Tag: china

Techno-Authoritarianism Is Here to Stay: China and the Deep State Have Joined Forces

“If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”—Senator Frank Church

The votes are in.

No matter who runs for office, no matter who controls the White House, Senate or the House of Representatives now or in the future, “we the people” have already lost.

We have lost because the future of this nation is being forged beyond the reach of our laws, elections and borders by techno-authoritarian powers with no regard for individuality, privacy or freedom.

The fate of America is being made in China, our role model for all things dystopian.

An economic and political powerhouse that owns more of America’s debt than any other country and is buying up American businesses across the spectrum, China is a vicious totalitarian regime that routinely employs censorship, surveillance, and brutal police state tactics to intimidate its populace, maintain its power, and expand the largesse of its corporate elite.

Where China goes, the United States eventually follows. This way lies outright tyranny.

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TikTok Has A Child Pornography And Chinese Espionage Problem

TikTok allegedly has child sex abuse material hiding in plain sight all over the social media platform, according to a Forbes investigative report.

According to the report, graphic social media content depicting lewd and pornographic acts from minors is easy to come across on the video-sharing app.

“They typically read like advertisements and come from seemingly innocuous accounts,” Forbes reports. “But often, they’re portals to illegal child sexual abuse material quite literally hidden in plain sight—posted in private accounts using a setting that makes it visible only to the person logged in.”

The grotesque material can be found in “post-in-private” accounts, which predators easily access using specific phrases to avoid algorithms that would lead to a violation.

According to Forbes, Seara Adair, child sexual abuse survivor and children’s safety advocate, told a TikTok employee that she believes users bypass the AI system by posting a few seconds of a black screen.

“There’s quite literally accounts that are full of child abuse and exploitation material on their platform,” Adair told Forbes. “Not only does it happen on their platform, but quite often it leads to other platforms – where it becomes even more dangerous.”

Adair claims to have seen videos showing “a child completely naked and doing indecent things.”

A Forbes investigator reports several of the post-in-private handles were easy to access, others would require pledges to contribute images, and some recruited girls at least 13 years old.

Mahsau Cullinane, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in an email to Forbes that the platform has “zero tolerance for child sexual abuse material and this abhorrent behavior which is strictly prohibited on our platform.” adding that the company has every public and private video posted on the platform go through TikTok’s AI moderation and additional human review, if needed.

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China’s Collection of DNA Data Linked to Bioweapons, Religious Persecution, Organ Harvesting

Police in China’s Fuzhou City recently bragged about solving a break-in by conducting a DNA test of a blood smear from a mosquito that allegedly stung the burglar. However, the incident, which made global headlines, brings to the fore the threats associated with the exploitation of DNA databases.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ambitious efforts to collect genomic data—from inside and outside of China—to solve crimes and maintain social control have already been raising concerns for years.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center has warned that the CCP, for years, has been collecting American healthcare and DNA data, through both legal and illegal means. U.S. officials recently said that such sensitive data might be potentially exploited by American enemies to create targeted biological weapons.

“There are now weapons under development, and developed, that are designed to target specific people,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) reportedly said at the Aspen Security Forum in July this year.

“That’s what this is, where you can actually take someone’s DNA … their medical profile, and you can target a biological weapon that will kill that person or take them off the battlefield or make them inoperable.”

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The Self-Licking Boot Of US Militarism

A new Bloomberg article titled “‘Sloppy’ US Talk on China’s Threat Worries Some Skeptical Experts” discusses the dangerous cycle in which pressures in the US political establishment to continually escalate hostilities with Beijing provokes responses that are then falsely interpreted as Chinese aggression.

Bloomberg’s Iain Marlow writes:

The hawkish narrative “limits room for maneuver in a crisis,” said M. Taylor Fravel, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Any effort to defuse tension could be characterized as “conciliatory or not tough enough,” he said.

China has been consistent on Taiwan and there’s little public evidence to suggest it’s sped up the timeline to take Taiwan, said a former senior US official who worked on China policy but asked not to be identified.

The former official said the hawkish tone in DC has contributed to a cycle where the US makes the first move, interprets Chinese reactions as a provocation, and then escalates further.

Bloomberg quotes Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund, who says this cycle of self-reinforcing escalation could “end up provoking the war that we seek to deter.”

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‘We Have No Choice’ Other Than Cooperate With China As A Partner On Climate Change, State Department Says

State Department spokesman Ned Price said Wednesday that the U.S. has “no choice” than to cooperate with China as a partner on climate change.

