Tag: china

Homeland Security warns of Chinese parts in election machines, will require paper ballot audits

The Homeland Security Department will require random audits of paper ballots in the midterm elections, citing long-simmering concern that the nation’s largest voting technology companies use Chinese parts in their voting machines, according to a letter from Secretary Markwayne Mullin released Thursday.   

Mullin sent the letter to the White House Transparency Task Force earlier this week outlining the dangers posed by Chinese components in American voting machines and the way that these components could be exploited by hackers or other malicious actors.

The letter highlighted longstanding concerns first raised in a bipartisan manner before the 2020 election, but which officials appear to have taken little action on in the intervening years.

“Voting machines with components manufactured by foreign adversaries introduce significant security risks,” Mullin wrote. “These vulnerabilities mean that malicious actors could potentially compromise election infrastructure at any stage of the supply chain, even before the machines are assembled or deployed.” 

The secretary explained, “If a component is tampered with during manufacturing, it could serve as a point-of-entry for hackers, allowing for the possibility of synchronized attacks across multiple machines and jurisdictions.”

Two Biden administration Intelligence Community memos in 2024 identified China as “the most active and persistent cyber threat” and assessed that China, along with Iran and Russia, has “the technical capability to access some U.S. election-related networks and systems.”  

You can read Mullin’s letter below: 

08.20.2026 – WHTF Letter Commerce – S1 SIGNED.pdf

Earlier this year, the Trump administration took drastic action to ban the import of all internet routers manufactured in foreign countries because of the unacceptable security risks posed by Chinese hacking capabilities.

Internet routers connect computers, cellphones, and other electronic devices to the internet, the backbone of the modern economy.

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VoterGA: Declassified Intelligence Reveals Massive China Election Interference Cover-up

President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address from the White House on July 16, 2026, on the subject of US election security.

During the speech, Trump announced the declassification of intelligence documents and made a series of allegations involving China, the 2020 election, and a subsequent effort by intelligence officials to withhold information from him and from Congress.

As reported earlier by Patriot Perspective, one CIA report outlined China’s broader objective as leveraging domestic and foreign groups opposed to Trump to reduce his support, pressure him to resign, or stop him from winning another term.

Another report alleged that information collected from millions of TikTok users could be used to place authentic names, addresses, and identification numbers on the fraudulent licenses, making them more difficult to detect.

The release by the US government in July, via an earlier TGP report by Patriot Perspective, revealed China’s massive, multi-year US election interference campaigns.

The documents depict a foreign adversary determined to exploit America’s political divisions.

The most alarming material concerns the collection of Americans’ personal information.

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Chinese Hackers Broke Into NASA, Federal Reserve, DOJ & Senate: FBI Announces

The United States Department of Justice has on Wednesday announced US authorities thwarted a major state-sponsored hack which saw a temporary intrusion into NASA, the Federal Reserve, Senate, the DOJ, Department of Energy, and the Department of Health and Human services, along with four unnamed companies in the US and South Korea.

“Today we announced the disruption of a global botnet and hacking platform used by Chinese state-sponsored hackers to target U.S. critical infrastructure,” said FBI Director Kash Patel.

“These tools were used by PRC cyber actors to hide the origin of their attacks. Thanks to the work of FBI San Diego, FBI Cyber Division, and DOJ partners, we seized adversary infrastructure and shut these platforms down,” he added.

Domains utilized by two hacking platforms identified as “QScan” and “QTRouter” were seized by the DOJ in the large scale counter-cyberespionage operation.

Describing a pervasive botnet which was ultimately believed to be backed by Chinese state actors, The Wall Street Journal details that the “goal was to blend in with legitimate networking traffic, making the hacking activity hard to trace, federal officials say.”

“The group exploited software vulnerabilities to launch cyberattacks against U.S. government agencies, power companies and hospital systems, and operated a worldwide network of hacked devices—known as a botnet—to conduct its hacking campaigns, according to Brett Leatherman, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s top cyber official,” WSJ continues.

As for the specific allegation that this had state backing, the DOJ press release states:

People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored group known as “QTFY,” employed by China-based Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company, created and operated QScan and QTRouter.

The DOJ announcement additionally outlines efforts at concealment and ‘plausible deniability’ in the following:

QTRouter consists of these compromised IoT devices, as well as commercial proxy service devices and leased virtual private servers. QTRouter then serves as an “obfuscation network” – meaning it allows QTFY and other malicious cyber actors to conceal the PRC-origin of their computer intrusion activities because the malicious communications appear to originate from computers (such as those compromised by QScan) that are outside of the PRC and may even be local to the targeted networks. Because the seized domains were hard-coded into both the QScan and QTRouter malware and used for essential tasks such as communication and authentication, the court-authorized seizures made QScan and QTRouter inoperable. 

