Caught in the act?

[Halfswede]

Great thread.  As a Falun Gong practitioner, I am well aware of just how bold and infiltrated they have become.  Between Confucius Institutes and secret police stations and general consulate interference in every country they have one, they are bold almost to the point of stupidity.

It is not a Chinese characteristic, but rather CCP party culture that has led to this.  I have heard from DoD sources that they will show up at DoD contractor trade shows and simply ask random people if they will provide information for 10k $$ etc.  The underlings are willing to do these things because they are told they will be protected and make way more money than they would working normally.

The intel community knows this, but the political leaders are weak and obviously genocide isn't a deal-breaker in doing business with a country. Almost all Chinese students are briefed by the consulate on what to do and how to provide any information about certain groups and technology.

It's far more pervasive than most people would even believe if they were told directly.

[Kenzo]

New video from The China Show guys about the pianogate ,  just watching it it now..

[guyfriday]

A couple of things here;
One, it looks like China is having some kind of melt down where it's dumping money into making it look like everything is fine and dandy.

In this video the presenter is showing how China is paying You Tubers to showcase China as a super great land of happy people (my words not theirs). The only issue I have with this video is near the end it talks about China building more and more coal burning powerplants, well it's kind of messed up. What seems to be going on is that instead of upgrading or replacing, China is just building new powerplants, and shutting down the old one. The old one stay standing since it costs money to tear them down, and it's easier to just build a new one than upgrade the older ones. 

Then there is this story from CNN, which I find very odd.
Major companies in China are setting up their own volunteer armies | CNN Business

Three take aways from this story:
One;

 Chinese companies are doing something rarely seen since the 1970s: setting up their own volunteer armies. At least 16 major Chinese firms, including a privately-owned dairy giant, have established fighting forces over the past year, according to a CNN analysis of state media reports.
 
These units, known as the People’s Armed Forces Departments, are composed of civilians who retain their regular jobs.

Two;

 
The establishment of corporate brigades highlights Beijing’s growing concerns about potential conflict abroad as well as social unrest at home as the economy stumbles, analysts say.
 
The revival is also seen as a response to the pandemic, and part of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s efforts to tighten Communist Party control over society, including the corporate sector.
 
“The return of corporate militias reflects Xi’s rising focus on the need to better integrate economic development with national security as the country faces a more difficult future of slower growth and rising geopolitical competition,” said Neil Thomas, a fellow for Chinese politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.
 
“Corporate militias under military leadership could help the Communist Party more effectively quell incidents of social unrest such as consumer protests and employee strikes,” he said.

 
And finally;

 By enrolling a large number of civilians into the brigades, Mao Zedong, China’s revolutionary leader, said he was enhancing the country’s defense against the threat of “imperial forces” such as the United States. But historians said Mao used the forces to promote his personal agenda and consolidate his power.
 
He embedded the brigades into the People’s Communes, huge collectives formalized in 1958 that managed almost all economic and political activities in rural China. The communes were a central part of Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign, a disastrous effort to galvanize agriculture and raise steel production through collectivization that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
 
Mao also expanded the militia system to suppress and intimidate people who opposed his radical policies, while developing a cult of personality within and outside the party.

Sound familiar? I think Xi has pushed the people too far. As to this Mao issue check out this out:
China's mysterious vanishing MaosーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS (youtube.com)

In this video (which is not viewable outside of NHK World) they talk to people about missing Mao Statues, and the answers to get are nonexistent. Now why would this happen? I think this virtual "great Wall is falling down, and China will either be acting out stupidly or shutting itself off from the world once again.

[guyfriday]

Well this was unexpected.

An Online Dump of Chinese Hacking Documents Offers a Rare Window into Pervasive State Surveillance | Military.com

  Chinese police are investigating an unauthorized and highly unusual online dump of documents from a private security contractor linked to the nation's top policing agency and other parts of its government — a trove that catalogs apparent hacking activity and tools to spy on both Chinese and foreigners.
 
Among the apparent targets of tools provided by the impacted company, I-Soon: ethnicities and dissidents in parts of China that have seen significant anti-government protests, such as Hong Kong or the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang in China’s far west.

The dump of scores of documents late last week and subsequent investigation were confirmed by two employees of I-Soon, known as Anxun in Mandarin, which has ties to the powerful Ministry of Public Security. The dump, which analysts consider highly significant even if it does not reveal any especially novel or potent tools, includes hundreds of pages of contracts, marketing presentations, product manuals, and client and employee lists.

The story linked provides a lot of details, but I didn't see any actual link to the data (which now that we know, I'm sure someone here or there will get access to that data "somehow")

Some major take-a-ways from this story:

 The hacking tools are used by Chinese state agents to unmask users of social media platforms outside China such as X, formerly known as Twitter, break into email and hide the online activity of overseas agents. Also described are devices disguised as power strips and batteries that can be used to compromise Wi-Fi networks.

