5 Charged with Stalking, Harassing, Spying on US Residents for PRC Secret Police
justice.gov
justice.gov
Then I remember the story of the lady in East Germany who, after it fell, managed to get the Stasi records that finally proved that yes, they had been stalking her, harassing her, and spying on her.
They would do things like wait until she went into a store to buy something, then let the air out of her bicycle tires. Just stupid little harassing things like that, so that if she complained about it to her family they'd think she was crazy.
Next time you hear some nutcase on the street talking about things like this to whoever will listen... ponder things like this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/technology/ebay-cockroach...
Really interesting read, if you guys wanna learn more. But basically anyone with money and power can initiate this kind of harassment activity.
> The CEO Wenig's messages were deemed "inappropriate" by eBay, but eBay's internal investigation concluded that the CEO did not know about the stalking and harassment activities.[5] Wenig left eBay in September 2019, with a US$57 million severance package.[5] After the harassment scandal became news, Wenig was re-elected to the board of General Motors.[5]
So essentially he got off Scott free due to plausible deniability then threw the people he told to do the deed under the bus. Then got a 50+ million dollar payday and a board position at General motors.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS
[2] https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/7...
I mean, we know when they do it - nearly every domestic terrorist bombing/kidnapping attempt ends up being a group of one guy and 4 FBI informers as soon as the one guy asks how to make a bomb on Facebook.
Similarly, they didn't overthrow Bolivia recently, but people think Elon did it personally to get cheaper lithium because he joked about it on Twitter once.
downvoters - why are you downvoting this? Do you think it's false? Or just don't like hearing about it?
It's interesting to you that what the PRC is doing today reminds you of something the FBI did last century. But the discussion is still about the PRC, not the FBI.
As you can see, your comment that is benign on the surface started a whole thread of off-topic comments, which bogs down the overall discussion and generates more heat than light.
Or maybe people read what you wrote as yet another "what about..." comment, the likes of which always pop up like mushrooms after a rain in discussions about China's current-day misdeeds.
An argument can also be made how it adds context, to properly frame these actions in the reality we live in.
Insisting on looking at this in total isolation, like it's this thing that only happens in that one particular place, completely belittles how and why these practices become established and normalized in the first place.
Because state organized suppression of perceived political dissidence is not unique to China, it has a long history all over the globe and takes many different forms to this day [0].
Recognizing and acknowledging that is a much more fitting approach to Hacker News than going; "This is a submission about China, only talking badly about China allowed in here!", which only results in the same kind of "circle jerk" discussions that already dominate too much of Reddit.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/05/25/oracle-social-media-surv...
Spying was excused as a necessity, so how would I condemn these actions in the first place? "Whataboutism" is an ethical argument but we are not talking about ethics in the context of spying at all.
Not what-about-ism: You are right! And here is another example in support of your point!
BOSTON – Six former employees of eBay, Inc. have been charged with leading a cyberstalking campaign targeting the editor and publisher of a newsletter that eBay executives viewed as critical of the company. The alleged harassment included sending the couple anonymous, threatening messages, disturbing deliveries – including a box of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath and a bloody pig mask – and conducting covert surveillance of the victims.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/six-former-ebay-employees...
> One client was Bank of America, who hired Hunton and Williams to launch a campaign against Wikileaks. At some point the list of targets was expanded to various other supporters of Wikileaks such as journalist Glenn Greenwald. The other client so far revealed was the Chamber of Commerce, which wished to target labor unions and a shockingly long list of their supporters.
> The main tool of attack would be the use of the Palantir technology to analyze the network of support for the targets.
Source: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/02/13/943139/-HBGary:-...
The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities never properly followed up on that incident. In 2011 it asked the DoD and NSA to provide any contracts with HBGary, Palantir and Berico, but as far as I can tell that never ended up happening, the whole thing was just buried over time and forgotten.
Surely they aren't during stuff like that, and "thwarting" "terrorist plots" where the "conspirators" are FBI assets themselves
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/magazine/fbi-internationa...
impossible to know how many such stories there are
and 00s/10s (https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/mar/14/cia-black-site-d...)
