Could you be a 'super-forecaster'?

Political forecasting is among the most vital roles played by the intelligence services: determining which country's government is most likely to collapse in the next few months, or whether a given nation has weapons of mass destruction that render them a threat. But what happens when there's no way to assess the quality of those forecasts – or the people making them?

In 2004, the Butler Review on the events leading up to the 2003 Iraq invasion found that the British Government's decision to invade – based on the premise that Saddam Hussein had WMDs – was the result of a major intelligence failure. It is just one example of how the predictions that go on behind closed doors can often be fallible.

But the work of Philip Tetlock and his team at the Good Judgment Project – funded by the US government's Intelligence Advanced Research Project (Iarpa) – points to new ways of thinking about geopolitical forecasting, and the question of what makes a person better-equipped to predict world events. A few people, the project has revealed, have extraordinary talents for seeing the future – might you be one of them?
Skilled ‘supers’

The Good Judgment Project is one of several funded by Iarpa to participate in a tournament-style challenge, and by far the most successful. It recruited over 2,000 forecasters to assess the likelihood of various world events: using models ranging from soliciting individuals' predictions to assigning forecasters to collaborative teams.
Tetlock found that the most successful predictions were made by a concentrated group of skilled “super-forecasters”. Their personality traits, rather than any specialised knowledge, allowed them to make predictions that, according to NPR, outstripped the accuracy of several of the world's intelligence services, despite the fact that forecasters had access to no more classified data than they could access with a Google search.

“Most people would expect to find domain experts doing well in their domain,” says Nick Hare, one of the super-forecasters (informally, they go by “supers”) whose performance in the project landed him an invitation to the Good Judgment Project's annual summer conference. But, in fact, “there are people who are good at all domains” – outperforming even specialists. And they could hold the key to reconfiguring the way intelligence services think about making predictions in the future.

Hare's interest in discovering a basis for good political forecasting predates the Good Judgment Project. For over five years, Hare served as head of futures and analytical methods at the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD): looking for ways to improve intelligence officers' performance while finding ways to create accountability in the wake of the Butler Report, “looking at how we can get intelligence analysts to approach their task to make them more likely to be right", he says. It's a “'dirty secret of the intelligence community,” he adds, that there are few formal structures in place to determine whether intelligence reports – which are likely to be narrative in character – in fact prove accurate. “[If we say] 'such-and-such a country is unlikely to back down on this issue' – what does 'back down' look like? What does 'unlikely' look like?... If somebody is not being rigorous to the point of tedious pedantry – it's difficult to say whether a prediction is right or wrong.”

Hare points to the failure of intelligence leading up to the 2003 Iraq War – which led to the Butler Inquiry into intelligence – as a turning point. “Traditionally, you got a bright person, you sat them down in front of a pile of intelligence, and then they wrote things. Nobody checked how good they were.” Now, however, it's more important than ever to ask how intelligence analysts can approach their task in a way that makes them more likely to be right – so that an intelligence failure is less likely.

‘Open-minded thinking’
Hare's interest in the Good Judgment Project was piqued by reading an article by Tetlock, who struck him as “one of the few people talking about futures who’s interested in getting it right, and not just guffing on”. He signed up to be a forecaster, only to find his skills were so good they put him into the “supers”.
So, what makes Hare such a good forecaster? His success, he says, comes down not to knowledge but his capacity for “active, open-minded thinking”: applying the scientific method to look rigorously at data, rather than seeking to impose a given narrative on a situation.

When asked to predict the likelihood of a nuclear test in North Korea in the next three months, for example, Hare didn't start by analysing the geopolitical situation there, or investigating whether its new leader was more likely to run tests; the arguments on either side, he says, cancelled each other out. Instead, he looked for a base rate probability. Concluding that there was, on average, one test every 30 months, it made the likelihood in the upcoming period around 10%. He then adjusted that base rate in accordance with additional data. North Korea's threats to run a test, numerically speaking, had in the past effectively doubled the likelihood of a test actually happening, so he adjusted his prediction to 20%. “That's basically the sort of approach you take,” he says.