Neither Beijing’s foreign ministry nor the Chinese embassy in Washington have officially responded to the allegations, and as has been the pattern in the past is likely to reject the US charge altogether.

Earlier this year Google was among those warning of imminent stepped-up Chinese and Russian targeting of US defense companies. 

Google’s prior report seemed to preview some of the techniques on display in this latest hack. The report cited observations of “more China-nexus cyber espionage missions directly targeting defense and aerospace industry than from any other state-sponsored actors over the last two years.”

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US Universities Had Extensive Ties With Chinese Defense Research Labs, Air Force Study Finds

Thirty U.S. academic institutions have until Aug. 31 to examine specified foreign research ties or risk losing eligibility for future federal research funding.

Seven days after the Pentagon ordered the reviews, an Air Force-affiliated institute published a study cataloging 204 interactions involving U.S. institutions and laboratories at the center of China’s defense research system.

The Aug. 24 study by the China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI) found more U.S. institution-level interactions with China’s Defense Science and Technology Key Laboratories than those involving institutions from any other country.

CASI describes the Defense Science and Technology Key Laboratories as China’s highest level national laboratory network for military research. The contacts it identified ranged from academic visits and conferences to coauthored technical research and formal joint laboratories in fields including aero-engines, underwater sensing, hyperspectral target detection, advanced communications, and aerospace materials.

CASI described interactions between Western researchers and Chinese military laboratories as “at the very least problematic,” saying even seemingly benign exchanges could give Chinese defense researchers access to knowledge and technology useful to the People’s Liberation Army.

CASI Director Brendan Mulvaney told The Epoch Times that institutional collaborations-including joint laboratories, long-term partnerships, and mutual study or training agreements-were the most concerning because they represented sustained cooperation rather than one-off encounters.

The Pentagon’s Aug. 17 order directs 30 U.S. institutions to review academic, financial, and research relationships with foreign entities of concern and report what action they have taken by Aug. 31.

The Pentagon did not publicly identify the schools. According to a list DefenseScoop obtained from a U.S. official, Harvard University, MIT, the University of California-Berkeley, Duke University, Penn State, the University of Texas at Austin, New York University, and the University of Southern California are among institutions on that list that also appear in CASI’s records.

The Pentagon has not said that the relationships identified by CASI prompted the Aug. 17 notices.

Purdue and Beihang Built Joint Research Labs

In 2011, Purdue and Beihang formally established the BUAA-Purdue Joint Laboratory on Energy Systems and the BUAA-Purdue Joint Laboratory on Low Emissions Combustion.

Then-Purdue President France Córdova and Beihang President Huai Jinpeng signed the agreements.

The energy laboratory paired Purdue’s computational modeling with Beihang’s experimental capabilities. The combustion laboratory focused on low emission gas turbine combustors used in aircraft and power generation.

Beihang records also describe the two laboratories as formal joint research arrangements and say the universities discussed broader scientific research, teaching, and faculty and student exchanges.

Beihang later described the combustion laboratory within a research program that also undertook Chinese National Defense 973 projects, a state-backed basic research program supporting its defense science and technology.

CASI identified Beihang’s thermal engineering department-which oversees a Defense Science and Technology Key Laboratory for aero-engine aerodynamics and thermodynamics-as having established a joint combustion research team with Purdue.

Beihang is now on the Pentagon’s Section 1286 list of foreign institutions subject to tighter research security restrictions.

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Declassified Docs Show Deep State Letting Chinese Espionage Slide If It Helps Democrats

his week the FBI released newly declassified files on former Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., and Chinese national Christine Fang (Fang Fang). There are two heavily redacted packets: one from the San Francisco Division’s 2014 “Freshman Fifteen” public-corruption probe and the other covering counterintelligence and recruitment efforts. These documents fill in details that earlier reporting left incomplete and underscore how institutional choices allowed a suspected Chinese intelligence operative to operate with relative impunity.

Here is a brief summary of the case: Fang, a Chinese national who lived in the U.S. until 2015, was the daughter of officers in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). The FBI suspected her of being an MSS-linked operative and unsuccessfully attempted to recruit her as a source in 2013 and 2014.

