I'm a bit uncomfortable with ideas like this being promoted in the popular press so much recently.
Spy-vs-spy is something that, for better or worse, nations do. It seems a complicated and delicate matter, and outside the experience of most of us.
In the Boston area, we have a wealth of colleagues, neighbors, and friends who arrived here from around the world. We welcome and appreciate them.
Ordinary people suspecting others, because of something they heard in the news (or amplified in some right-wing outlet), seems unfair and toxic. We've even seen recently that it can be deadly, when a violent mentally ill person is inspired.
I think the international spy business can best be left to the professionals (diplomats, intel agencies, law enforcement, corporate security), to handle discreetly, and the rest of us can just get along.
In theory yes in reality no. In cases of both China and the USA. Please cite any exceptions of where anything as such went to court. The reason being that it's very difficult to prove that your secrets were stolen. Sure you can sue companies for copying your products, and you can also prevent US and Europe from importing goods from China which have been copied even if you can't get a Chinese court to decide wrongdoing in your favor.
The article mentions that most are here for legitimate reasons. It seems like the headline could have had a better choice of words to be less of a blanket statement.
Why should you be uncomfortable? Even by your own definition, it is something that is often done but seldom discussed, and there is a change (Boston tech are targeted), so it is news.
And, this IS different than ordinary "spy-vs-spy". That normally applies to keeping track of national adversaries' military strength & asset positioning, political maneuvering, treaty talks, etc.
This, in contrast, is straight up industrial espionage for profit and/or military advantage, done by a nation state (vs just a competing company.
While it may have occurred some in the past, PRC is taking it to a never-before-seen massive scale.
It is part of the pervasive culture of IP theft in Chinese society and govt that runs form the smallest business right to the top of the govt.
It is a serious threat to all western democracies, indeed all other nations, and should be taken seriously.
What should make you uncomfortable is this fire, not the messenger who reports the fire.
I'm uncomfortable about the fire, too. And I'd like to trust the firefighters to handle the fire, in this case. Not alarm non-firefighters, to go rushing in the way of firefighters, kicking in doors of houses that are not on fire, etc.
To hazard a guess, it should be up to to security/risk experts and the like to monitor and determine where the threats come from, set policies, and deny access accordingly. It shouldn't be up to citizen watchdogs to yank computers from people because they have a terminal up appear to be hacking things.
> It shouldn't be up to citizen watchdogs to yank computers from people because they have a terminal up appear to be hacking things.
Which is entirely reasonable, but I don't see anyone advocating this nor does the article so I'm a bit confused. Is someone advocating some kind of Chinese pogrom here?
For example, treating a coworker poorly because of what country they're from, or what religion. Or worse, especially when unstable people get riled up by right-wing outlets.
> For example, treating a coworker poorly because of what country they're from, or what religion. Or worse, especially when unstable people get riled up by right-wing outlets.
Since you're the poster, where are you getting this from? I'm not reading that in either the replies nor the article... this feels like scaremongering in the opposite direction.
For everyday workplace/community culture, we in the US have a long and ongoing history of biases and poor treatment (including in the workplace) of people belonging to identifiable groups that have been singled out as somehow threatening or lesser. Maybe the pattern repeats. Or maybe the pattern doesn't repeat this time, but many people in the group fear it will, and that's not good for workplace/community either.
Of course being treated unfairly and as a group sucks, and is generally stupid.
However, when a society maintains such a universal "your IP is up for grabs" approach to business from the smallest fabricator to the top levels of government, and the govt is noticed to have a top level program targeting a region's business, that's not prejudice, it is established fact.
Moreover, getting the word out on such issues is exactly what you advocate; it is a part of the 'spy-vs-spy' people doing their job.
The network of suppliers is extremely extensive, and expecting the CIA to squander time individually contacting every single sub-subcontractor, or even only the set of ITAR-registered producers is silly.
I would go so far as to say that the threat against you even from overt discrimination is less than the threat from our society being undermined by an unopposed attack on its foundations.
No one is advocating "kicking in doors of houses that are not on fire".
What should be done is to be aware of the risk, and that it is very different doing business with China vs. say, Thailand or Mexico.
Of course, wherever you do business, you must take precautions against IP theft and having your product sold out the back door.