Daily Caller healthcare reporter Dylan Housman pressed Price on whether the U.S. approach to collaborate with China, a large coal producer, on energy is effective given that President Xi Jinping only mentioned climate change once in his 72-page report to the Communist Party of China (CCP) congress.

“We have no choice but to find ways to cooperate with the PRC when it comes to climate,” he said. “We’ve demonstrated our ability to do so in the past and in fact it was about a year ago at the previous COP where Secretary Kerry and his counterpart announced a joint agreement that helped us make tremendous headway towards our ultimate climate goals.”

“The decision by the PRC over the summer to suspend cooperation on climate for that reason was deeply regrettable, not only because what it represents to the bilateral relationship, one of those areas of shared mutual interest, but it was even more regrettable because of the collective toll that it would take on the international community on the globe,” he continued.

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Chinese drone airdrops machine gun-wielding robot dog

Recent footage of a Chinese drone dropping off a dog-like robot with a machine gun strapped to its back has gone viral, providing a glimpse at the future of unmanned warfare.

Video clips, which were originally published by Chinese media earlier this month, showed large unmanned aircraft system with eight propellers hovering in to drop off a robot dog. The robot has its legs tucked in as it’s dropped off, but begins to unfold its legs and stand upright and walk.

As the robot dog begins to move, it is evident that it has some type of light-machine gun mounted on its back. The weapon appears to be a QBB-95 or QBB-97, which are both drum-magazine fed weapons used by Chinese forces.

Another video appears to show the same drone-based robot dog delivery from a different view.

The Drive reported the footage appeared earlier this month on an account on the Chinese social media app Weibo named “Kestrel Defense Blood Wing.” The Weibo-verified account appears to be affiliated with the Chinese armsmaker known as Kestrel Defense.

Another video went viral this summer showing a Chinese robot dog actually aiming and firing at targets on a range. In the video, the robot had to move its entire body and take several seconds to fine tune to aim the gun and it would reel back under the recoil of sustained automatic fire.

The U.S. military has also been developing dog robots. The U.S. robotmanufacturer Ghost Robotics has also showcased a dog robot equipped with a 6.5 mm rifle pod.

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CCP Runs Police Outpost in New York City, Part of Global Network of Transnational Repression

Chinese authorities have opened at least one “overseas police service station” in the United States as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) global transnational repression, according to human rights group Safeguard Defenders.

“These operations eschew official bilateral police and judicial cooperation and violate the international rule of law, and may violate the territorial integrity in third countries involved in setting up a parallel policing mechanism using illegal methods,” the Spain-based group said in a recent report.

The report, titled “110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild,” examined the initiative first launched by ten “pilot provinces” in 2018. These stations were also called 110 Overseas, named after the country’s police emergency services phone number.

An outpost in New York City was among the “first batch” of 30 overseas police service stations in 21 countries set up by the Public Security Bureau in Fuzhou city, the capital of the southern coastal province of Fujian. Other Chinese cities also set up their own outposts abroad.

The Chinese police authorities’ division in New York was opened on Feb. 15, according to Dongnan News, a media outlet backed by Fujian provincial government. The center, called Fuzhou Police Oversea Service Station, is located at 107 East Broadway, inside the headquarters of the American ChangLe Association (ACA), a non profit with close ties to the Chinese regime.

Safeguard Defenders identified 54 overseas police service stations across five continents, including in cities from Toronto to Dublin.

Yet the total number of such stations is unclear. “There is no complete list of such “110 Overseas” police service stations available,” the report stated. “[T]he number is undoubtedly larger and such stations more widespread,” it added.

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When a ‘conspiracy theory’ turns out to be…not a theory

WHEN A ‘CONSPIRACY THEORY’ TURNS OUT TO BE…NOT A THEORY. On Monday, the New York Times published a story about Konnech, a small election software company that has just 27 employees, 21 based in Michigan and six in Australia. The paper reported that Konnech has been the target of “election deniers” who have made it the focus of “a new conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential election.”

“Using threadbare evidence, or none at all,” the New York Times’s Stuart A. Thompson reported, the “election deniers” said Konnech “had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers in the United States.”

In the last two years, the New York Times added, “conspiracy theorists have subjected election officials and private companies that play a major role in elections to a barrage of outlandish voter fraud claims.” But now, “the attacks on Konnech demonstrate how far-right election deniers are also giving more attention to new and more secondary companies and groups.”

