nytimes.com
By Chris Buckley and Adam Goldman
Sept. 28, 2025

Fears of U.S. surveillance drove Xi Jinping, China’s leader, to elevate the agency and put it at the center of his cyber ambitions.

American officials were alarmed in 2023 when they discovered that Chinese state-controlled hackers had infiltrated critical U.S. infrastructure with malicious code that could wreck power grids, communications systems and water supplies. The threat was serious enough that William J. Burns, the director of the C.I.A., made a secret trip to Beijing to confront his Chinese counterpart.

He warned China’s minister of state security that there would be “serious consequences” for Beijing if it unleashed the malware. The tone of the meeting, details of which have not been previously reported, was professional and it appeared the message was delivered.

But since that meeting, which was described by two former U.S. officials, China’s intrusions have only escalated. (The former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the sensitive meeting.)

American and European officials say China’s Ministry of State Security, the civilian spy agency often called the M.S.S., in particular, has emerged as the driving force behind China’s most sophisticated cyber operations.

In recent disclosures, officials revealed another immense, yearslong intrusion by hackers who have been collectively called Salt Typhoon, one that may have stolen information about nearly every American and targeted dozens of other countries. Some countries hit by Salt Typhoon warned in an unusual statement that the data stolen could provide Chinese intelligence services with the capability to “identify and track their targets’ communications and movements around the world.”

The attack underscored how the Ministry of State Security has evolved into a formidable cyberespionage agency capable of audacious operations that can evade detection for years, experts said.

For decades, China has used for-hire hackers to break into computer networks and systems. These operatives sometimes mixed espionage with commercial data theft or were sloppy, exposing their presence. In the recent operation by Salt Typhoon, however, intruders linked to the M.S.S. found weaknesses in systems, burrowed into networks, spirited out data, hopped between compromised systems and erased traces of their presence.
“Salt Typhoon shows a highly skilled and strategic side to M.S.S. cyber operations that has been missed with the attention on lower-quality contract hackers,” said Alex Joske, the author of a book on the ministry.

For Washington, the implication of China’s growing capability is clear: In a future conflict, China could put U.S. communications, power and infrastructure at risk.

China’s biggest hacking campaigns have been “strategic operations” intended to intimidate and deter rivals, said Nigel Inkster, a senior adviser for cybersecurity and China at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

“If they succeed in remaining on these networks undiscovered, that potentially gives them a significant advantage in the event of a crisis,” said Mr. Inkster, formerly director of operations and intelligence in the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. “If their presence is — as it has been — discovered, it still exercises a very significant deterrent effect; as in, ‘Look what we could do to you if we wanted.’”

The Rise of the M.S.S.
China’s cyber advances reflect decades of investment to try to match, and eventually rival, the U.S. National Security Agency and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

China’s leaders founded the Ministry of State Security in 1983 mainly to track dissidents and perceived foes of Communist Party rule. The ministry engaged in online espionage but was long overshadowed by the Chinese military, which ran extensive cyberspying operations.

After taking power as China’s top leader in 2012, Xi Jinping moved quickly to reshape the M.S.S. He seemed unsettled by the threat of U.S. surveillance to China’s security, and in a 2013 speech pointed to the revelations of Edward J. Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor.

Mr. Xi purged the ministry of senior officials accused of corruption and disloyalty. He reined in the hacking role of the Chinese military, elevating the ministry as the country’s primary cyberespionage agency. He put national security at the core of his agenda with new laws and by establishing a new commission.

“At this same time, the intelligence requirements imposed on the security apparatus start to multiply, because Xi wanted to do more things abroad and at home,” said Matthew Brazil, a senior analyst at BluePath Labs who has co-written a history of China’s espionage services.

Since around 2015, the M.S.S. has moved to bring its far-flung provincial offices under tighter central control, said experts. Chen Yixin, the current minister, has demanded that local state security offices follow Beijing’s orders without delay. Security officials, he said on a recent inspection of the northeast, must be both “red and expert” — absolutely loyal to the party while also adept in technology.