But super-forecasters need not have a background in the intelligence services to apply that kind of logic successfully. This year's crop of “supers” includes a number of finance workers, as well as an animator, an oil painter, and someone who made factory machinery.
‘Something stranger’

“I think the advantage I have is that I was a massive ignoramus,” jokes Reed Roberts, another “super”, who joined the Good Judgment Project after reading about it in a blog. He’s finishing his PhD in chemistry, and was looking for a distraction from research and an impetus to follow the news more closely: only to find that he, too, had the skills necessary to become a super. He says he “didn't go into many of these questions with any particular attachment” or viewpoint he was hoping to prove or disprove. Instead, he thought narrowly – sometimes too narrowly – about “what it would take to resolve the question”.

Roberts cites the Isaiah Berlin essay “The Fox and the Hedgehog” – a comparison often used by Tetlock himself – which divides thinkers into those “hedgehogs'” narrowly invested in a single topic and “foxes” with a wider, if shallower, range of experience. “Foxes” like him, Robert says, tend to be better forecasters. “They don't get attached to one particular narrative” and are able to adapt their viewpoints to incorporate any new information, unlike “hedgehog” thinkers, who often force new information into a pre-existing mental framework, or discard it if it seems to contradict their initial view.

He did particularly well on one question about whether military presence would be involved in a fatality in the South China Sea, for example, because of that specificity: he thought a “calamity” was unlikely but didn't exclude the possibility of “something stranger”; ultimately, the shooting of an illegally present fisherman ruled the question in his favour.

It remains to be seen how international intelligence services will respond to the Good Judgment Project's findings. For now, however, many supers are finding ways to monetise their skills in the private sector. Hare left his position at the MoD a few months ago to start Aleph Insights: a consulting company specialising in “strategic decision-making”. The project, too, has evolved: a website for Good Judgment, LLC, now advertises its services in providing “independent geopolitical forecasts” in the wake of the project's success.

Hare and Roberts alike agree that an added benefit of the Good Judgment Project was facilitating ways for hyper-intelligent “supers” to find each other and develop ways to collaborate. Hare's first super-forecaster conference, he says, was something of a revelation. “It's like that bit at the end of ET,” he says, “when all the other ETs come and get him. He's not an alien anymore.”

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Why Debt and Money Created ‘Out of Thin Air’ Are Necessary, Not Evil

Paul Solman sets the record straight on how he explains economics to himself and to his readers, tackling three different questions about the Federal Reserve, pictured above. Photo courtesy of Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Paul Solman sets the record straight on how he explains economics to himself and to his readers, tackling three different questions about the Federal Reserve, pictured above. Photo courtesy of Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

I am about to address three entirely reasonable questions concerning the Federal Reserve and its monetary policy. But first, let me make a general observation addressed to those of you who write in with genuine questions, like those below, and also to those of you who think you already know the answers and call people like me either “ill informed” or “part of a conspiracy” (see question three) when I try to explain that, for example, paper money is not the work of the devil, whose latest incarnation, many think, happens to be Ben Bernanke.

Look, I’ve been a journalist for 43 years. It was after the first six that I set out to do a story about municipal bonds. I was a pretty sophisticated guy, relatively speaking, and had even been on the board of directors of the weekly newspaper for which I served several years as editor-in-chief. But as I slogged my way through the bond story, I gradually realized how little I knew about the world of economics and its most basic workings.

I applied for a fellowship to go back to school (I couldn’t afford it on my own), lucked out with a year’s funding to attend business school, and underwent my professional conversion experience. As the year progressed, my suspicion was confirmed: there was a vast mechanism ticking away right in front of my eyes, chronicled regularly by the likes of The Wall St. Journal or Fortune or Business Week magazines, but except for the readers of those publications and perhaps a few others, few Americans really knew how it operated. “What an opportunity to be useful,” I thought. Or, as I later put it — using finance terminology — an intellectual arbitrage.

