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..


[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOCvI3O8--A]

[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.
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q60iyRA_7aI&t=0s]
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:
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxeSrCCjPKU]
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.