But they SURELY have changed in 2020s!
How weird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Grassley
I have no idea if Chuck Grassley had anything to do with that, but my point is that if the same people in Congress then are still in Congress today, you can't claim a clean break from the past due to the passage of time.
I think one difference is we did have the Church commission so at least there is some amount of accountability although it could have been better whilst in PRC there will be no such inquiry into these sorts of things.
But there's not a ton of reason to believe that things have changed so fundamentally.
Hell it doesn't even have to be state actors, if anyone here pisses off someone with too much money, it wouldn't be hard to hire someone anonymously on craigslist to harass you. People have done a lot worse for a lot less money
Because the belief that this kind of gang stalking never happens and people who think that they are getting harassed like this are always crazy is a psyop designed to make sure the public is more susceptible to the rare, but highly effective practice.
Turns out the FBI was following him, as detailed in recently classified documents (2010s).
My synopsis is that they enabled his predisposition for depression and paranoia. But the initial observation of being watched by the government was not inaccurate.
People often read these types of articles and think "this can't be right." Without researching the topic they cannot fathom a government would do such a thing. The CCP's "United Front" organization sponsors many of these actions.
However, the fact these things occur is very open source, well published (including in the CCP's 5-year plans), and verified in many academic settings. You just have to read some researched documents or books (if interested, I can recommend plenty), and not rely on your own intuition based on living in a Western society of what the PRC would do. They are taking advantage of democratic principles and using them against us.
The media does not heavily report on it due to the clear externality of spurring, or appearing to support, xenophobia against Chinese citizens. However, everything I read intentionally takes the time to point out that their issue is with the CCP and not the Chinese people, as most authors lived in China and love the Chinese culture. We can point out wrongdoing by the CCP without extending those views towards the Chinese people who live under the one party system.
This is not cherry-picked; I just went to the subreddit and found a relatively recent post: https://old.reddit.com/r/Gangstalking/comments/tf2xd0/they_a....
(Spoilers: the number of people in amphetamine psychosis is several orders of magnitude larger than the number of victims of targeted government harassment.)
If a person is suffering from strong enough paranoia to classify themselves as a "targeted individual", then they've probably walked through the scenario that they might be crazy but also realized that if their paranoia is accurate, then they would also have appeared to be crazy.
It's a vicious cycle.
Someone who believes themselves to be the fastest athlete is not so when their opponent falls down and they win the race.
Edit: old.reddit.com/r/gangstalking
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/ebay-execs-sent-...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/lawsuit-ebay-tri...
Political dissidents flee to US (west in general), west (US in particular) will magnify and weaponize dissident for international discourse power when convenient. Countries being targeted spend resource to deter this behaviour. Interesting case of different systems abusing each other's asymmetries - large diasporas in west = lots of asylum for dissidents but also many recruitable foreign assets.
And sometimes diaspora drama is innate, deep cultural beef between nationalist and dissident Chinese that IMO will only get more acrimonious with time. Older gen of dissidents who fled PRC when times were bad are dying but their kids and younger generation of dissidents from HK/XJ/TW will clash hard with younger gen of PRC nationalist economic migrants and 1st gen kids of mainlanders who inherited beef against dissidents. It will be shitshow, with lots being exploited by domestic propaganda and foreign espionage.
Things are automated now. Nowadays while living in Germany, torrent some movies and stop paying TV license. Then observe what will happen. In society there are hordes of bored lawyers and sadists who eagerly harass for a fee. Given legal immunity and pervert sense of purpose, people simply like to be invasive and predatory.
Political gain often means more wealth and power for those involved, and I think we all know the great lengths people will go to for both of those things. Not defending China, but harassing and stalking is fairly tame compared to things like assassinating journalists and starting wars.
> The Stasi set him up with minors, hoping that they could then pursue criminal charges.
Am I reading this right? They leveraged child abuse laws against political opponents? Essentially weaponizing children? And this practice is well documented?
The DOJ is explicitly accusing five specific persons of conspiring:
> In one of these schemes, the co-conspirators sought to interfere with federal elections
I'm curious, did they stop teaching in school that Zersetzung happened in East Germany in the context of WWII? I was taught in High School about that.
