Tag: china

Chinese Hackers Used U.S. Government-Mandated Wiretap Systems

For as long as law enforcement has sought a way to monitor people’s conversations—though they’d only do so with a court order, we’re supposed to believe—privacy experts have warned that building backdoors into communications systems to ease government snooping is dangerous. A recent Chinese incursion into U.S. internet providers using infrastructure created to allow police easy wiretap access offers evidence, and not for the first time, that weakening security for anybody weakens it for everybody.

“A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week. “For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data.”

Among the companies breached by the hacker group, dubbed “Salt Typhoon” by investigators, are Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies. The group is just one of several linked to the Chinese government that has targeted data and communications systems in the West.

While the Journal report doesn’t specify, Joe Mullin and Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) believe the wiretap-ready systems penetrated by the Chinese hackers were “likely created to facilitate smooth compliance with wrong-headed laws like CALEA.” CALEA, known in full as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, dates back to 1994 and “forced telephone companies to redesign their network architectures to make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap digital telephone calls,” according to an EFF guide to the law. A decade later it was expanded to encompass internet service providers, who were targeted by Salt Typhoon.

“That’s right,” comment Mullin and Cohn. “The path for law enforcement access set up by these companies was apparently compromised and used by China-backed hackers.”

Keep reading

FIVE CHINESE U of M Grads Caught Spying On America’s Largest National Guard Base In MI—Only Short Distance From Controversial Proposed Chinese Battery Plant Supported By Dem Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

Five recent Chinese graduates of the University of Michigan have been charged with conspiracy, making false statements to investigators, and destroying records during the federal investigation. They were caught with cameras late at night on the base at Camp Grayling, America’s largest US National Guard training facility in Grayling, MI.

The students claimed to be there to observe a meteor shower. Their presence coincided with military exercises involving Taiwanese forces, which led authorities to believe they were engaged in espionage.

According to M-Live, the five suspects who graduated from the University of Michigan in May 2024 are Zhekai Xu, Renxiang Guan, Haoming Zhu, Yi Liang, and Jingzhe Tao. They were found on the US military training base in 2023 near tents, military vehicles, and sensitive communications equipment. Court records show that the students were part of a joint program with Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

MSN reports – The students were found at Bear Lake on the camp’s property after midnight on Aug. 13, 2023. About 7,000 military officials, including some from Taiwan, were participating in live firing exercises, records show.

A U.S. sergeant major found the students taking photos near classified equipment and soldiers sleeping in tents, records show.

One of the students told the sergeant major they were Chinese media members. The sergeant major told them to leave, which they quickly did.

Keep reading

UN ‘Pact For The Future’ Draws Concerns Over CCP Backing

The United Nations and its member governments, with strong support from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), adopted a landmark agreement last week to bestow the U.N. with more power and influence in global affairs.

The controversial agreement, known as the Pact for the Future, outlines 56 actions for governments and international institutions to take over the coming years.

Among the key provisions is “transforming global governance” and further empowering international institutions across a range of issues, including “sustainable development and financing for development,” as well as “science, technology and innovation, and digital cooperation.”

The pact includes a Global Digital Compact to restrict “misinformation” and “disinformation” and a Declaration on Future Generations that encompasses the 2030 Agenda climate goals that include the phase-out of fossil fuels.

It is also part of transforming the U.N. into what the organization is touting in promotional materials as “U.N. 2.0.”

U.N. leaders and top officials from the CCP celebrated the pact as a historic effort to create a better future for humanity and increase global cooperation on international problems.

“We can’t create a future fit for our grandchildren with systems built for our grandparents,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said.

Despite opposition from various quarters, the 193-member body adopted the pact by consensus on Sept. 22 at the Summit of the Future during the U.N. General Assembly after about nine months of negotiations.

In the days before the pact was adopted, a coalition of U.S. lawmakers and grassroots leaders held a press conference on Capitol Hill criticizing the agreement as an effort to undermine national sovereignty and freedom.

Keep reading

Was Tim Walz Connected to Disappearance of Manual for Nuclear-capable Howitzer?

A National Guard soldier who served with Tim Walz alleges a classified manual for a howitzer capable of firing nuclear artillery went missing not long after Walz returned from a trip to China, in the 1990s.

Speaking to Alpha News, the retired soldier, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described how the standard operating procedure manual for the M109A5 howitzer, detailing the gun’s nuclear capabilities, went missing.

He said Walz was one of the few men with access to the building where the manual was kept and was “often the only one there.” The soldier believes Walz stole the manual and later returned it. The disappearance, which was never reported, coincided with one of Walz’s many visits to China.

When asked why the manual’s disappearance was never reported, the former soldier said that the battalion was more concerned with Walz’s neglect of key duties, because he was “double-dipping,” or working a full-time job when he should have been working full-time with his unit.