It was then (1977) that I turned myself into a business and economics reporter, learning the field as I worked it. I read the business and economics press, audited economics classes and interrogated those in the know, both on the right and the left. And that’s what I’ve done ever since. The journalist’s MO has been crucial — whenever I’ve encountered a strong opinion or pointed analysis I’ve asked, “What’s the best argument a skeptic would make as a counter?” Yes, that’s the sure road to ambiguity. But it’s also, I found, the key to understanding.

The point of this introduction is that when I began, I too was ignorant about money — about banking, bonds, the stock market, the Fed and hundreds of other key aspects of material life in the largest, most successful economy the world has ever seen. So I really appreciate people like Gary Barrett, Yan Doodan and Janice Bienn, whom I’m about to address, and the many others of you over the years, who know that they don’t know everything, and therefore send in questions of the very sort I’ve been asking for almost four decades now.

As for those who think they do know all the answers but haven’t spent years hearing the other side, beware. And with that, here’s this week’s q-and-a, with my answers put in the kind of simple, jargon-averse terms I try to use to explain things to myself.

Gary Barrett — Conifer, Colo.: Why does federal monetary policy target a 2 percent inflation rate? Why encourage inflation?

Paul Solman: Let me rephrase your question with a dose of skepticism, Gary. “Why encourage inflation of 2 percent a year when that means the U.S. dollar will lose half its value by 2050? How can inflation be a good thing?”

A simple answer lies in the nature of economic activity itself. What is an economy? People providing goods and services to others — period. The more goods and services, the bigger the economy. The faster the rate of providing more goods and services, the faster the economy grows.

If economic growth is what a society is after, then it wants to use the devices at its disposal to facilitate that growth. And one key way to get people to provide more goods and services is to make it easier for them to trade for something of value.

What’s a device to make trading a whole lot easier than it would otherwise be? Money. So when people in a society aren’t providing as much in the way of goods and services as they might be — if lots of them are sitting idle because they’re “unemployed,” say — then the creation of more money holds out the hope of goosing production.

Let’s say I’m unemployed. The government of my society creates some more money and gives it to me in return for providing a service like filling costly potholes, which are getting more costly to fix with every passing day. My fellow citizens get a service they can’t buy on their own, and I can now spend the money I get on their goods or services. That should, in turn, encourage them to provide more.

Where would the new money I get come from? The government would borrow it. How would it pay the money back? Ultimately, by collecting higher taxes in the future and/or borrowing even more. And who will it borrow from? Well, among other lenders, the Federal Reserve Bank, whose workings we’ll explain in the q-and-a that immediately follows this one. Suffice it to say, in this answer, that when the government (via the U.S. Treasury) borrows from the government (via the Federal Reserve), the Fed creates the money, aka “monetizing the debt.”

Of course, there’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip. In other words, there are lots of possible screw-ups in the process. The most obvious of which is that by creating so much new money, the money itself becomes worth less and less, thereby becomes less and less of an encouragement to trade.

But the general idea of pursuing a modest inflation rate like 2 percent is that people won’t much notice the diminution in value. And meanwhile, economic growth, with all its new and cheaper goods and services, will make everyone better off.

Yan Doodan — Fairfax, Va.: So, after the taper, what’s the Federal Reserve going to do with all those bonds? They should be worth four trillion dollars or so by then. If the Fed sold them, wouldn’t they be competing with the Treasury? Could they give them to the main part of the government? What would the bonds be if that happened? Mad money?

Paul Solman: If you’ve been reading from question one, here now we get to the agency of the government that actually creates our money, and thereby tries to control inflation: the Federal Reserve. It creates U.S. dollars not by printing them, but by generating them electronically as deposits in our banks, deposits known as “Federal reserves.”

The Fed doesn’t just give the reserves to the banks, however. It uses them to buy some of what the banks have in abundance: bonds.

And what are bonds? Legal debt contracts, as in “my word is my bond, but just in case you don’t take my word as Gospel, here’s a written promise that I’ll pay you back.”