Fang facilitated conduit contributions to Swalwell’s campaigns, contradicting the 2020 Axios report that claimed there was no evidence of illegal donations. She also placed interns in Swalwell’s office and maintained a sexual relationship with him. FBI agents built a case against both Fang and Swalwell and provided regular updates to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section (PIN), then led by Jack Smith, who later oversaw the special counsel investigations into Donald Trump. Declassified files now indicate the case was more serious than previously understood. It remains unclear why the DOJ did not arrest or charge Fang.

Swalwell cut ties with Fang after agents gave him a defensive briefing in early 2015. Fang fled to China in May that same year. She remains in China and is barred from re-entering the United States. The DOJ closed the Fang/Swalwell case without action against either party.

The declassified documents reveal a broader reluctance among institutions to address Chinese influence operations targeting Democratic officials. Field agents reported Fang’s illegal fundraising and other suspicious activities to Jack Smith’s Public Integrity Section. Yet, no decisive steps were taken before the suspected operative left the country. Once Fang was safely in China, the chance to prosecute or further disrupt her network disappeared. Closing the case without charges left the underlying security risk unresolved.

Democratic leaders further complicated the situation. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly supported Swalwell and kept him on the House Intelligence Committee for years, suggesting that party considerations took precedence over the counterintelligence warning the FBI had already delivered.

The Swalwell/Fang case is not an isolated incident. The same FBI San Francisco Division had earlier identified former Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s longtime driver and California staffer as a Chinese intelligence recruit. He reported on local politics to handlers linked to the San Francisco Chinese consulate for years before the bureau notified Feinstein in 2013. Sen. Feinstein dismissed him, yet no charges were filed. The breach occurred while she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the most sensitive oversight positions in government. Yet, her career proceeded without interruption or lasting professional consequence.

More recently, Linda Sun, a senior aide to Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul, was charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the Chinese government. The case ended in a mistrial.

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Was An Obama Energy Secretary A CCP Plant?

Before Steven Chu oversaw America’s national laboratories and nuclear-weapons complex, a group inside what U.S. officials describe as the CCP’s “political warfare” apparatus listed him as an “overseas honorary president.” He later launched landmark research and technology partnerships with Beijing from inside the Department of Energy.

The organization was not simply “China-linked.” Its own records say it was led by the CCP Central Secretariat and administered by the Central United Front Work Department—the sprawling Party organ the U.S. government says works to co-opt elites, neutralize opposition and manipulate foreign institutions in service of Beijing.

Buried inside a non-searchable image on the official website of the Western Returned Scholars Association, or WRSA, is Chu’s Chinese name: 朱棣文.

The page identifies the organization’s Fourth Council as serving from 1999 to 2003. In the official roster image, under the heading 海外名誉会长—“overseas honorary presidents”—WRSA lists ten additional prestige scientists.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences explicitly identifies 朱棣文 as “Steven Chu,” the Stanford physicist and 1997 Nobel laureate. WRSA itself later used the same Chinese name for the “former U.S. Energy Secretary and physicist” Steven Chu. The surrounding names—some of the most famous overseas Chinese scientists of the era—make the match effectively certain.

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China Rejected 22 Tons of Argentine Beef Over a Banned Antibiotic as Trump Opens the Door to 300,000 Tons

President Donald Trump’s plan to allow up to 300,000 metric tonnes of foreign beef into the US has sparked an unusual backlash from Republican ranchers and cattle groups, who warn that cheaper imports could make it harder to rebuild America’s depleted herd.

Trump says the move will lower grocery costs while giving American ranchers time to rebuild cattle supplies. Critics see a contradiction, arguing that increasing imports could weaken the incentive for US producers to expand.

The controversy also puts Argentina under scrutiny. In March, China rejected a 22-tonne shipment of Argentine beef after detecting chloramphenicol, an antibiotic prohibited for livestock use in Argentina. There is no evidence that this rejected shipment is connected to Trump’s import plan.

On August 21, Trump announced that the US would allow up to 300,000 metric tonnes of product for ground beef to enter over 90 days without the additional out-of-quota tariff.

Trump said foreign exporters had committed to selling the beef at 25% below current market prices. The White House said an executive order with further details was expected within two weeks.

The plan concerns lean beef trimmings used for ground beef, rather than 300,000 tonnes of assorted beef cuts. Trump initially declined to identify the supplying countries, later naming Argentina as one of them.

That leaves a major question hanging over the Trump beef import plan: who exactly will supply the new imports?