“He claims that Walz frequently neglected key duties, such as recruitment and payroll, which allegedly raised concerns to the point that a superior had to investigate,” Alpha News reports.

“The former soldier stated that the unit was more focused on those issues, and when the manual eventually reappeared, it went unreported. In hindsight, the soldier believes he should have reported it when it first went missing but feared repercussions for not addressing it sooner.”

The Chinese began developing a howitzer, the PLZ-05, with striking similarities to the US M109A5 in the mid-1990s, around the time the former soldier alleges Walz stole the manual.

Alpha News also draws attention to Walz’s arrest for DUI, which took place at the same time. Walz was arrested for travelling at 96mph in a 55-mph zone. Walz’s lawyer later alleged that his client believed he was being chased. It was never revealed by whom, but the timing is suggestive, perhaps, of a connection to in-person spying activities.

Alpha News contacted Walz’s team for a response to the accusation, but received no response. The Minnesota National Guard also provided no response.

Walz’s connections to China have come under close scrutiny in the media, and now the House Oversight Committee, under James Comer, has announced an investigation of his ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

Keep reading

Fauci’s Inner Circle Shielded U.S. Collaborator

The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s chief American collaborator leveraged connections in Anthony Fauci’s inner circle to survive federal scrutiny and keep millions in public funding flowing without turning over key data, new records show.

Hundreds of documents — emails obtained under Freedom of Information Act lawsuits or Congressional subpoena, as well as Congressional interview transcripts — show Fauci’s institute protected EcoHealth Alliance, which collaborated on novel coronavirus discovery and engineering projects with the Wuhan lab. 

At a congressional hearing this summer, Fauci cast EcoHealth and its president Peter Daszak — who are currently under proposed debarment by the federal government — as minor and rogue grantees.

But EcoHealth was among the first grantees that Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases contacted as news of a novel coronavirus first swirled, and Daszak requested supplemental funds to respond to the crisis. In early February 2020, when NIAID began conducting weekly calls with a few experts about the novel coronavirus, Daszak was among the invitees. And at the height of pandemic confusion and controversy in the summer of 2020, EcoHealth maintained the goodwill of NIAID, which awarded EcoHealth two new grants totaling $19.8 million, weakening the leverage of other officials to obtain information from one of the US government’s only sources of insight into the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Fauci “asked how Peter is doing, as he often does, and he seemed to commiserate with him to a degree,” Fauci’s senior scientific advisor David Morens wrote in apparent reference to Daszak on Nov. 18, 2021. 

At the time, officials at the National Institutes of Health’s central headquarters or “Building One” — at the demand of the Trump White House — had suspended EcoHealth’s existing NIAID grant and sought lab notebooks and unpublished genomic data as a condition of getting its funding back. This information could have shed light on the coronavirus research in Wuhan before the pandemic. 

But aided by allies within NIAID, millions continued to flow to EcoHealth, and Daszak would not ask his longtime collaborators in Wuhan for information sought by the US government until 20 months later, in January 2022 — two years after the pandemic began. 

Keep reading

China’s top economist disappears after criticizing Xi Jinping

China’s top economist, Zhu Hengpeng, criticized Chinese President Xi Jinping in a private chat. At first, he was detained and removed from office, and then he disappeared, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Sources report that in the spring of 2024, Zhu Hengpeng made several “impolitic remarks” about China’s weakening economy and indirectly criticized Xi Jinping in a closed chat on the Chinese messaging app WeChat.

As a result, a case was opened against Hengpeng, leading to his detention and dismissal from the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where he had worked for 20 years, including the last 10 as deputy director.

Additionally, references to him were removed from the online staff list of one of Tsinghua University’s centers.

It is unknown where the economist is now and what happened to him. His name has also disappeared from the CASS staff lists, and he has not responded to emails from the Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. No one answered the door at his apartment in Beijing. The Chinese agency handling media inquiries has not responded to requests for comment.

Keep reading

U.S. taxpayers funded Chinese labs that carried out grisly experiments on beagle puppies

The federal government has been paying Chinese labs that carry out animal testing including experiments that involved severing beagle puppies’ spines to study how they would react to such a horrific injury.

The White Coat Waste Project, in a new investigation shared first with The Washington Times, said 28 Chinese labs are approved to receive U.S. taxpayer money for animal testing. Among them are Sun Yat-Sen University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which carry out the grisly experiments on beagles.

Video of some experiments, compiled by WCW, shows beagles whose spines had been severed crawling on their front paws with their rears dragging across the ground, unable to move normally on their own.

Keep reading

The Case for Pessimism in Sino-American Relations

On September 11, the Chicago Tribune published an op-ed by the director of the Asia Engagement Program at Defense Priorities and director of the China Initiative at Brown University, Dr. Lyle Goldstein, on the need for Washington to work to improve its relations with Beijing.