Banks are in the business of taking money from depositors and lending it out. Often they lend to individuals and small businesses. Other times, they lend to large institutions or governments. Those loans are usually made in return for bonds — IOUs. So banks have lots of them.

The world’s biggest issuer of bonds is the U.S. government, which has run up a cumulative $16 trillion national debt. As a result, the U.S. has $16 trillion worth of bonds outstanding. U.S. banks hold a significant portion of them.

When the Fed wants to spur the economy, as I explained in my answer to the first question, above, it buys bonds from the Treasury, thus injecting its “Federal reserves” into the banking system, which can then lend out most of the new money as loans and spur economic activity. That’s what the Fed has been doing ever since the Crash of ’08.

Look at the Fed’s situation six years ago, in October of 2007. It held about $800 billion worth of U.S. Treasury IOUs, meaning it was financing less than a trillion dollars worth of U.S. debt. As of this week, that number had swelled to $2.2 trillion, with the Fed having bought another $1.5 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities (housing loans) as well. So yes, Yan, the Fed is now the proud owner of nearly $4 trillion dollars worth of loans.

All told, the Fed has newly taken on about $3 trillion worth of loans since the Crash of ’08, which it paid for with newly created electronic “Federal reserves.” That’s the policy known as “quantitative easing,” so-called because the Fed increased the quantity of money in the banking system in order to ease ( as opposed to “tighten”) economic activity. And to be clear: this is what the Fed has always done when it tried to stimulate the economy. The Fed was blasted by conservative economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz for not having done so in the early 1930s and thus having contributed mightily to the Great Depression by failing to ease.

The talk now is that the Fed will slow and eventually stop its bond buying and money creation — gradually. It will, in short, taper off its easing, as it typically has done in the past.

Yan asks a question beyond tapering, however: If the Fed were to start selling its bonds instead of continuing to buy them, wouldn’t that flood the bond market with U.S. Treasuries, making it more difficult for the Treasury to borrow money by selling new bonds of its own and indeed forcing the Treasury to offer a higher interest rate to get anyone to lend to it?

Well, yes, which is why the Fed will only start selling bonds when it wants to tighten the economy — should it show signs of overheating and bubble-like activity. Those signs would presumably show up first in lots of buying and price and wage rises and thus, a sudden spurt in the inflation rate. To “taper,” in short, does not mean “to suddenly reverse course.”

Yan also asks: “Could [the Fed] give [the Treasury bonds] to the main part of the government? What would the bonds be if that happened? Mad money?”

I’m no finance lawyer, but the answer is almost surely “no.” I can’t imagine that the Fed has authority to simply give away its assets. And why would the Treasury need the bonds? It has nothing to fear from the Fed. If the Fed holds Treasury bonds, it’s not likely to dump them, is it? Not unless the economy needs dramatic tightening, that is, in which case the Treasury should be happy to see the Fed start unloading.

But let me ask a question you didn’t pose, Yan: what happened to the nearly $3 trillion dollars the Fed has created between 2008 and today?

Well, look again at the Fed balance sheet. In the second section, entitled “1. Factors Affecting Reserve Balances of Depository Institutions (continued),” the seventh row is labeled “Reserve balances with Federal Reserve Banks.” Up until the Crash of ’08, that number was in the low billions. Today, as you can see if you look, it’s $2.3 trillion.

In other words, most of the money the Fed has created — “out of thin air,” as Fedophobes like to declaim — is right back at the Fed in the form of deposits by banks.

“But why would that be?” you might well ask.

And the answer is this: at the time of the Crash, the Fed instituted a policy of paying the banks to redeposit money at the Fed. That payment is known as “Interest on Excess Reserves” (IOER). It appears to have been a way of discouraging banks from making risky loans, a way of keeping the newly created Fed money from circulating throughout the economy and thus creating inflation. In fact, some observers would say its main purpose was simply to shore up the wobbly banking system with Fed money. I wouldn’t disagree.