“It all essentially means that the Ministry of State Security now sits atop a system in which it can move its pieces all around the chessboard,” said Edward Schwarck, a researcher at the University of Oxford who is writing a dissertation on China’s state security.

Mr. Chen was the official who met with Mr. Burns in May 2023. He gave nothing away when confronted with the details of the cyber campaign, telling Mr. Burns he would let his superiors know about the U.S. concerns, the former officials said.

The Architect of China’s Cyber Power
The Ministry of State Security operates largely in the shadows, its officials rarely seen or named in public. There was one exception: Wu Shizhong, who was a senior official in Bureau 13, the “technical reconnaissance” arm of the ministry.

Mr. Wu was unusually visible, turning up at meetings and conferences in his other role as director of the China Information Technology Security Evaluation Center. Officially, the center vets digital software and hardware for security vulnerabilities before it can be used in China. Unofficially, foreign officials and experts say, the center comes under the control of the M.S.S. and provided a direct pipeline of information about vulnerabilities and hacking talent.

Mr. Wu has not publicly said he served in the security ministry, but a Chinese university website in 2005 described him as a state security bureau head in a notice about a meeting, and investigations by Crowd Strike and other cybersecurity firms have also described his state security role.

“Wu Shizhong is widely recognized as a leading figure in the creation of M.S.S. cyber capabilities,” said Mr. Joske.

In 2013, Mr. Wu pointed to two lessons for China: Mr. Snowden’s disclosures about American surveillance and the use by the United States of a virus to sabotage Iran’s nuclear facilities. “The core of cyber offense and defense capabilities is technical prowess,” he said, stressing the need to control technologies and exploit their weaknesses. China, he added, should create “a national cyber offense and defense apparatus.”

China’s commercial tech sector boomed in the years that followed, and state security officials learned how to put domestic companies and contractors to work, spotting and exploiting flaws and weak spots in computer systems, several cybersecurity experts said. The U.S. National Security Agency has also hoarded knowledge of software flaws for its own use. But China has an added advantage: It can tap its own tech companies to feed information to the state.
“M.S.S. was successful at improving the talent pipeline and the volume of good offensive hackers they could contract to,” said Dakota Cary, a researcher who focuses on China’s efforts to develop its hacking capabilities at SentinelOne. “This gives them a significant pipeline for offensive tools.”

The Chinese government also imposed rules requiring that any newly found software vulnerabilities be reported first to a database that analysts say is operated by the M.S.S., giving security officials early access. Other policies reward tech firms with payments if they meet monthly quotas of finding flaws in computer systems and submitting them to the state security-controlled database.

“It’s a prestige thing and it’s good for a company’s reputation,” Mei Danowski, the co-founder of Natto Thoughts, a company that advises clients on cyber threats, said of the arrangement. “These business people don’t feel like they are doing something wrong. They feel like they are doing something for their country.”

nytimes.com By Farnaz FassihiRonen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti 2025/08/30

Israel was able to track the movements of key Iranian figures and assassinate them during the 12-day war this spring by following the cellphones carried by members of their security forces.

The meeting was so secret that only the attendees, a handful of top Iranian government officials and military commanders, knew the time and location.

It was June 16, the fourth day of Iran’s war with Israel, and Iran’s Supreme National Security Council gathered for an emergency meeting in a bunker 100 feet below a mountain slope in the western part of Tehran. For days, a relentless Israeli bombing campaign had destroyed military, government and nuclear sites around Iran, and had decimated the top echelon of Iran’s military commanders and nuclear scientists.

The officials, who included President Masoud Pezeshkian, the heads of the judiciary and the intelligence ministry and senior military commanders, arrived in separate cars. None of them carried mobile phones, knowing that Israeli intelligence could track them.

Despite all the precautions, Israeli jets dropped six bombs on top of the bunker soon after the meeting began, targeting the two entrance and exit doors. Remarkably, nobody in the bunker was killed. When the leaders later made their way out of the bunker, they found the bodies of a few guards, killed by the blasts.