Does Elon know about this, and if so will he be exposing this spy information?

 He said organizations targeted by I-Soon — according to the leaked material — include governments, telecommunications firms abroad and online gambling companies within China.
Until the 190-megabyte leak, I-Soon’s website included a page listing clients topped by the Ministry of Public Security and including 11 provincial-level security bureaus and some 40 municipal public security departments.

looks like a lot of those "gambling apps" in the ol'app store will be off line soon. 

  Internal documents in the leak describe I-Soon databases of hacked data collected from foreign networks around the world that are advertised and sold to Chinese police.

So this is an interesting quote since it implies that Chinese Police have to buy they intel. Is this what set off the "HACKing" in the first place, some CCP member not getting a cut, or maybe a PLA loyalist?

 I-Soon’s tools appear to be used by Chinese police to curb dissent on overseas social media and flood them with pro-Beijing content. Authorities can surveil Chinese social media platforms directly and order them to take down anti-government posts. But they lack that ability on overseas sites like Facebook or X, where millions of Chinese users flock to in order to evade state surveillance and censorship.

 
I guess that's why it was stated that China is using so much money in over-seas branding to "pretty-up" their image. 

 
One leaked draft contract shows I-Soon was marketing “anti-terror” technical support to Xinjiang police to track the region’s native Uyghurs in Central and Southeast Asia, claiming it had access to hacked airline, cellular and government data from countries like Mongolia, Malaysia, Afghanistan and Thailand. It is unclear whether the contact was signed.
 
“We see a lot of targeting of organizations that are related to ethnic minorities — Tibetans, Uyghurs. A lot of the targeting of foreign entities can be seen through the lens of domestic security priorities for the government,” said Dakota Cary, a China analyst with the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne.
 
He said the documents appear legitimate because they align with what would be expected from a contractor hacking on behalf of China’s security apparatus with domestic political priorities.

 
Well, we already knew that Human rights are violated in China, but maybe this just confirms how entangled their intelligence services are in in it. I am left wondering if this tool is used in supporting the genocide of the Uyghurs as well?

 Cary found a spreadsheet with a list of data repositories collected from victims and counted 14 governments as targets, including India, Indonesia and Nigeria.

 

 Cary was also struck by the targeting of Taiwan’s Health Ministry to determine its COVID-19 caseload in early 2021 – and impressed by the low cost of some of the hacks. The documents show that I-Soon charged $55,000 to hack Vietnam’s economy ministry, he said.

 

 Although a few chat records refer to NATO, there is no indication of a successful hack of any NATO country, an initial review of the data by The Associated Press found. That doesn’t mean state-backed Chinese hackers are not trying to hack the U.S. and it’s allies, though. If the leaker is inside China, which seems likely, Cary said that “leaking information about hacking NATO would be really, really inflammatory" — a risk apt to make Chinese authorities more determined to identify the hacker.

Now given all those countries listed, it almost seems that NATO and the US are not being mentioned by name out of concerns. This bit about another system in the article does talk about that though;

 Mathieu Tartare, a malware researcher at the cybersecurity firm ESET, says it has linked I-Soon to a Chinese state hacking group it calls Fishmonger that it actively tracks and which it wrote about in January 2020 after the group hacked Hong Kong universities during student protests. He said it has, since 2022, seen Fishmonger target governments, NGOs and think tanks across Asia, Europe, Central America and the United States.

 
And, this is funny. 

 On Monday, Mao Ning, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said the U.S. government has long been working to compromise China’s critical infrastructure. She demanded the U.S. “stop using cybersecurity issues to smear other countries.”

Ring-ring
Hello?
Hey kettle, you're black.

looks like China got hit hard on their spying. Weird that they use a third party company to hide their spying when everyone knows that all Chinese businesses are owned by the CCP. Talk about getting caught with your pants down.

---

China's mysterious vanishing MaosーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS (youtube.com)

In this video (which is not viewable outside of NHK World) they talk to people about missing Mao Statues, and the answers to get are nonexistent. Now why would this happen? I think this virtual "great Wall is falling down, and China will either be acting out stupidly or shutting itself off from the world once again.

I want to address this. There have been a number of identical statue of Chairman Mao that have been put up and now have disappeared lately. There is a rumor that China can only afford one statue and is just shuffling it around. I'm not sure if this is true, but China took a pretty big hit economically recently, and they may have gone broke.

[guyfriday]

So I got asked by a person that I associate with why is it important to know what China is doing. I told them that it's important to see what China is doing since those in the US (and other countries) are prompted by China to use these same tactics on others in their respective countries. Case in point:

In this video we see a man that refused to comply with the official narrative about the Climate Change Cash Grab. Not only did they go after him by removing him from his job, but also used a state congressional law to completely eliminate his entire office. This was done in order to create an atmosphere of "comply or else" mentality in other offices. 

