Standing Up to China: How a Whistleblower Risked Everything for His Country (Brown Books Publishing; On Sale: April 5, 2022) tells the thrilling true story of Ashley Yablon—a whistleblower who risked his life and career to expose his company’s illegal business dealings with Iran. In his debut nonfiction, Yablon recounts the national headline spiral that followed his affidavit leak, outing him as an informant to the F.B.I. Yablon’s memoir takes readers with him on a head-to-head legal battle against the world’s top Chinese telecoms giant.
As the freshly minted general counsel for ZTE, Yablon believed he’d landed his dream job. That was, until a confidential meeting in China where Yablon uncovered his company’s illegal scheme to sell billions of dollars’ worth of surveillance equipment to embargoed countries. If overlooked, the transactions could have led to critical security threats against the United States. Yablon’s choice to become an informant and expose illegal trade within his company led him down a course of personal and professional peril that ended with ZTE pleading guilty. This resulted in the largest fine levied in U.S. history at the conclusion of the court case in March of 2017: $1.2 billion in criminal and civil penalties.
Standing Up to China remains more relevant than ever today. As reported during the Defense Intelligence Agency’s annual threat assessment, China remains unquestionably “the primary danger to U.S. national security,” and ZTE continues to...
Artificial intelligence tools have been a double-edged sword in Operation Epic Fury—both helping to spread disinformation, and helping to clear it up. On Thursday afternoon, the United States Cent...