While trying to find my source, I did find out Putin was in East Germany when the wall fell, and was working for KGB. Along with Stasi, Putin burned so much evidence of their wrongdoing, it broke the furnace.
So I guess Putin was a questionable fellow even back in the 1980's and 1990's!
> Beginning in September 2021, Lin hired a private investigator (the PI) in New York to disrupt the campaign of a Brooklyn resident currently running for U.S. Congress (the Victim), including by physically attacking the Victim. The Victim was a student leader of the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, who later escaped to the United States, served in the U.S. military, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. In September 2021, the Victim (then living in Long Island) announced his intention to run for a U.S. congressional seat on Long Island in the November 2022 general election.
> In hiring the PI, Lin explained that if the Victim was selected during the June 2022 primary election, then he might be “elected to be a legislator. Right now we don’t want him to be elected.” Lin emphasized that, “Whatever price is fine. As long as you can do it.” He also promised that “we will have a lot more-more of this [work] in the future…Including right now [a] New York State legislator.” Lin explained to the PI that Lin was working with other unidentified individuals in the PRC to stop the Victim from being elected to U.S. Congress.
It was a good pay for a very easy job.
However, considering that Kim Jong-un's brother was killed at the airport by making a civilian to spray neurotoxin on him under the pretext of a camera joke, I don't see why foreign entities wouldn't be able to hire unsuspecting citizens to do shady stuff(that can be plausibly explained as jobs).
2) successfully rigging a presidential election is more significant than attempting to influence a congressional primary
3) these people were caught and prosecuted by the federal government, Russian interference was encouraged by the POTUS in 2017 (post Jan 20)
Presidential election interference would seem to cost a lot more than that, and be a bit more difficult to hide.
Organised and pro criminal are not dumb. They know what brings the heat.
> CHP officers arrested the driver under charges of forging/possessing a fraudulent public seal and impersonating a peace officer. A police official has told KTLA 5 that the man's charges will be treated with the same severity as they would if it were American officers he had impersonated.
Wow... If this person is indeed directed by the PRC, that's basically state-sponsored killing/maiming...
I'm sure other countries (including the USA) do it.. but it's wrong on so many levels....
Why does the CCP seem so restrained when it comes to dealing with those that they see as posing a threat. I'm not defending the CCP's actions or tactics, but surely it would be easier for them to cut to the chase and just "get rid" of those that they consider a serious threat or liability to their existence?
We've seen plenty of examples of similar situations where Russia, North Korea, etc... employs a quick and cut-throat approach to foreign nationals/individuals that they identify as a threat.
For the excerpt it's clear that they're willing to kill this individual... why create such risk and exposure for themselves with this drawn-out, ambiguous dubious plot?
Covert:
Inflitrate US Congress for potential blackmail - https://www.axios.com/china-spy-california-politicians-9d2df...
Infitration of US Higher Ed & Supression - https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/16/how-china...
Siphon off entire US Government personnel information, Probably to match it against Grindr, Tiktok and other social networks - https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/de/security/news/cyber-atta...
Inflitrated Australian Government - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/28/world/australia/china-spy...
Infiltration of UK Higher Ed - https://felixonline.co.uk/issue/1773/news/chinese-infiltrati...
Overt:
US Newspapers - https://zeenews.india.com/world/china-daily-paid-us-newspape...
Tiktok: https://www.reuters.com/technology/rubio-wants-biden-block-t...
Zoom (potential massive spying operation) - https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-he...
And many more.
You only see the news cover the people who get caught.
CCP might be good at this, but this is just laughably wrong. They certainly haven't overthrown anywhere close to as many governments as Washington has since WW2.
Were they, though? Which nation was primarily responsible for escalation of tensions during that time? And for whom were the stakes high enough to justify overthrowing democratic governments in favor of brutal dictators?
Careful, this is literally Moscow's reason for its invasion of Ukraine -- to prevent the rise of a hostile fascist entity in its frontyard.
