China's murky web of economic espionage was uncovered by an arrest in Brussels & an iPhone backup

New Delhi: "Burn the paper and destroy the burner phone," was the protocol for spies to hide gathered intelligence while being chased or captured by enemies. Today, in the age of cloud-based data storage, it is difficult to hide information, even for spies. The story of Xu Yanjun, a Chinese spy extradited from Brussels to the United States in 2018 and convicted last year by a federal jury for economic espionage, shows how an iPhone's iCloud backup gave away China's clandestine ploys to steal technology from western corporations to American authorities. Xu's story, though, is not the first Chinese incident…