Formerly a research professor at the U.S. Naval War College for two decades, Dr. Goldstein retains nothing but respect from this author—referencing him at several points in The Fake China Threat and Its Very Real Danger regarding the security situation around the Taiwan Strait.

However, I could not but remark upon a few key passages that stood out to me in reading his generally worthy commentary from last week.

First, regarding the notion that the selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz, who spent time teaching in China in his youth and has visited the country many times, as the Democratic vice presidential nominee offers evidence that the party “now understand the stakes in this most pivotal bilateral relationship,” seems wanting for evidence of this recognition.

From Politico to the The New York Times, NBCto TIME—what mattered was his ability to appeal to key demographics in the handful of states in play in the election without alienating other key constituencies in the Democrat’s confused big-tent coalition; he is a white, middle class guy, a veteran and gun owner who also supports all the key pillars of the progressive gospel, from climate change to gun control to abortion access. Zero mention of his expertise regarding China.

And even if Walz had some ideas as to what might be done, if the Pentagon and beltway securocrats disagreed, which they certainly would if his inclination were toward moderation, we already know from Donald Trump’s undermined attempted reset of relations with Russia that it isn’t going to happen.

On top of which, as Dr. Goldstein acknowledges, despite criticizing Trump’s bellicose first-term China policy from the sidelines, once in office the Joe Biden administration simply carried on the policy.

Much like going along with the previous administration’s Iran policy, one suspects it is simple cowardice in the face of the political calculation that being called “weak” on national security, true or not, would be more electorally damaging that making the right call geopolitically.

Keep reading

GAIN OF FUNCTION research on viruses from bats, birds and monkeys funded with U.S. taxpayer money and nefariously created in Chinese Communist Party labs

As an American, one should expect that taxpayer money goes directly to helping this country and its citizens prosper, including top-notch public education; fully functional roads, tunnels and bridges; and a strong military in all aspects, among other services. Without feeling like a conspiracy theorist, nobody should have to question whether our taxpayer money might be used to outright harm Americans, and what’s worse, in ways that we would all, on the surface, believe are helping us.

That’s where the White Coat Waste Project comes into play, with a recent investigation that exposed how the USDA collaborates with the Chinese Communist Party and their Academy of Sciences to fund and create gain-of-function viruses to make viruses that normally only infect animals now infect humans. Sounds insane, right?

18 Members of Congress now demanding answers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture regarding millions of dollars spent creating new deadly viruses

Who are the creators of these new viruses intending to kill? What other purpose could there possibly be for scientists to be creating “novel” viruses that leap from animals to humans and create pandemics? It’s obviously to create more biological weapons of mass destruction, going against the Geneva Convention and every ethical and moral obligation that modern medicine could violate.

The letter from Congressional members to USDA boss Tom Vilsack reads, “We are disturbed by recent reports about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-linked Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on bird flu research. This research, funded by American taxpayers, could potentially generate dangerous new lab-created virus strains that threaten our national security and public health.”

It’s a fact that Covid-19 gain of function virus was made in the Wuhan lab using U.S. taxpayer funds that Anthony “Insidious” Fauci directed to them by the millions. That man should be in prison for life without parole for mass murder, but instead, new research is being funded to make MORE deadly viruses that can leap from bats, birds and monkeys to humans so we can all experience more plandemics soon.

The White Coat Waste Project used the Freedom of Information Act to uncover USDA documents revealing this latest Bird Flu collusion between the U.S. and Communist China. Previously, under oath, the Secretary of Agriculture swore that the U.S. was NOT colluding with the CCP to make Bird Flu have gain of function ability, saying “It’s really not a collaboration per se… To my knowledge there is not [data] sharing…all of this is basically walled off, so everything we’re doing stays with us, it doesn’t necessarily go to the UK or to China.”

Never forget, the original story of the origins of Covid-19 was that some Chinamen were eating some bat soup that was infected or contaminated, and they somehow got infected themselves. You can’t make this stuff up (well, they did). Now, the U.S. is funneling millions to CCP labs to make new pandemic-style viruses they can “accidentally” release or claim terrorists stole from their labs and released. Either way, it wouldn’t happen, nor have happened, if these scientists weren’t being handed millions in grant money to work on it all. Period.

Keep reading

CCP Tried to ‘Steal’ Assembly Seat, NY Dem Politician Claims

Queens Assemblyman Ron Kim has come forward with explosive allegations of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interference in New York’s political landscape. 

The Korean-American politician claims that CCP-affiliated groups attempted to unseat him in the recent Democratic primary, raising alarm bells about foreign influence in local elections.

Kim, who narrowly won his primary battle in the 40th District by just 443 votes, told New York Post reporters, “There were clear patterns of foreign influence trying to dictate the outcome of the election — groups with ties to mainland China and the CCP.”

“They were trying to steal the Flushing seat.”

The assemblyman’s revelations come on the heels of a high-profile arrest that has sent shockwaves through New York’s political circles. 

Keep reading