Ukraine is (well, sadly, was) in danger of becoming more democratically- and West-aligned, which Putin (irrationally, IMO) feared, but my take on it is that he's really motivated mostly by fallen-empire envy. (Granted, that's just my opinion; I don't know what Putin is actually thinking.)
The hostile part has been obvious for 8 years, and escalated last year. 14,000 dead, war declared on Russian Crimea last year, etc.
Clearly Ukraine is not fascist and Korea would have been. There is a difference.
The main problem with fascism in Nazi Germany, Zionist Israel, and Banderite Ukraine is that these fascist states have overt policies of ethnic cleansing.
IOW the "fascism" part isn't necessarily bad (unless you are a liberal chauvinist), it's the ethnic cleansing part that is bad.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, they also semi-regularly engage in armed conflict with South Korea, killing usually tens of people, and they occasionally kidnap foreign nationals. Admittedly small fare for a rogue state. They also have nukes but it must be fine since they haven't used them yet.
This is something that... doesn't really exist today? I mean, sure there are still nazis in Ukraine, even in its government and military, but by and large it doesn't seem that they're anywhere near a majority or have significant influence... despite what Putin's propaganda would like us to believe.
> IOW the "fascism" part isn't necessarily bad (unless you are a liberal chauvinist)
If you truly believe that, I don't think you're going to have a productive discussion on this topic here. Most people here (myself included) would not characterize hard-right authoritarianism that way. I believe that form of government is objectively bad for the people under it, at least those outside the ruling class.
Of course; many folks here are ideologically hyper-individualists, liberals, liberal anarchists, libertarians, etc. The idea that various collectivisms including "fascism" are okay is offensive to those ideologies.
However, the onus is not on me to pander to their ideological limitations.
"In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge were largely supported and funded by the Chinese Communist Party, receiving approval from Mao Zedong; it is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid which was provided to the Khmer Rouge came from China."
> In 1970, the United States had orchestrated a coup to oust Prince Sihanouk, and installed Lon Nol, a general who was supposed to be Cambodia’s Suharto. His forces trained in Bandung, not far from the site of Sukarno’s 1955 Afro-Asian Conference. During Lon Nol’s rule the United States continued to bomb the country indiscriminately, killing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly peasants, in a futile attempt to stop Vietnamese communists from moving through the countryside. The United States dropped three times the tonnage on Cambodia that fell on Japan during World War II, atom bombs included.
> [...]
> The disregard for life was staggering, and well understood in Southeast Asia. Traumatized refugees flooded Cambodia’s cities. After the US-backed coup that deposed him, the ousted prince, Sihanouk, published a book of memoirs titled My War with the CIA. “We refused to become US puppets, or join in the anti-communist crusade,” he wrote. “That was our crime.” He threw his support behind the small, shadowy, and strange group of Marxists he had repressed while in power. The Khmer Rouge, as he called them in the old colonial language, were the only ones fighting against Lon Nol and the US Army, which was wiping out entire swathes of the population.
Pol Pot was convinced of the necessity of armed struggle by the annihilation of the PKI in Indonesia. There ~1 million people were killed with the encouragement of the US and Britain, who supplied arms, kill lists, and promises of economic development.
[2]
> In a “historical lessons” document composed in early 1977, Pol Pot looked back on the 1966 period as follows: “If our analysis had failed, we would have been in greater danger than [were the communists] in Indonesia. But our analysis was victorious, because our analysis was agreed upon, because most of our cadres were in life-and-death contradiction with the enemy; the enemy sought to exterminate them constantly.”
After Vietnam invaded Cambodia and put a stop to the Khmer Rouge's Killing Fields:
[3]
> The United States chose to recognize the remnants of the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations, keeping its tiny regime alive, and refusing to recognize the Vietnamese-allied government. This would last for years. Partly, it was a way to appease Carter’s new ally in Beijing. But Benny knew that it was something else too. “They hated Vietnam too much,” Benny said. “They couldn’t forgive them for winning the war.”
[4]
> And to insure that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would fight the Vietnamese occupiers, the Carter Administration helped arrange continued Chinese aid.