The attack threw Iran’s intelligence apparatus into a tailspin, and soon enough Iranian officials discovered a devastating security lapse: The Israelis had been led to the meeting by hacking the phones of bodyguards who had accompanied the Iranian leaders to the site and waited outside.

Israel’s tracking of the guards has not been previously reported. It was one part of a larger effort to penetrate the most tightly guarded circles of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus that has had officials in Tehran chasing shadows for two months.
According to Iranian and Israeli officials, Iranian security guards’ careless use of mobile phones over several years — including posting on social media — played a central role in allowing Israeli military intelligence to hunt Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders and the Israeli Air Force to swoop in and kill them with missiles and bombs during the first week of the June war.

“We know senior officials and commanders did not carry phones, but their interlocutors, security guards and drivers had phones; they did not take precautions seriously, and this is how most of them were traced,” said Sasan Karimi, who previously served as the deputy vice president for strategy in Iran’s current government and is now a political analyst and lecturer at Tehran University.

The account of Israel’s strike on the meeting, and the details of how it tracked and targeted Iranian officials and commanders, is based on interviews with five senior Iranian officials, two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and nine Israeli military and intelligence officials.

The security breakdowns with the bodyguards are just one component of what Iranian officials acknowledge has been a long-running and often successful effort by Israel to use spies and operatives placed around the country as well as technology against Iran, sometimes with devastating effect.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran and Israel? , and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Following the most recent conflict, Iran remains focused on hunting down operatives that it fears remain present in the country and the government.

“Infiltration has reached the highest echelons of our decision making,” Mostafa Hashemi Taba, a former vice president and minister, said in an interview with Iranian media in late June.

This month Iran executed a nuclear scientist, Roozbeh Vadi, on allegations of spying for Israel and facilitating the assassination of another scientist. Three senior Iranian officials and a member of the Revolutionary Guards said Iran had quietly arrested or placed under house arrest dozens of people from the military, intelligence and government branches who were suspected of spying for Israel, some of them high-ranking. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied a connection to those so accused.

Spy games between Iran and Israel have been a constant feature of a decades-long shadow war between the two countries, and Israel’s success in June in killing so many important Iranian security figures shows just how much Israel has gained the upper hand.

President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran attending a protest in Tehran on June 22, following the U.S. attacks on nuclear sites in Iran. Mr. Pezeshkian himself escaped an attack on a bunker on June 16.
Credit...
Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Israel had been tracking senior Iranian nuclear scientists since the end of 2022 and had weighed killing them as early as last October but held off to avoid a clash with the Biden administration, Israeli officials said.

From the end of last year until June, what the Israelis called a “decapitation team” reviewed the files of all the scientists in the Iranian nuclear project known to Israel, to decide which they would recommend to kill. The first list contained 400 names. That was reduced to 100, mainly based on material from an Iranian nuclear archive that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, had stolen from Iran in 2018. In the end, Iran said the Israelis focused on and killed 13 scientists.

At the same time, Israel was building its capacity to target and kill senior Iranian military officials under a program called “Operation Red Wedding,” a play on a bloody “Game of Thrones” episode. Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Aerospace Force, was the first target, one Israeli official said.

Ultimately, Israeli officials said, the basic idea in both operations was to locate 20 to 25 human targets in Iran and hit all of them in the opening strike of the campaign, on the assumption that they would be more careful afterward, making them much harder to hit.

In a video interview with an Iranian journalist, the newly appointed head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, said that although Israel had human operatives and spies in the country, it had tracked senior officials and scientists and discovered the location of sensitive meetings mostly through advanced technology.

“The enemy gets the majority of its intelligence through technology, satellites and electronic data,” General Vahidi said. “They can find people, get information, their voices, images and zoom in with precise satellites and find the locations.”

From the Israeli side, Iran’s growing awareness of the threat to senior figures came to be seen as an opportunity. Fearing more assassinations on the ground of the sort that Israel had pulled off successfully in the past, the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered extensive security measures including large contingents of bodyguards and warned against the use of mobile phones and messaging apps like WhatsApp, which is commonly used in Iran.

