Irony came back to the shores of the United States in the month of September as the CIA was forced to recall a number of undercover agents working in China. The agents’ names and identities were part of the millions of records exposed by the hack of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management earlier in 2015.

The OPM hack was called, “the gift that keeps on giving for years” by the Director of National Intelligences, James Clapper.

A subsequent audit of the OPM’s security practices and posture demonstrated that the infrastructure was in shambles, lacking logging and monitoring, systems updates and patches, with some systems not having been reviewed in several years. Also, some of the most critical databases and back-end systems lacked multi-factor authentication and many of them were not even authorized to be on the network!

The breach affected tens of millions of past and current government employees, exposing medical history and background investigations forms and details about the individuals, including CIA agents and embassy staffers.

As CIA agents do not usually show up on diplomatic manifests and lists of staffers, Chinese intelligence could deduce that missing names would be strong indicators of CIA operatives or other secret activities performed by the individuals in question.

According to the Washington Post, Clapper told a congressional panel that the OPM breach was not so much an attack as a form of espionage, and that both nations engage in this behavior. What happened in OPM case, “as egregious as it was,” Clapper said, was not an attack: “Rather, it would be a form of theft or espionage.”

Clapper said that the OPM hack “has very serious implications . . . from the standpoint of the intelligence community and the potential for identifying people” who may be undercover.

UK intelligence agents have been moved because Russia and China can read files stolen by a US whistleblower, a senior government source has told the BBC.

The Sunday Times is reporting that Russia and China have cracked the encryption of the computer files.

The government source told the BBC the countries “have information” that led to agents being moved but added there was “no evidence” any had been harmed.

Edward Snowden, now in Russia, leaked intelligence data two years ago.

The former CIA contractor left the US in 2013 after leaking details of extensive internet and phone surveillance by American intelligence to the media.

His information made international headlines in June 2013 when the Guardian newspaper reported that the US National Security Agency was collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans.

Mr Snowden is believed to have downloaded 1.7 million secret documents before he left the US.

‘Hostile countries’

The government source said the information obtained by Russia and China meant that “knowledge of how we operate” had stopped the UK getting “vital information”.

Intelligence officials have long warned of what they see as the dangers of the information leaked by Mr Snowden and its potential impact on keeping people in the UK safe – a concern Prime Minister David Cameron has said he shares.

According to the Sunday Times, Western intelligence agencies have been forced to pull agents out of “hostile countries” after “Moscow gained access to more than one million classified files” held by Mr Snowden.

“Senior government sources confirmed that China had also cracked the encrypted documents, which contain details of secret intelligence techniques and information that could allow British and American spies to be identified,” the newspaper added.

‘Huge setback’

Tim Shipman, who co-wrote the Sunday Times story, told the BBC: “Snowden said ‘nobody bad has got hold of my information’.

“Well, we are told authoritatively by people in Downing Street, in the Home Office, in the intelligence services that the Russians and the Chinese have all this information and as a result of that our spies are having to pull people out of the field because their lives are in danger.

“People in government are deeply frustrated that this guy has been able to put all this information out there.”

The newspaper quoted Sir David Omand, former director of UK intelligence agency GCHQ, saying the fact Russia and China had the information was a “huge strategic setback” that was “harming” to Britain, the US and their Nato allies.

It comes two days after the UK’s terrorism watchdog David Anderson QC published a review into terrorism legislation, which was set up amid public concerns about surveillance sparked by Mr Snowden’s revelations.

He said the country needed clear new laws about the powers of security services to monitor online activity and concluded that the current situation was “undemocratic, unnecessary and – in the long run – intolerable”.

In response to terrorism threats, China recently lifted a decade-long ban on police guns and began issuing firearms to officers for the first time across the country.

We plumbed the depth of problems in the wake of these guns in our story today: the sudden spate of suspicious police shootings and woeful lack of training and accountability.