> "I encourage the Chinese to support Pol Pot," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser at the time. "The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could."
> At the United Nations, the United States, along with most countries of Europe and Asia, gave the Cambodia seat to the Khmer Rouge Government by itself and, after 1983, in coalition with other anti-Vietnamese Cambodian groups.
> All attempts even to describe the Khmer Rouge regime as genocidal were rejected by the United States as counterproductive to finding peace. Only in 1989, with the beginning of the Paris peace process, was the word genocide spoken in reference to a regime responsible for the deaths of more than a million people.
[1][2][3] - The Jakarta Method, chapters 2, 4, and 10 (also contains more detailed sources)
[4] - https://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/17/world/death-of-pol-pot-th...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_United_States...
If your goal is to compare the West or the US in particular with its dictatorial rivals, it's probably not very enlightening to account only for Western errors. You need to account for the errors and contributions of both sides. Unfortunately, this seems like hidden knowledge because virtually this debate is nearly always framed in the "only enumerate Western errors" fashion.
So not absolutely perfect angels at all times? Harsh criticism.
The US started the thermonuclear arms race, and escalated it until it consumed a large part of the economy, based on literal calculated lies about the "missile gap."
> If your goal is to compare the West or the US in particular with its dictatorial rivals
The goal should be to point out its dictatorial tendencies, and its preference for predictable dictatorial regimes all over the world that it is willing to spend huge amounts of resources to install and preserve, bathing countries around the world in blood.
China is not doing that, Russia is not doing that, Iran is not doing that, North Korea is not doing that.
Russia has been propping up the brutal dictatorship in Syria for a very long time, and several others before it across the Middle East. It has also propped up both the Belarus dictatorship and the authoritarian regime in Kazakhstan, and those are merely very recent examples.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spie...
The US has obviously accomplished much more, toppling the governments of dozens of countries, and always credibly threatening and working towards doing it to two or three.
The "Overt" campaign you cite against "US Newspapers" consists of buying $19 million of advertorials. That's a billionaire's bar tab.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/18/australia-china-trade-disput...
How would you know? Maybe others just haven't been caught yet. It would be naive to think that China is the only country doing, or attempting to do, this.
Just the sheer level of intel coming out of Russia over the last decade would lead anyone to believe that half of the Kremlin is on America's payroll.
It's not that Israel has infiltrated America but instead the fact that American politician do not expect to be electable unless they behave as a "friend to Israel" given certain jewish and christian communities are willing to campaign against politicians on this issue.
This means the Israeli representatives can even come to the U.S. and act like belligerent a-holes and the politicians have to put up with it to win elections.
If the poster was really suggesting infiltration rather than being sarcastic I would assume they are perhaps trading in antisemitic conspiracy theories.
https://queenseagle.com/all/2022/3/16/queens-atty-stabbed-to...
Australian population in 2016 born in China was ~500k. If you assume that the majority of this was happening within that population, if it's 50k "informants", that would mean it's 1 in every 10 people. If you further limited it to students, it would be even more than that.
If this were actually known to be happening at such high frequency, I would expect that Australia would know about it & do something about it.
https://quickstats.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/get...
Students doxxed and harassed after protesting https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/aug/04/we-ca...
The government doesn't do anything about it because Chinese students are a cash cow and every university in Australia as well as the property market would implode without that sweet cash
If you want to experience the US 60's style racism go to Australia. Imagine a place in US named like this https://goo.gl/maps/aoUdGWvFmGcmV7f29
You toe a line. As in standing where you're told, with your toes on the line.
You tow a trailer. As in dragging it behind you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line#Misspelling_as_...
Sorry, this is just my personal pet peeve eggcorn. We now return you to your regularly scheduled Hacker News...
Imagine you're a lonely Chinese student in Australia and you meet a wealthy and successful fellow countryman. After a while he asks how you're doing considering the "anti-Chinese" attitudes in Australia. "What's the situation like on campus?".
If that information makes it back to the Chinese gov't, well, you're now a part of an informant network.
Bad -- maybe cover of the investigation got blown?