However, for China, the threat model needs to be completely re-calibrated. Specifically, recalibrated to assume either that your product will be sold out the back door of the factory under another label, that your IP will end up in a competitor's hands, or that if it is important enough it will be expropriated by the govt either via rules requiring 'sharing' or by state-level espionage.
This is NOT to say that every person is untrustworthy. There are good people everywhere.
The difference is like that between a small rural town where everyone knows each other and leaves their doors unlocked and keys in the car, vs. a gang-ruled favela where you need to watch your back if you step outside. Both are mostly full of good & honest people, with a few problems, but you really need to calibrate your behavior differently for each.
I agree that general "All Chinese are spying on you!" is not a helpful message, but nation-state espionage, generally, is not a bad thing to be aware of overall. The article also doesn't seem to fear-monger so much as call out recent espionage attempts while also citing the difficulty of detection because most folks are here for the right reasons.
As for "leave it to the professionals", you left out a key component from your list - the people doing the work - doing the research, building the devices. Engineers, professors. The people doing the work are the first line for any social engineering or simple vector attacks. Anyone that works with this information reads and signs things but if they haven't really been tested or understand the consequences, maybe they forget.
Having a reminder that it's OK to be impolite when somebody you don't know asks you overly specific questions you're not supposed to share is not always a bad thing.
When I said "leave it to the professionals", I meant to cover the workers indirectly when I said "corporate security". Corporate security personnel shouldn't be getting operational info from popular press.
Agreed, but corporate security is also not out at the bar on a Friday. One would hope that facilities security folks would at a minimum be briefing people, but that stuff costs money, and probably doesn't happen as much as it should.
I've found that people in many areas of work are given guidance and training then either:
a) forget over time
b) ignore the policy because they think they know better
c) ignore the policy because it is inconvenient (this is my favorite!)
d) ignore the policy because it is personally advantageous to them (either for reputation, money, etc)
Reminders never hurt (assuming they are reminders and not over the top bigoted screeds)
So many people think they understand what the impacts are if they bend some of these rules, or ignore them a bit for convenience. I would argue that most of the time, unless the stakes are consistently high, they do not.
>diplomats, intel agencies, law enforcement, corporate security
Personally, I have absolutely no trust in any of these, and I completely disagree that we should "leave it to the professionals" and let them "handle discretely" whatever is going on. This is how you end up with things like FISA courts, Gitmo, and PRISM.
What's new is perhaps the China Initiative, something that the US Department of Justice announced late last year to focus on curbing Chinese economic espionage. Now the leader of this initiative has named Boston as a "target-rich environment."
I wouldn't want to work for a corp that doesn't have the right political muscle to avoid the charges. Halliburton, Exxon, Boeing, HSBC, etc, won't be charged.
Yep. Huawei didn't do anything except probably insert spyware on their devices, and they're being charged with crimes. Boeing killed hundreds of people through criminal negligence, but I'm sure we won't see any executives there charged with crimes in the US.
I'm surprised they couldn't arrange for some government officials to shake hands kicking off some sort of above the board tech collaboration with the usual fanfare and political mumbo jumbo speak. MA and PRC would get along well. Both are totalitarian one party states with capitalist economies that the state meddles in when it has sufficient interest. Other than wildly different levels of regard for human life it seems like a match made in heaven. The powers that be in MA would have fallen over themselves rushing to have their educational institutions collaborate with the kind of totalitarian state they can only dream of. Seems like this whole "spy operation" could have been avoided by having some politicians have a face to face and tossing a little money at the situation.
I live in an area with a lot of newly arrived Chinese grad students. Not generalizing but many of the WiFi ssids I see are : chinanumbaone , df26(one day I realized this is carrier killer missile)
Meanwhile there are two separate Nazi references in the SSIDs of my friend's building. This is, frankly, an idiotic line of discussion. I mean, smearing Chinese students (oh I forgot, you said "not generalizing" as though that means anything at all [yes, you were generalizing otherwise what is the relevance?]) because you saw some SSIDs, really!
You are bad at reasoning. The SSIDs are indicative of those specific people but not their larger group, in whose membership you can't even verify; there's no way OP knows the SSIDs even belong to Chinese grad students! And even if they did, it tells us little about Chinese people in general.