This is something we have seen in Chinese issues, but here we are seeing this in America as well. CCP is a disease that needs to be recognized and exposed so that people can prevent it's spread.

[guyfriday]

Ok so this is a very new situation, but it holds very in line to how China operates and as well as their policies and politicians (people who are being funded by Chinese backers) are pushing Chinese agendas in the US. 

Some back ground:
The current Attorney Gerneral for the State of Washington is running for the office of Governor and two other people with similar names had filed to run against him. 
Here's a video with the full story about it and what happened:


For those who can't watch the video, or choose not of, the jest of it is this, The Democrat running for office threatened the other candidates with jail time because they were running against him. There are rules that would have allowed these men to run but given that by doing so the State Attorney would have to be shoved lower on the list of people running, and that it would dilute the names of those running for office, the Attorney General just decided to threaten the others into dropping out. 

This type of action is seen in both Chinese elections (though often the other people "drop-out" by disappearing) and in countries were China presses their control over. Clearly, we can see that the Chinese influence is only going to get worse if this doesn't get exposed and force them to run like the cockroaches that they are.

[guyfriday]

So sadly it has come to this:
Harris campaign editing news headlines in her favor — without outlets' knowledge: report (nypost.com)

 Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team has been silently editing news headlines in Google search results to make it seem like major news outlets are on her side, according to a report.
 
The altered headlines — all paired with a “Paid for by Harris for President” banner — were changed without the news outlets’ knowledge, Axios reported Tuesday.
 
Nearly a dozen publishers were swept up in the faux headline campaign, including major companies like The Guardian, Reuters, CBS News, The Associated Press and PBS.

So much like in China and even in Washington State, the notion of "adjusting" the headlines as ads is becoming a thing along the Presidential Campaign. 

Hiding facts on public policies:


By the way, those people that tried to sue the State are also supporting the AG in his bid for Governor. So this attempt to hide a case that would remove publicly backed initiatives was taking place on both sides of the case. Luckly the court made the right ruling. Just like in the Harris story above, the AG is trying to make this a win for himself when the issue is brought up. 

I would say this is sickening, but it's become hard to talk with a barf bag over ones face.

[guyfriday]

I'm going to pop this news report in here due to it being a road map into how and where China is influencing other places while using the "plant" technique they use in China. 
Former high-ranking Hochul aide arrested for acting as a foreign agent for China (nypost.com)

The former high-ranking aide for Gov. Kathy Hochul who was arrested along with her husband Tuesday acted as a foreign agent for China in exchange for millions of dollars in kickbacks and fancy perks such as salted ducks, according to a bombshell indictment.

This is the part of the report that needs attention:

Sun shadily used her position under Hochul and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo – who are unnamed but clearly referenced in the court documents – to turn the governor’s office into a virtual mouthpiece for the People’s Republic of China and Chinese Community Party, the indictment contends.
 
At several points, Sun bragged about effectively blocking Cuomo and Hochul from making statements that arguably recognized Taiwan, including when the disputed island sent 200,000 much-needed masks to New York during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, documents state. 
 
She also blocked representatives from Taiwan’s governor from visiting the New York governor’s office, according to the documents.
 
“As alleged, while appearing to serve the people of New York as Deputy Chief of Staff within the New York State Executive Chamber, the defendant and her husband actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the CCP,” said US Attorney Breon Peace in a statement. “The illicit scheme enriched the defendant’s family to the tune of millions of dollars.”
 
Sun and Hu laundered kickbacks she received from China and the CCP to buy the $4.1 million Long Island home that FBI agents raided in July, the indictment contends.

I wonder if she was responsible for any Bio-Labs in New York and/or Michigan not getting noticed *See Note at bottom.


*Note;
The Danger of ‘Invisible’ Biolabs Across the U.S. | TIME

Recently, many California residents were disturbed to learn that a small, privately-operated bio lab in the Central Valley town of Reedley was shut down by Fresno County Department of Public Health officials after they found that it had been improperly managing almost 1,000 laboratory mice and samples of infectious diseases including COVID-19, rubella, malaria, dengue, chlamydia, hepatitis, and HIV. The lab was registered to a company called Prestige Biotech that sold a variety of medical testing kits, including for pregnancy and COVID-19, and it was likely storing disease samples for the purpose of developing and validating its testing kits. Government authorities are still investigating the company’s history, but it appears to have previously operated a lab in Fresno under the name Universal MediTech, where city officials flagged it for investigation regarding improperly stored chemicals.

If it wasn't for a Local code enforcer not on the take, this bio-lab might never have been reported. Now imagine how many Sun and Hu might have whitewashed into never getting reported. Chinas agents need to be purged from these positions of power.

