Foreign spies on US campuses are growing in number.
If writing a spy thriller is on your bucket list, you may want to go back to college, and not just for the classes.
It turns out that universities are a new hotbed for all sorts of international espionage and nefarious covert activity.
Capitalizing on the institutional desire to constantly break new ground in research and development, many countries use academia’s talent recruitment practices as an inroad.
According to a US Defense Department report, East Asian requests to review papers or study with American professors multiplied 8 times between 2009 and 2010.
Founded in 2005, the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board collects and shares data about potential risks.
They also serve to open a dialogue between government and higher education. As the universities must protect and promote academic freedom, screening and reporting students can be a sticky process.
Further complicating the matter are actual spy training classes, like the one at the University of Tulsa. In it students learn how to hack, write viruses, and mine broken devices for data.