The first one is an online gaming meme. It was a hilarious (and highly inappropriate!) clip from H1Z1 where a guy starts shouting “Taiwan number one” at some Chinese players. If you google it you will find it as a first result. Nothing nefarious with that ssid
All innovation starts with copying what came before. This is why liberal IP laws are so important to innovation. HN readers seem to understand this basic point quite well unless China is involved.
Except China as a state isn't our ally or friend. Their interests lie primarily in furthering their own political and military power, and secondarily benefiting their own population. They're more than eager to steal technology, then use that new-found knowledge and ability combined with massive government subsidies to drown out foreign competitors locally and abroad.
>Their interests lie primarily in furthering their own political and military power, and secondarily benefiting their own population.
How exactly is that different from the US? I don't see US politicians in power trying to do things to benefit their own population, such as by providing universal healthcare.
You're not wrong, it's a common criticism of democracy. Except China is not a democracy, they act only to protect their own grip on power (and keep their stolen party wealth).
The converse of liberal IP laws is that once a company gets enough money and resources, they can just poach smaller companies for ideas, before they get any real traction.
Less innovation will happen because more people will be secretive (since there are less protections) or we will end up with a few large companies owning everything.
You also can't deny the fact that the US is probably the most innovative country in the world and has fairly strict IP laws.
China has very lax IP laws and most companies end up just copying, because nobody wants to risk capital for R&D if it's just going to get copied by someone.
And Britain ripped off porcelain from China in the 1700s, bringing us full circle. (Until we go back another cycle, to Marco Polo. And another, to the Avars and the stirrup. Another, to the Silk Road, then on to...) It's sort of hilarious to think people wouldn't focus on copying inventions, given how much faster it is (for anyone!) than developing things from scratch. Describing it as some kind of national trait, rather than the standard response to someone else inventing things, is bizarre.
Heck, if someone really wanted to make a national-identity pitch, they'd have better luck talking about late-Ming isolationism and claiming that China is exceptional for sometimes not ripping off foreign innovations. That would be wrong too, of course, but at least it'd be better than a narrative which barely stretches back to the 1990s.
This is absolutely traditional for every country, though?
Samuel Slater brought the Industrial Revolution to America by memorizing the banned-for-export designs of water-powered spinning machines. The Brits nicknamed him "Slater the Traitor" for his trouble, but within a generation new industrial technology was being developed in the US off that basis.
British porcelain production in the 18th century was driven by the letters of a missionary in China, who secretly observed the details of Chinese production and sent them back to Europe. Mistakes in replicating that process lead to "bone china", the strongest and purest-white form of porcelain known.
Stirrups, famously (and debatably) a formative element of medieval warfare, originated in the caucasus. The Byzantines captured some of them in a war with the Avars, and within two centuries they were widespread across Europe. An invention that was at the time fueling mounted archery in Asia was combined with European iron reserves and metallurgy to (re)invent armored heavy cavalry.
Everyone excels at copying. It's much easier than inventing! That doesn't mean they won't invent further once they've caught up in a specific space.
And yes, it's possible to build infrastructure and education better suited to copying than inventing. That's not terribly surprising, and in fact downright sensible. Following WWII, both the PRC and the USSR focused heavily on replicating American nuclear and industrial developments, because they needed to not only obtain that technology but build up a core of technical talent capable of maintaining and modifying it. That didn't stop the USSR from later pursuing their own R&D to compete with projected American advances, and there's no good reason to think China won't switch to a heavier R&D footing in 10 or 20 years as current copies become widely used and understood.
The problem with these efforts is that the FBI often does not consult with technical experts before indicting Chinese nationals and have resulted in a number of false cases that have damaged the reputation of regular Chinese Americans. The rate at which Asians are falsely accused are twice those of other races[1]
Surely the FBI should be held to account when they make mistakes or behave unfairly, but it seems absurd that they shouldn't consider connections to China when looking for Chinese espionage.
I wasn't downvoted, and surely Chinese tactics will evolve over time to match those of the Soviets, but the majority of the Chinese espionage cases that I've seen so far have involved ethnic Chinese.