Those bodyguards, Israel discovered, were not only carrying cellphones but even posting from them on social media.

“Using so many bodyguards is a weakness that we imposed on them, and we were able to take advantage of that,” one Israeli defense official said.

Iranian officials had long suspected that Israel was tracking the movements of senior military commanders and nuclear scientists through their mobile phones. Last year, after Israel detonated bombs hidden inside thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, Iran banned many of its officials in particularly sensitive jobs from using smartphones, social media and messaging apps.

Smartphones are now completely off limits for senior military commanders, nuclear scientists and government officials.

The protection of senior officials, military commanders and nuclear scientists is the responsibility of an elite brigade within the Revolutionary Guards called Ansar al-Mehdi. The commander in chief of Ansar, appointed last August after the new government came into office, is Gen. Mohamad Javad Assadi, one of the youngest senior commanders in the Guards.

General Assadi had personally warned several senior commanders and a top nuclear scientist, Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, that Israel was planning to assassinate them at least a month before they were killed on the first day of the war, according to two senior Iranian officials with knowledge of the conversation. He had also called a meeting with the team leaders of security details asking them to take extra precautions, the officials said.

The cellphone ban initially did not extend to the security guards protecting the officials, scientists and commanders. That changed after Israel’s wave of assassinations on the first day of the war. Guards are now supposed to carry only walkie-talkies. Only team leaders who do not travel with the officials can carry cellphones.

But despite the new rules, according to officials who have held meetings with General Assadi about security, someone violated them and carried a phone to the National Security Council meeting, allowing the Israelis to carry out the pinpoint strike.

Hamzeh Safavi, a political and military analyst whose father is the top military adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei, said that Israel’s technological superiority over Iran was an existential threat. He said Iran had no choice but to conduct a security shakedown, overhaul its protocols and make difficult decisions — including arrests and prosecution of high-level spies.

“We must do whatever it takes to identify and address this threat; we have a major security and intelligence bug and nothing is more urgent than repairing this hole,” Mr. Safavi said in a telephone interview.

Iran’s minister of intelligence said in a statement this month that it had foiled an Israeli assassination attempt on 23 senior officials but did not provide their names or details of their positions and ranks. It said in the months leading up to the war, Iran had discovered and foiled 13 plots by Israel that aimed to kill 35 senior military and government officials. (An Israeli intelligence official disputed the Iranian account, saying that Israel had not been carrying out operations ahead of the surprise attack in June that could have led to heightened alertness on the part of Iran.)

The statement also said that security forces had identified and arrested 21 people on charges of spying for the Mossad and working as field and support operators in at least 11 provinces around Iran.

Iran has also accelerated efforts to recruit its own spies in Israel since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war in the Gaza Strip and triggered aggressive Israeli military operations in Iran and Lebanon.

Over the past year, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, has arrested dozens of Israelis and charged them with being paid agents of Iran, accused of helping collect intelligence about potential targets for Iranian strikes on Israel.

Israel has made killing Iran’s top nuclear scientists an urgent priority as a way to set back the nation’s nuclear program, even poisoning two young upcoming scientists.

As Iran made steady progress over the years toward enriching its uranium stockpile into near-weapons grade material, Israeli military and intelligence officials concluded that the campaign of sabotage and explosions in the enrichment apparatus, which the Mossad had been engaged in for many years, had only a marginal impact.

In 2021, according to three Israeli security officials, the focus turned to what Israeli officials called “the weapon group” — a cadre of Iranian scientists who the Israelis believed met regularly to work on building a device to trigger the enriched uranium and cause a nuclear explosion. This is one of the most technologically difficult parts of a nuclear project. (Iran has said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, and the U.N.’s atomic watchdog and American intelligence agencies have long assessed that Iran has not weaponized its nuclear project.)

It was this group of scientists that became the focus of what Israel called Operation Narnia, the military plan to kill off scientists during the war’s early days this spring.

By the time of the June 16 national security meeting of top Iranian officials, Israel had already killed a number of high-profile figures associated with the nuclear program, including Mr. Tehranchi and Fereydoun Abbasi, another nuclear scientist, both killed just days earlier. The cellphones of their bodyguards helped Israel target all of them.