Janice Bienn — Dallas, Texas: What are your thoughts on the video “Money as Debt” by Paul Grignon? I sent someone your article, and he fired back with this video, stating that you were either ill informed, or part of the “conspiracy.” I don’t believe either conclusion is true. But I would appreciate some clarification. Thanks in advance for your time.

Paul Solman: I don’t mean to sound defensive, Janice, but if even I am ill informed, after all these decades of time and effort, we might as well go fishing and leave the economy to — well, whom, exactly? Paul Grignon? His great insight, as near as I can tell, is that money is debt — true — and debt is bad. Really? Debt is bad? Money is bad?

Look, debt can be abused. Who would doubt it? The ability to create money can be abused. Again, who would argue otherwise? But for goodness sake, everything of value can be abused, from land to love to food to friendship!

The easiest form of communication, I discovered early in my career, is to denounce, to deride, to find flaws. That’s because pretty much nothing in this all-too-human world of ours works quite as intended.

People and larger groups of people (institutions) and even larger groups (governments) take on financial commitments they can’t meet. What else is new? This has been happening throughout the entire course of financial transactions. Here’s the translation of a message on a clay tablet, in cuneiform, from A. Leo Oppenheim’s book, “Letters from Mesopotamia”:

From Silla-Labbum and Elani

Tell Puzur-Assur, Amua, and Assur-samsi:

Thirty years ago you left the city of Assur [one of the capitals of ancient Assyria, 250 or so miles north of Baghdad]. You have never made a deposit since, and we have not recovered one shekel of silver from you, but we have never made you feel bad about this. Our tablets have been going to you with caravan after caravan, but no report from you has ever come here. We have addressed claims to your father but we have not been claiming one shekel of your private silver. Please, do come back right away; should you be too busy with your business, deposit the silver for us. (Remember) we have never made you feel bad about this matter but we are now forced to appear, in your eyes, acting as gentlemen should not. Please, do come back right away or deposit the silver for us.

If not, we will send you a notice from the local ruler and the police, and thus put you to shame in the assembly of the merchants. You will also cease to be one of us.

I suppose it’s possible to attribute the fall of Assyrian hegemony to widespread debt abuse. But personally, I’d be more inclined to believe that cross-desert commerce was good for the Mesopotamian economy — the world’s very first economy, some say — and that such commerce was facilitated by debt and money, as all commerce has been ever since. If that makes me part of a conspiracy, so be it.


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MasterCard Tests 'Selfie Pay' Technology

MasterCard may soon roll out a new feature on its smartphone app that lets users pay for online purchases by taking "selfies."

The financial services company is testing technology that allows customers to authorize transactions using photos of themselves instead of passwords, the company announced in a news release in August.

Some 200 employees of the First Tech Federal Credit Union are currently taking part in a two-month "selfie pay" pilot program, which runs through October, USA Today reports. Another trial is underway in the Netherlands.

Ajay Bhalla, president of MasterCard's security company Enterprise Solutions, has called the technology convenient and secure.

"Passwords are a pain," Bhalla said in a news release when the feature was announced. "They’re easy to forget, they waste our time and they’re not very safe. Biometrics are making online transactions as secure and simple as purchases in person."

If a purchase requires identity verification, customers can hold up their phone cameras, blink and let the app verify with a facial scan, according to USA Today. Blinking safeguards against thieves who might try to bypass security with a photo of the cardholder.

MasterCard is also working to implement voice recognition and even heartbeat recognition to verify a person’s identity, USA Today reports.
Visa is considering a feature similar to "selfie pay." The competing corporation has developed a blueprint to enable biometrics like fingerprints to verify on site transactions, according to USA Today.
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Kentucky Prosecutor: Being Hispanic Is Good Enough Reason For Police To Pull You Over

Being Hispanic in Oldham County, Kentucky is enough to be pulled over by a cop, according to one prosecutor. You can also be coerced into a plea deal if you have a certain last name.