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China Publishes Furious Screed Against Japanese PM for Not Killing a Cockroach

China’s state-run Global Times on Monday published a bizarrely overheated editorial criticizing Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae for refusing to kill a cockroach.

Among other things, the Chinese communist paper accused Takaichi of hypocrisy for approving weapons exports after sparing the insect’s life.

The anecdote that bugged Chinese propagandists was disclosed by Takaichi in a social media post on Friday. In the course of answering questions about her life in the prime minister’s official residence, she mentioned that she was “shocked when, one day, a cockroach suddenly scurried past my feet.”

Takaichi said she cannot bring herself to kill anything, including insects, because she was inspired to consider reincarnation and the interconnectedness of life by her childhood love for the manga series Phoenix by Tezuka Osamu. Tezuka regarded the story of the mythical immortal bird as his life’s work, begun in 1954, but unfortunately he died in 1989 before completing it.

“For the cockroach that ran through the official residence, I thought things like, ‘Maybe this life is also part of that long cycle of reincarnation,’” Takaichi mused in her social media post, “and for a while, I endured it, hoping it would somehow leave on its own – but when I told my secretaries about it, they were appalled.”

Takaichi’s secretaries proved to be much less reluctant to kill cockroaches than the prime minister was. She concluded by saying she “felt relieved, but also a little lonely, or maybe sad” after the cockroaches were eliminated from her residence.

Takaichi’s critics in Japan used her cockroach anecdote to slam the prime minister for everything from supposedly valuing insects more than human life to being frivolous and unserious for basing so much of her personal philosophy on a childhood comic book.

The Global Times gleefully piled on, and then some, capitalizing on the online cockroach controversy to vent Beijing’s spleen at Takaichi.

The Chinese Communist Party has loathed Takaichi since the moment she became prime minister because she said Japan would regard a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as a threat to its own security. A Chinese diplomat working in Japan threatened to behead Takaichi for her remarks about Taiwan.

“The intense public backlash over Takaichi’s remarks is not about whether she is genuinely squeamish about killing cockroaches,” the Global Times wrote. “Rather, it stems from her attempt to curate a benevolent personal image online to build momentum ahead of the upcoming cabinet reshuffle and personnel adjustments in September.”

“While showing reluctance to kill a cockroach, Takaichi is actively opening the floodgates for lethal weapon exports,” the editorial hissed, referring to Takaichi’s April 2026 revisions to Japan’s guidelines for transferring military equipment.

“The Japanese government can argue that arms exports are subject to strict legal reviews and aimed at deterrence rather than provocation,” the Global Times said, “but if a national leader relies on a ‘reverence for life’ to shape her public image, she must explain why Japan’s prudent arms export controls were dismantled under her watch,”

The lengthy editorial screed also worked in some shots at Takaichi for worrying about cockroaches instead of Japan’s rising cost of living index, and even claimed the Japanese prime minister cared more about bugs than the victims of disasters like the Kumamoto earthquake, which left many local residents without air conditioning during a hot summer.

The editorial concluded:

The public relations backlash against Takaichi’s comments does not stem from a lack of humor among Japanese citizens. Rather, when a prime minister injects private morality into political communication, the public naturally applies that same ethical yardstick to judge the administration’s governance.

Behind the opportunistic hyperventilating of the Global Times lies the simple political reality that Takaichi came into office as prime minister in October 2025 with stratospheric approval ratings and considerable star power, thanks to her status as Japan’s first female PM and her appealing, offbeat personal style.

A year later, those approval ratings have come back down to earth, and anything Takaichi does to draw attention to herself – such as ruminating on the meaning of a cockroach’s life – is likely to open the door to criticism.

Fortune pointed out on Sunday that Takaichi’s astounding personal energy and hard-driving work ethic – which she says can leave her as little as three hours a night to sleep – has gone from being a source of admiration among her constituents to becoming another angle for criticism.

Some of Takaichi’s detractors accuse her of setting a poor example for Japanese professional women and young girls by maintaining such a brutal pace at the age of 65, while others accuse her of cloistering herself at the prime minister’s residence to avoid dealing with lawmakers and the press.

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Bluetooth Glitch Exposes Alibaba’s Secret Tracking Of Users, Developer Says

A San Francisco-based developer discovered that Alibaba Group’s AliExpress marketplace secretly hijacked his computer’s audio system through hidden browser scripts, allowing the website to run inaudible sound waves at zero volume to create “fingerprints” used to track devices without relying on cookies. 