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Konnech officials assured the New York Times that “none of the accusations were true.” Thompson reported that employees “feared for their safety” from right-wing violence and that “Konnech’s founder and chief executive, Eugene Yu, an American citizen who immigrated from China in 1986, went into hiding with his family after receiving threatening messages.”

Any reasonable reader would come away with the conclusion that Konnech, an innocent company that makes products to deal with “basic election logistics, such as scheduling poll workers,” has been the target of crazy, and possibly dangerous, conspiracy theories. To press the point, the New York Times used the phrase “conspiracy theory” or “conspiracy theorists” nine times in the article, once in the headline — “How a Tiny Elections Company Became a Conspiracy Theory Target” — seven times in the body of the story, and once in a photo caption. Got it?

Fast forward one day. Twenty-four hours. The New York Times published another story about Konnech, this one headlined, “Election Software Executive Arrested on Suspicion of Theft.” Thompson reported that Yu had been “arrested by Los Angeles County officials in connection with an investigation into the possible theft of personal information about poll workers.”

From the New York Times: “The company has been accused by groups challenging the validity of the 2020 presidential election with storing information about poll workers on servers in China. The company has repeatedly denied keeping data outside the United States, including in recent statements to The New York Times.” And then: The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office “said its investigators had found data stored in China.” And this is from the New York Times on the core of the matter:

Konnech came under scrutiny this year by several election deniers, including a founder of True the Vote, a nonprofit that says it is devoted to uncovering election fraud. True the Vote said its team had downloaded personal information on 1.8 million American poll workers from a server owned by Konnech and hosted in China. It said it obtained the data by using the server’s default password, which it said was ‘password.’ … The group provided no evidence that it had downloaded the data, saying that it had given the information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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Election Software CEO Arrested Over Data Theft, Storing Data on Servers in China

The head of Konnech Corporation, a Michigan-based software company, was arrested on Oct. 4 for allegedly stealing and storing personal data of Los Angeles County election workers on servers in China.

Konnech’s CEO Eugene Yu, 51, was arrested on charges of stealing “the personal identifying information” of LA County election workers, according to the LA County District Attorney’s Office.

Investigators also seized computer hard drives and other digital data relevant to the case. The office said that it would seek Yu’s extradition to Los Angeles.

According to the office, Konnech won a five-year, $2.9 million contract with LA County in 2020 for an election worker management system—named PollChief software—that was used by the county in the last California election.

The software was designed to assist with poll worker assignments, communications, and payroll, LA County District Attorney George Gascon said in a statement.

Under the contract, Konnech was supposed to securely maintain the data and only provide access to U.S. citizens and permanent residents. But investigators found that it stored the data on servers in China.

“In this case, the alleged conduct had no impact on the tabulation of votes and did not alter election results,” Gascon said. “But security in all aspects of any election is essential so that we all have full faith in the integrity of the election process.”

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US-China Space Wars & Moon-Mining

On May 30, two NASA astronauts were launched into space under the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, marking the return to a time when the United States transported its people into space without depending on foreign countries like Russia. U.S. private firms can now carry out launches to low-Earth orbits at competitive prices. Consequently, in addition to no longer being dependent on foreign countries for space assistance, NASA can now focus on its longer-term goal of launching Americans into deeper space.

In 2020, China’s Chang’e-5 moon mission discovered a new variant mineral now called Changesite-(Y). The crystal containing helium-3 could prove incredibly valuable as it may offer a new energy source. Scientists believe that the tiny crystals may be able to power nuclear reactors and are abundant on the moon. To put the power of helium-3 in perspective, about three tablespoons of helium-3 could replace 5,000 tons of coal.

Consequently, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced plans for three more moon missions over the next 10 years and the construction of a permanent lunar base.

The Chinese space agency frequently captures headlines heralding China’s achievements in space. Apart from Chang’e-5 landing on the moon, China managed to land a rover called Zhurong on Mars in 2021. However, China is slow in the space race. The United States sent its first uncrewed mission to the moon in 1962, followed by a human-crewed mission in 1969. Chinese unmanned craft reached Mars in 2020, a feat NASA had achieved with Mariner 4 in 1964, while the first U.S. craft to land on Mars was Viking 1 in 1975. Currently, with 2,944 satellites, the United States has nearly six times as many satellites orbiting the Earth as China with 499.

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