But Israel was also targeting a wide variety of Iranian leaders, including the heads of government branches at the national security meeting, and killed at least 30 senior military commanders through strikes during the war.

General Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ air force, assembled his leadership team, accompanied by their security units, at the very start of the war to monitor intelligence about possible Israeli strikes. Israeli warplanes swooped in and carried out a pinpoint strike on the bunker where General Hajizadeh had taken refuge, killing him and other top commanders.

Mr. Hajizadeh’s son Alireza has said that his father took extra caution with phones. On a video published on Iranian media, he said that “when my father wanted to discuss something important he would tell us to take the phones and smart devices out of the room and place it far away.”

The ability to track the bodyguards also helped lead the Israelis to the June 16 meeting. The attendees, in addition to Mr. Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, included the speaker of Parliament, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, and the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei. Also on hand were the ministers of the interior, defense and intelligence and military commanders, some brand-new to their jobs after their bosses had been killed in previous strikes.

The attack destroyed the room, which soon filled with debris, smoke and dust, and the power was cut, according to accounts that emerged afterward. Mr. Pezeshkian found a narrow opening through the debris, where a sliver of light and oxygen was coming through, he has said publicly.

Three senior officials said the president dug through the debris with his bare hands, eventually making enough of a space for everyone to crawl out one by one. Mr. Pezeshkian had a minor leg injury from a shrapnel wound and the minister of interior was taken to the hospital for respiratory distress, officials said.

“There was only one hole, and we saw there was air coming and we said, we won’t suffocate. Life hinges on one second,” Mr. Pezeshkian said recently, recounting the attack in a meeting with senior clerics, according to a video published in Iranian media. He said if Israel had succeeded in killing the country’s top officials it would have created chaos in the country.

“People,” he said, “would have lost hope.”

nytimes.com - Documents examined by researchers show how one company in China has collected data on members of Congress and other influential Americans.

The Chinese government is using companies with expertise in artificial intelligence to monitor and manipulate public opinion, giving it a new weapon in information warfare, according to current and former U.S. officials and documents unearthed by researchers.

One company’s internal documents show how it has undertaken influence campaigns in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and collected data on members of Congress and other influential Americans.

While the firm has not mounted a campaign in the United States, American spy agencies have monitored its activity for signs that it might try to influence American elections or political debates, former U.S. officials said.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly the new frontier of espionage and malign influence operations, allowing intelligence services to conduct campaigns far faster, more efficiently and on a larger scale than ever before.

The Chinese government has long struggled to mount information operations targeting other countries, lacking the aggressiveness or effectiveness of Russian intelligence agencies. But U.S. officials and experts say that advances in A.I. could help China overcome its weaknesses.

A new technology can track public debates of interest to the Chinese government, offering the ability to monitor individuals and their arguments as well as broader public sentiment. The technology also has the promise of mass-producing propaganda that can counter shifts in public opinion at home and overseas.

China’s emerging capabilities come as the U.S. government pulls back efforts to counter foreign malign influence campaigns.

U.S. spy agencies still collect information about foreign manipulation, but the Trump administration has dismantled the teams at the State Department, the F.B.I. and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that warned the public about potential threats. In the last presidential election, the campaigns included Russian videos denigrating Vice President Kamala Harris and falsely claiming that ballots had been destroyed.

The new technology allows the Chinese company GoLaxy to go beyond the election influence campaigns undertaken by Russia in recent years, according to the documents.

In a statement, GoLaxy denied that it was creating any sort of “bot network or psychological profiling tour” or that it had done any work related to Hong Kong or other elections. It called the information presented by The New York Times about the company “misinformation.”

“GoLaxy’s products are mainly based on open-source data, without specially collecting data targeting U.S. officials,” the firm said.

After being contacted by The Times, GoLaxy began altering its website, removing references to its national security work on behalf of the Chinese government.

