> And she says she has the “documents” to back up her accusations.
Then show those documents? It's hard to take these allegations seriously when the mysterious proof is only alluded to, not submitted as part of the testimony.
Then show those documents? It's hard to take these allegations seriously when the mysterious proof is only alluded to, not submitted as part of the testimony.
Not really. If the NDA is void (such as the case with congressional hearings), there isn't going to be a lengthy legal proceeding. The judge would look at it and throw it out.
People brought before a Congressional hearing like this can be held in contempt of court for failure to cooperate. Testimony is subject to perjury laws.
This wasn't just someone writing a letter to Congress with some claims. This was a Senate hearing convened on the matter.
A Congressional hearing can compel people to give testimony under oath. Witnesses can be held in contempt for failure to answer questions.
A corporate NDA cannot prevent you from cooperating with a Congressional hearing.
> Wynn-Willias told senators that Meta built a “physical pipeline connecting the United States and China” and executives “ignored warnings that this would provide backdoor access to the Chinese Communist Party, allowing them to intercept the personal data and private messages of American citizens.”
> She said that China does not currently have access to U.S. user data only because Congress “stepped in.”
> The pipeline to China mentioned by the whistleblower, the Pacific Light Cable, was never completed.
> The cable, which was first announced in 2016 with support from Facebook, Google and other companies, was envisioned as a high-capacity fiberoptic undersea cable running thousands of miles under the Pacific Ocean connecting Los Angeles and Hong Kong.
> Bloomberg reported in 2020 that Facebook, Google and other companies abandoned their plans to link the U.S. to Hong Kong. They revised their proposal to build the link only as far as Taiwan and the Philippines, according to Bloomberg.
Real talk, I have zero idea how she could explain this one away, other than with “it came to me in a dream.”
She is not claiming the pipeline exists today.
Either there is some massive grand conspiracy going on between all those different companies (a good number of which have exactly zero products or revenue or business presence in China) and the Chinese government or, which I am leaning more towards given the claims, this is all just oversensationalized lies.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far we only got the “bush did 9/11” level of evidence for claims that are arguably even more wild and convoluted than that.
The author, for example, also claims that “yeah, this was all according to the plan, until congress stepped in to stop the fiberoptic cable due to those concerns.” Any record of congress doing that for those reasons?
What about existing fiberoptic cables going through China right now? Are those cables not as special or useful for that purpose? Why not?
I am not even defending China and their approaches. I am familiar with deep packet traffic inspection and other things of a similar nature their government does. But that’s not a blanket excuse to just claim wild massive multinational conspiracies involving so many actors, all without as much as even good reason for why it would even make sense for them all to cooperate.
I think it was part of Clean Networks Initiative, there's ongoing strategic game to cut PRC out of subsea infra business, just like telcom. IIRC a bunch of sanctions a few years ago killed many cable projects or at least pushed PRC out as partner. Cables landing in PRC didn't. Cables landing in ASEAN but with PRC suppliers/builders ended up switching to other suppliers/builders.
None of those reasons have anything to do with the congress stepping-in due to the concerns of Meta/Google/etc. conspiring with PRC, to provide them a dedicated backdoor access to american user data.
It was part of the ongoing subsea cable wars, US wanted to squeeze PRC from subsea infra game a few years ago and sanctioned a bunch of PRC companies which disrupted projects.