Last July, Mauro Martinez was pulled over for speeding but he was not charged. Instead, he was cited for not having a license because he only had a Guatemalan ID at the time. During a court hearing about the citation, Assistant County Attorney Travis Combs pointed out that the defendant’s issue was that he was pulled over for being Hispanic. In a video recording of the hearing, prosecuting attorney John K. Carter says “that’s probable cause.”

After a video of the exchange was circulated by the Courier-Journal, Carter reversed course and said the speed at which Martinez was driving was probable cause. But the judge presiding over the case and Martinez’ defense attorney, Dawn Elliot, did not interpret Carter’s remarks that way.
Watch the video:


WDRB 41 Louisville News

“Clearly he had an opportunity to clear that up on the record over 24 hours ago, but now there’s buzz about it,” Elliot said. “My reaction and the judge’s reaction speaks for itself. We certainly interpreted him talking about probable cause for my client’s ethnicity.”
Elliot believes Carter’s comment highlights a growing trend of racially profiling Hispanics in the county. She claims that prior to Martinez’ trial, she was informed by an assistant attorney that there is a special form for “people that have that type of last name” to plead guilty. If people without driver’s licenses are stopped, as Martinez was, officers encourage them to sign the form and agree to two years of unsupervised probation. If they are caught driving again without proper ID, they can be sentenced to jail for 90 days.

The assistant attorney noted that Martinez was offered a plea bargain, but repudiated Elliot’s claim that Hispanics are disproportionately targeted. Elliot is calling for an investigation of the county’s officers.

Latinos, like other people of color, are racially profiled during traffic stops across the country. Many are stopped for minor offenses, and if they cannot provide valid licenses they are funneled into the criminal justice system. Police often use lack of ID to crack down on undocumented immigrants.
While the push to give undocumented immigrants licenses has gained traction in many states, Kentucky still bars non-citizens from applying for driver IDs. However, a bill to give undocumented people special licenses if they live in the state for at least three years received bipartisan support earlier this year. The bill was not voted on, but it could be revived in 2016.

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Signal-Scrambling Tech 'Freezes' Drones in Midair

A new device that can detect, target and deter commercial drones could be used to keep the flying robots away from areas where they're not wanted, like government properties, airports or your own backyard.

The new Anti-UAV Defense System (AUDS) was developed by three tech companies in the United Kingdom. It has a radar detection component, advanced tracking capabilities and a sneaky little onboard device that keeps drones at bay.

Rather than melting drones in midair like Boeing's new Compact Laser Weapons System, AUDS shoots the flying vehicles with something that doesn't destroy them — radio waves. Drone operators typically communicate with, and direct, the aerial bots using radio signals. [5 Surprising Ways Drones Could Be Used in the Future]

Enter AUDS, which uses a drone's communication system against it. Using directional antennas pointed at the drone, AUDS sends the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) radio signals that interfere with the radio signals coming from the remote operator. When the drone picks up AUDS' signals, it "freezes," unsure of where to fly.

Whoever is controlling the anti-drone system can keep the UAV hovering at a distance until the machine runs out of battery life and crashes to the ground, according to a report by the BBC.

AUDS can spot a drone from about 5 miles (8 kilometers) away. After zeroing in on its target, it uses video and thermal imaging software to keep the flying vehicle in its sight. Once the drone gets close enough to the anti-drone system, it's "game over" for the drone.

Drone disturbance

Even though drones can be incredibly useful— they can help conservationists keep tabs on protected areas and help farmers survey their crops more quickly — these flying robots have stirred up quite a few problems in recent months.

Just today (Oct. 9), two people operating a small drone near the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., accidentally crashed their UAV on the back lawn of the White House. A similar incident occurred at the presidential residence in January. Drones are prohibited from flying in the U.S. capital, but laws and heavy fines don't seem to keep all drones out.

Commercial drones have also been used in attempts to smuggle contraband goods, like cellphones and weapons, into prisons. And camera-toting drones hovering over private homes have been derided as both a security and privacy concern for residents.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which sets guidelines for how and where commercial drones can be flown, has ruled that small UAVs cannot be flown within 5 miles of airports and that they must remain below 400 feet (122 meters), where they are unlikely to interfere with piloted aircraft.