But we also privately consulted officers and gun instructors across the country — in particularly revealing and rare interviews because police in China almost never talk to foreign media. On the condition of anonymity, half a dozen current and retired officers told us how it feels to carry a gun for the first time, worries they now wrestle with and mounting pressures both on the street and in their departments. Here’s what they told us:

Many expressed a surprising aversion to their new firearms.

“I’ve never liked guns,” said one nine-year veteran. Until this year, guns were forbidden to most police — except for SWAT units and teams on special missions. “Even in past special operations, when we were ordered to have guns, I let co-workers take them instead. You have to worry about it misfiring, about it getting stolen or someone dying improperl

A retired officer from Hangzhou City suggested there’re tricky issues of pride at play.

In the past, police were praised for daring to confront criminals without firearms, he said. And whenever bad guys got away or a situation spiraled out of control, police could always fall back on the excuse that they were unarmed, unlike police in many countries.

“Now that they have guns, they’re in a tighter spot,” said the retired officer. “If you shoot, the public may question whether it was necessary. If you don’t, they may say, ‘You can’t even control criminals with the power of  a gun?'”

Blaming the System

The timing is interesting with China arming its officers even as talk grows in the United States of demilitarizing the police forces there in the wake of the shooting in Ferguson, Mo.

Critics complain that Chinese authorities are rarely held accountable for improper shootings. But local officers said that while they may not face prosecution, they often do face internal bureaucratic wrath whenever someone is shot. And if a shooting becomes widely known and sparks public anger, they are sometimes hung out to dry to appease the public.

Most of the police we interviewed blamed the system rather than individual officers for the recent rash of suspicious or wrongful shootings.

Pro-police propaganda poster in China

Many patrol officers who are now carrying guns haven’t fired shot since the police academy, where each recruit is required to shoot five bullets, officers said. One SWAT officer in Guangdong Province said that while his team shoots 100 bullets every morning for practice, regular patrol officers in his district are shooting less than 10 bullets a year.

“There are no standards, every department just makes up their own rules,” he said.

Officers attributed the meager training to bureaucratic inertia, lack of funding and accountability. For years, no national standardized test has existed for licensing police. Instead, several officers said, much of their training often focuses on teaching them Communist ideology and anti-corruption slogans — useless to them on the street.

Proper training, said a 30-year veteran who now advises SWAT teams in Nanjing, isn’t just about shooting accurately but having the psychological fortitude and judgment to respond correctly to pressure situations.

Public Fears, Hollywood Response

No one knows how many people have been shot since officers began carrying guns four months ago because of government secrecy.

But researchers at China’s state-run Legal Daily newspaper published a report last month that suggests a dramatic increase since the policy change. Searching for the keywords “police” and “shot to death” in online news reports, they found 45,100 instances in 2014 compared to 536 the year before. Similarly, instances with the keywords “police” and “guns” rose from 497 to 436,000.

To combat growing fears about their newly armed officers, some departments have become creative. The most popular example has been a series of posters in several jurisdictions of their newly armed officers striking Hollywood action-hero poses.

“You are not fighting alone,” reads the caption on one. Wearing light makeup, stoic-faced officers grip their guns as debris flies about. Flickering embers illuminate their skin.

“We made this poster series to encourage colleagues and send positive messages,” wrote Officer Tu Huiyang from the Huangyan police station in central China in a post on Twitter-like Weibo.

At the photo shoot for the posters, many officers were horribly wooden at first, Tu complained in a state media interview. But he got them to relax by asking them to imagine they were questioning suspects. Some police departments like this one in Luoyang City have posted online posters of officers smiling and joking with their new guns in an apparent attempt to allay fears and anger of unjustified shootings. Sina Weibo

The Huangyan movie posters were quickly emulated by police in other departments in China, including in Beijing, Chengdu, Yantai and Xinjiang. State-run media reports have praised the posters.

But as police shootings continue to mount, experts say, it will take more than Hollywood lighting to sway public opinion and victims’ families.

The government released all these new guns in such rushed manner that “it’s now become like a beast they can no longer control,” said Fu Hualing, a law expert at University of Hong Kong. “The whole system needs time to adapt.”