The documents examined by researchers appear to have been leaked by a disgruntled employee upset about wages and working conditions at the company. While most of the documents are not dated, the majority of those that include dates are from 2020, 2022 and 2023. They were obtained by Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security, a nonpartisan research and educational center that studies cybersecurity, intelligence and other critical challenges.

Publicly, GoLaxy advertises itself as a firm that gathers data and analyzes public sentiment for Chinese companies and the government. But in the documents, which were reviewed by The Times, the company privately claims that it can use a new technology to reshape and influence public opinion on behalf of the Chinese government.

nytimes.com 04.08 - The introduction of a state-approved messaging app has raised fears that Russia could be preparing to block WhatsApp and Telegram.

Russia is escalating its efforts to curtail online freedom, taking new steps toward a draconian state-controlled internet.

The authorities are cracking down on workarounds that Russians have been using for access to foreign apps and banned content, including through new laws signed by President Vladimir V. Putin this past week. Moscow has also been impeding the function of services from U.S. tech companies, like YouTube, that Russians have used for years.

At the same time, the Kremlin is building out a domestic ecosystem of easily monitored and censored Russian alternatives to Western tech products. That includes a new state-approved messaging service, MAX, which will come preinstalled by law on all new smartphones sold in Russia starting next month.

The idea, experts say, is to migrate more Russians from an open internet dominated by the products of Western tech giants to a censored online ecosystem, where Russians primarily use software under the gaze and influence of the state. The effort has advanced significantly amid wartime repression, but it is unclear how far it will go.
“The goal here is absolute control,” said Anastasiia Kruope, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who wrote a recent report on declining Russian internet freedoms.

The Kremlin wants to control not only the information available online but also where and how internet traffic flows, Ms. Kruope said, so the Russian internet can function in isolation and be switched on and off at will. Russia’s technical capabilities for clamping down are improving, she added.

“They are not perfect,” Ms. Kruope said. “They are not nearly at the level they would like them to be. But they are getting better, and this is the reason to start paying attention.”“The goal here is absolute control,” said Anastasiia Kruope, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who wrote a recent report on declining Russian internet freedoms.

The Kremlin wants to control not only the information available online but also where and how internet traffic flows, Ms. Kruope said, so the Russian internet can function in isolation and be switched on and off at will. Russia’s technical capabilities for clamping down are improving, she added.

“They are not perfect,” Ms. Kruope said. “They are not nearly at the level they would like them to be. But they are getting better, and this is the reason to start paying attention.”

nytimes.com (29.07.2025) - Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota activated the National Guard to help the city of St. Paul address a cyberattack that was detected last Friday.
Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Tuesday activated the state National Guard to help officials in St. Paul, the capital, respond to a complex cyberattack that was first detected on Friday.

Mayor Melvin Carter of St. Paul said the city had shut down the bulk of its computer systems as a defensive measure as state and federal investigators tackled what he called “a deliberate, coordinated digital attack, carried out by a sophisticated external actor.”

Mr. Carter said that the F.B.I. and several state agencies were helping assess who was behind the attack. He declined to say whether ransom had been demanded or whether there was any evidence suggesting a foreign government was behind the attack.

City officials said they have yet to ascertain whether sensitive data had been stolen.

Emergency services, including police response systems, were not crippled by the attack, the city said in a statement. The shutdown meant that city employees did not have access to the internet in municipal buildings, and that routine services such as library loans and online payment systems were inaccessible.
Large and small cities across the United States, along with school systems and hospitals, have been targeted in cyberattacks in recent years. Such attacks are often carried out by individuals who compromise networks and encrypt data, then demand ransom payments in order to restore access.

Attackers sometimes steal sensitive data — such as credit card information — that they can later sell online.

St. Paul officials said they detected unusual activity on their network Friday morning and eventually realized the city’s networks had been breached. Deeming it a serious attack, they sought help from the governor and federal law enforcement agencies as well as cybersecurity companies.

Mr. Walz issued an executive order on Tuesday directing the National Guard to assign military computer experts to assist officials in St. Paul. In the order, Mr. Walz said that “the scale and complexity of this incident exceeded both internal and commercial response capabilities.”