company whose website became unavailable during Reuters’ reporting. Reuters could not determine the nature of the relationship between Smiao Intelligence and the four companies.

The news agency’s attempts to track down the four companies and Smiao Intelligence ran into numerous dead-ends including unanswered phone calls, phone numbers that no longer work, fake addresses, addresses that lead to empty fields, unanswered emails and deleted job listings from LinkedIn.

(Reuters “could not determine” if any former federal employees had been snagged by the Chinese yet, but if I had to guess based on what I know about bureaucrats, I’d say it was highly likely.)

Isn’t that just great—a bunch of angry, jilted Democrats with no loyalty to the American people and no sense of duty or honor are being targeted by hostile influences for the sensitive information they possess. I’m not optimistic.

What’s particularly offensive is that it’s not like the information would be extracted by any means of legitimate and understandable pressure, like the people were being tortured or their family’s safety was put at risk…instead, it’s because these people can’t, or don’t want to, get real jobs in the private sector, where you actually have to produce something of value to earn a living.

Creating a bureaucrat means creating a lifelong headache and significant liability for the American, taxpaying public.

As if it weren’t clear enough that bureaucrats are just a disaster whichever way you look at it…here’s yet another reminder.

Image: Public domain.