For example, Walter Liew stealing the titanium dioxide formula (with help from paid off non-Chinese), or the engineering student in Chicago sending off recruiting profiles...all Chinese or Taiwanese.
"Mistakes" can also be just lack of sufficient evidence, or even evidence that is not collected properly. Mistakes do not always mean the party is innocent, just that we take them to be on a legal basis regardless of the truth.
>"Mistakes" can also be just lack of sufficient evidence, or even evidence that is not collected properly. Mistakes do not always mean the party is innocent, just that we take them to be on a legal basis regardless of the truth.
I am extremely worried by China's panopticism, especially in Xinjiang[1]. But violating the rights of Chinese students so egregiously that you're unable to secure a conviction because your evidence is "fruit of the poisonous tree"[2] harms American interests by handing a propaganda victory to the PRC.
The FBI needs to ensure they follow the law when they investigate espionage so that offenders can be changed and convicted.
Can you cite examples of them dropping cases against Chinese defendants because of evidence they had to exclude due to it being fruit of the poisonous tree? Inability to secure a conviction can happen for many reasons.
The FBI may very well have been overzealous here (especially considering the history of the organization), but I think we'd need to look at the facts of each case in detail, rather than only the charge and conviction statistics by nationality. The case with the Temple professor appears to have resulted from a misinterpreted email.
Parent is the one who stated that mistakes "can also be just lack of sufficient evidence, or even evidence that is not collected properly.", they would be the one to ask about specific cases.
In general, you shouldn't be taking cases to trial you can't win, whether if it's due to evidence being thrown out or evidence not being present in the first place.
How much leeway do you have to discuss and publicize incidents like the Tienamen Square massacre and other atrocities that the Chinese government has generally made an effort to scrub from the internet?
We're a Hong Kong-based media organization, meaning no government, Chinese or not, dictates to us what we can or cannot report on. Our website is blocked in China. We do not censor our content and have reported on Tiananmen. For example: did you know that China just sentenced several men who put the image of the Tank Man on baijiu (a kind of hard liquor) bottles as a form of protest? https://www.inkstonenews.com/politics/activists-who-put-tank...
Yup. An article is only on part of any media campaign. I think it also safe to assume this HN discussion is being cataloged, if not actively manipulated, by those who created this article.
I created the article! Trust me when I say I'm not cataloging this discussion or actively manipulating it.
(EDIT: deleted "with my colleagues" because another commenter says it sounds like something other than reporters working with editors to put out an article.)
No I don't find you snarky. I'm just confused. Are you saying that by engaging in a discussion about an article I posted in an online forum I'm "cataloging" and "actively manipulating" it? Am I "cataloging" a discussion if I tweet an article and reply to the responses? Am I "actively manipulating" a Reddit discussion if I post a link on the site and... respond to the comments? I've been doing both my whole career.
Well, I only trust a news agency that would also report about the people in captivity there ( a couple of million Muslims).
Or about the digital credit system.
Or about claiming international waters.
Or about the countries that won't be able to pay back the investments of the one-road. Where locals don't get any benefits from.
Or that the worldwide loans to other countries make it clear that china is not a developing country anymore.
What's the chance of that?
( Sorry, but I'm more worried since I know China is actively sponsoring pro-China news agencies close to home ( Londen)). The sooner it fails, the better.
And no, it's not personal against you. It is however personal against me ( manipulating news close to home).
And Xi is pretty smart and hard-working. He is going for the long/slow haul, it's not what he's doing now, it's what he can do tomorrow.
What I see now, is what I thought it would be. He is waiting till Trump is gone, because he will be in charge longer.
Inkstone is Hong Kong-based and independent. We're only a little more than one year old but have published countless stories about all of the topics you mentioned. I'll give you a few examples, below. Try searching the site with site:inkstonenews.com if you want more.
> Well, I only trust a news agency that would also report about the people in captivity there ( a couple of million Muslims).
No need to go all the way out to China to get your fix. And the Chinese will likely be serving up Chinese propaganda anyway. If you want American propaganda, why not just consume it here in America?
>> I created the article! Trust me when I say I'm not cataloging this discussion or actively manipulating it.