But a recent deluge of complaints from pilots, as well as U.S. Forest Service employees who have spotted the flying bots near wildfires, has led the FAA to take further action against rule-breaking drone operators. The FAA signed an agreement this week that will allow it to test technologies that can detect the position of operators who are flying their drones in restricted areas, such as near airports, according to a report by Phys.org.

Though the AUDS system doesn't promise to help locate errant drone operators, it could be used to keep drones away from restricted areas altogether. The radio-jamming technology aboard AUDS doesn't scramble signals from commercial or military aircraft, which use encrypted signals, so it might be safe to use near airports.

The new anti-drone system has been tested in the United Kingdom, the United States and France, according to the BBC. But there's no word yet on when or where this drone-freezing technology could be used in these countries.

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Chinese hack attacks against US companies persist despite leader's pledge, report says

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WASHINGTON –  Chinese hacking attempts on American corporate intellectual property have occurred with regularity over the past three weeks, suggesting that China almost immediately began violating its newly minted cyberagreement with the United States, according to a newly published analysis by a cybersecurity company with close ties to the U.S. government.

The Irvine, California-based company, CrowdStrike, says it documented seven Chinese cyberattacks against U.S. technology and pharmaceuticals companies "where the primary benefit of the intrusions seems clearly aligned to facilitate theft of intellectual property and trade secrets, rather than to conduct traditional national security-related intelligence collection."

"We've seen no change in behavior," said Dmitri Alperovich, a founder of CrowdStrike who wrote one of the first public accounts of commercial cyberespionage linked to China in 2011.

One attack came on Sept. 26, CrowdStrike says, the day after President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced their deal in the White House Rose Garden. CrowdStrike, which employs former FBI and National Security Agency cyberexperts, did not name the corporate victims, citing client confidentiality. And the company says it detected and thwarted the attacks before any corporate secrets were stolen.

A senior Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss the matter publicly, said officials are aware of the report but would not comment on its conclusions. The official did not dispute them, however.

The U.S. will continue to directly raise concerns regarding cybersecurity with the Chinese, monitor the country's cyberactivities closely and press China to abide by all of its commitments, the official added.

The U.S.-China agreement forged last month does not prohibit cyberspying for national security purposes, but it bans economic espionage designed to steal trade secrets for the benefit of competitors. That is something the U.S. says it doesn't do, but Western intelligence agencies have documented such attacks by China on a massive scale for years.

China denies engaging in such behavior, but threats of U.S. sanctions led Chinese officials to conduct a flurry of last-minute negotiations which led to the deal.

CrowdStrike on Monday released a timeline of recent intrusions linked to China that it says it documented against "commercial entities that fit squarely within the hacking prohibitions covered under the cyberagreement."

The intrusion attempts are continuing, the company says, "with many of the China-affiliated actors persistently attempting to regain access to victim networks even in the face of repeated failures."

CrowdStrike did not explain in detail how it attributes the intrusions to China, an omission that is likely to draw criticism, given the ability of hackers to disguise their origins. But the company has a long track record of gathering intelligence on Chinese hacking groups, and U.S. intelligence officials have often pointed to the company's work.

"We assess with a high degree of confidence that these intrusions were undertaken by a variety of different Chinese actors, including Deep Panda, which CrowdStrike has tracked for many years breaking into national security targets of strategic importance to China," Alperovich wrote in a blog posting that laid out his findings.

The hacking group known as Deep Panda, which has been linked to the Chinese military, is believed by many researchers to have carried out the attack on insurer Anthem Health earlier this year.

CrowdStrike and other companies have tracked Deep Panda back to China based on the malware and techniques it uses, its working hours and other intelligence.

In 2013, another cybersecurity company, Mandiant, published a report exposing what it said was a hacking unit linked to China's People's Liberation Army, including identifying the building housing the unit in Beijing. Those findings were later validated by American intelligence officials.
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