---

In the above posting the New York Post article has a link to the court case about Sun and Hu. What I found interesting was this:

Association-1 was a nonprofit 501©(3)organization closely associated with the United Front Work Department (“UFWD”) and the Chinese Communist Party (“CCP”). The UFWD was a CCP department that attempted to manage relationships with and generate support for the CCP among elite individuals inside and outside the PRC, including by gathering human intelligence. After 2018, the UFWD reported directly to the CCP’s Central Committee, a national party organization that helped drive political decision-making in the PRC. In his role as president of Association-1, CC-1 maintained contact with PRC government officials and frequently traveled to the PRC for UFWD-sponsored events.

UFWD, might be a starting point for some to dig into.

[guyfriday]

This is an interesting report from the Washington Post of all places (via MSN News)
We investigated how China silenced its critics in an American city (msn.com)

 China has stepped up efforts to intimidate and spy on its diaspora, as Beijing’s influence grows outside its borders.
 
For more than six months, The Washington Post has been investigating a global surge in campaigns of cross-border repression. Our latest story examines the violence during Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in November. It is based on an analysis of more than 2,000 photos and videos; interviews with more than 35 witnesses, U.S. officials and analysts; text messages from American security guards working with Chinese diplomats; messages shared in Chinese diaspora WeChat groups; and medical reports and police reports obtained by The Post.

The key discoveries made in this report are the following:

 
Here are five key findings:
 
1. While there was aggression from both sides, the most extreme violence was instigated by pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) activists and carried out by coordinated groups of young men embedded among them, verified videos show.
 
2. The Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles paid for supporters’ hotels and meals as an incentive to participate, according to messages shared in WeChat groups reviewed by The Post; and at least 35 pro-CCP Chinese diaspora groups showed up to the APEC summit protests.
 
3. Videos show at least four Chinese diplomats from the consulates in Los Angeles and San Francisco among the crowd of pro-CCP protesters, sometimes directly interacting with aggressive actors over four days of protests from Nov. 14-17.
 
4. Chinese diplomats hired at least 60 private security guards to “protect” Chinese diaspora groups gathered to welcome Xi, according to seven people involved in the arrangement.
 
5. The FBI is investigating the violence at the APEC summit, according to two officials familiar with the matter.
 
The Chinese Embassy in Washington said that members of Chinese communities who traveled to San Francisco to welcome Xi were the ones subject to “multiple incidents of provocations and violence.”

I'm beginning to get a feeling that the media is turning on China by design rather than by facts. So, this whole exposure might be Chinese disinformation for reasons-unknown at this point.

[guyfriday]

So, now that this Chinese Spy story out of New York is in the open, it should be pointed that within a week more busts of high-powered plays got nabbed. Thats why I'm posting this. (it's an opinion piece for very good reasons)
NYPD cracks down on The Post, free press amid Edward Caban scandal (nypost.com)

Fights between journalists and the powerful are so commonplace they’re rarely worth remarking upon — there are always going to be stories officials don’t want us reporting, and we’ll try our best to do them anyway.
 
But it’s worth informing Post readers about what’s happening at the NYPD, which under Commissioner Edward Caban has become hostile to any transparency.
 
First, the police department banished reporters to a trailer outside of NYPD headquarters. Less chance pesky journalists covered anything other than the “official” narrative.
 
All inquiries, they decreed, must come in writing and go to one press office — questions they’ve been regularly ignoring.

Ok so why am I posting this in a Chinese Spy thread, look at how the NYPD higher ups are handling this:

Then, on Thursday, the bureau chiefs of both The Post and The New York Times were banished from the trailer. The sin of our reporter, Tina Moore? She reached out to the Police Benevolent Association about doing a feature related to the upcoming anniversary of 9/11.
 
After The Post complained, Moore was allowed to return, but given a lecture on what she did “wrong” — that is, try to speak to anyone on the force without the NYPD’s permission.
 
That’s a ridiculous rule on its face, but even more so when it comes to the PBA. That’s a union that the NYPD does not control. If the PBA wants to cooperate, it is up to them.
 
Of course, the increasingly authoritarian press office of the NYPD does not see it this way. They do not consider themselves taxpayer-funded servants of the people of Gotham, they are thin-skinned propagandists who spend their days lashing out at reporters on X.

This style of information is exactly how China controls the narrative for every public issue that might embarrass the country, and now we see that exact style of control being used in New York City right after a Chinese Spy was nabbed.

Some additional stories for extra context:
Exclusive | NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban's twin brother is ex-cop with checkered past that's being eyed by feds as alleged 'fixer' for NYC hotspots: sources (nypost.com)
Again the issue here isn't what or who but rather that it happened so soon after the Chinese Spy grab.
NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban faces calls for ouster after feds shockingly raid his home (nypost.com)
This was the first story that broke after the Spy grab.

So it's not just a single state issue with Chinese influence or tactics getting used against the public of many countries (like in the opening posts about the UK)