The privacy-focused Brave browser revealed in a series of X posts that the AliExpress marketplace was keeping the developer’s computer audio system active through hidden browser scripts, potentially allowing the website to generate a unique identifier for his device.

The issue emerged when the developer’s Bluetooth headphones refused to transfer their audio connection from his computer to his phone while AliExpress was open. A deeper dive of the website’s code showed background scripts maintaining access to the computer’s audio-processing system without producing audible sound.

The scripts allegedly used the browser’s Web Audio API to process signals at zero volume. Small differences in how individual computers handle those signals can be measured and combined into an “audio fingerprint,” allowing websites to recognize devices even when cookies are deleted or blocked.

The developer also found that the scripts collected other device characteristics, including available memory, screen dimensions, and network information.

Here’s what Brave found:

1. Alibaba’s AliExpress was caught using users’ audio systems to track them. AliExpress wasn’t recording users but instead playing a silent sound and measuring how users’ specific devices processed it in order to fingerprint them.

2. Fingerprinting is a way that websites can identify you without cookies. Sites will note details about your device like your screen size or installed fonts. These details are then combined into a unique, persistent “fingerprint” that can be used to track you across the Web.

3. There are slight variations in how each device plays the same audio file due to differences in CPU, sound card, browser, etc. When AliExpress played the silent sound, it measured these small variations to help build fingerprints of users’ devices.

4. This tracking was discovered due to an unexpected side effect. A user with Bluetooth headphones noticed they couldn’t play music on their phone because the headphones were instead playing AliExpress’s silent sound from their PC.

Brave turned what it found into a sales pitch for its browser:

1. For 6+ years, Brave has protected users against audio fingerprinting, and other fingerprinting types, by default. Brave injects random data into the browser’s output so you show a different fingerprint to different sites. This fingerprint also resets across sessions.

2. Trackers are constantly finding new ways to fingerprint your device, so Brave keeps adding new protections. We recently added defenses against GPU fingerprinting, which stops sites from identifying you with your graphics card or drivers.

The findings raise new questions about browser fingerprinting, a stealthy way that uses silent audio processing for covert tracking. 

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Once China’s Richest Man, Evergrande Founder Hui Ka Yan Gets Life In Prison — And The Property Crisis Rolls On

Hui Ka Yan, the founder and once richest man in China of property developer China Evergrande Group, has been sentenced to life in prison for fraud and bribery in one of the biggest corporate collapses in history.

Hui Ka Yan, the chairman of Evergrande Property Services, was found guilty of fraud by a Chinese court on Thursday and sentenced to life in prison, along with a number of other defendants, including his two sons. Xu Tenghe and Xu Zhijian were also found guilty of crimes committed as part of the business dealings of their father.

He was arrested in 2023 while abroad after he had pleaded guilty in April 2023 to multiple counts brought against him as the former chairman of the now-bankrupt property developer including dishonesty offenses and the misuse of funds. He was at one stage the world’s richest man and was the number one ranked person in China’s rich list, compiled by China’s rich list magazine Fortune China, which ranked individuals by their estimated net worth.

Evergrande became the symbol of China’s massive property market financed by massive amounts of debt that eventually collapsed under the weight of Beijing’s tighter leverage rules. Its highly publicized default in 2021 triggered a massive systemic crisis in China’s entire property sector and got the attention of investors worldwide, from Hong Kong to New York.

The liquidation of Evergrande Group’s Hong Kong incorporated entity was ordered by a Hong Kong court in early 2024. As a consequence, Evergrande Group was delisted from the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. In the meantime, the Chinese mainland regulators and liquidators are trying to recover the large amounts of dividends and assets, which were distributed to Hui Ka Yan and his family members during the boom years.

In other news, China’s onshore bankruptcy proceedings against the mainland entity of Evergrande’s Hong Kong listed subsidiary have been launched this week and will complicate recovery for international creditors.

The severe sentence handed down to Hui Ka Yan, once China’s richest man, will be seen as a warning to the rest of the country’s business leaders that they will be held accountable for the debts that have so destabilized the economy. The developers are responsible for the mess left by Evergrande’s collapse, and for the hundreds of thousands of homebuyers left in the lurch – many still waiting in their half-finished apartments for the homes they had paid for in full.

China’s real estate market, once accounting for some 25% of China’s total GDP, continues to be a drag on the country’s broader economy with no end in sight to the downturn in home prices in major cities. China is prioritizing accountability over bailouts in the sector, believing that by putting the worst perpetrators of the crisis behind bars, they can restore confidence in the property market.

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