I don't see any version of "alanwong" on the article. We have a political piece written by a journal/website/news source that is apparently owned by a Chinese company and authored by a woman named "Viola Zhou". Now we have someone calling themselves "alanwong" claiming to have created the article but whose name appears nowhere on said article. This looks like team effort to me, a badly executed one.
(Alanwong claims to be the editor, not author, but I don't see the editor listed on the website)
Few sites list editors of an individual article these days. Here's my author page. https://www.inkstonenews.com/author/alan-wong-0 My role is also listed in my hackernews profile. Try searching my name and Inkstone. You'll find me and my relations with Inkstone. It's all one search away.
of course they're targeting the Boston area; our city is the country's nexus of research and development in a plethora of fields, our culture is welcoming to foreigners at a time when most areas of the US are positively hateful, and we're large enough that expats can find at least a few others from their home country if they so choose. it's the perfect place to learn and network whether you're a spy or a jobseeker.
my main question is what can we realistically do about the problem of chinese spying while preserving the integrity of our institutions here. we have chinese expats sprinkled heavily into all of our research groups, tech groups, you name it -- and it is my assumption that the overwhelming majority of these people are innocent of any crime, so it wouldn't be acceptable to subject them to additional scrutiny. these people are valuable members of our teams and we're lucky to have them in the quantity that we do.
i'm not sure what the right move is here -- it's just my nightmare that the federal government / FBI implements some hamfisted policy that damages Boston's primary economic activities.
88 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadSpy-vs-spy is something that, for better or worse, nations do. It seems a complicated and delicate matter, and outside the experience of most of us.
In the Boston area, we have a wealth of colleagues, neighbors, and friends who arrived here from around the world. We welcome and appreciate them.
Ordinary people suspecting others, because of something they heard in the news (or amplified in some right-wing outlet), seems unfair and toxic. We've even seen recently that it can be deadly, when a violent mentally ill person is inspired.
I think the international spy business can best be left to the professionals (diplomats, intel agencies, law enforcement, corporate security), to handle discreetly, and the rest of us can just get along.
What troubles me (and many others) about the PRC's behavior is the PRC's disregard for IP: US/European/other countries have no recourse.
https://law.stanford.edu/2018/04/10/intellectual-property-ch...
And, this IS different than ordinary "spy-vs-spy". That normally applies to keeping track of national adversaries' military strength & asset positioning, political maneuvering, treaty talks, etc.
This, in contrast, is straight up industrial espionage for profit and/or military advantage, done by a nation state (vs just a competing company.
While it may have occurred some in the past, PRC is taking it to a never-before-seen massive scale.
It is part of the pervasive culture of IP theft in Chinese society and govt that runs form the smallest business right to the top of the govt.
It is a serious threat to all western democracies, indeed all other nations, and should be taken seriously.
What should make you uncomfortable is this fire, not the messenger who reports the fire.
I don't follow your metaphor.
Which is entirely reasonable, but I don't see anyone advocating this nor does the article so I'm a bit confused. Is someone advocating some kind of Chinese pogrom here?
Since you're the poster, where are you getting this from? I'm not reading that in either the replies nor the article... this feels like scaremongering in the opposite direction.
For everyday workplace/community culture, we in the US have a long and ongoing history of biases and poor treatment (including in the workplace) of people belonging to identifiable groups that have been singled out as somehow threatening or lesser. Maybe the pattern repeats. Or maybe the pattern doesn't repeat this time, but many people in the group fear it will, and that's not good for workplace/community either.
However, when a society maintains such a universal "your IP is up for grabs" approach to business from the smallest fabricator to the top levels of government, and the govt is noticed to have a top level program targeting a region's business, that's not prejudice, it is established fact.
Moreover, getting the word out on such issues is exactly what you advocate; it is a part of the 'spy-vs-spy' people doing their job.
The network of suppliers is extremely extensive, and expecting the CIA to squander time individually contacting every single sub-subcontractor, or even only the set of ITAR-registered producers is silly.
I would go so far as to say that the threat against you even from overt discrimination is less than the threat from our society being undermined by an unopposed attack on its foundations.
What should be done is to be aware of the risk, and that it is very different doing business with China vs. say, Thailand or Mexico.
Of course, wherever you do business, you must take precautions against IP theft and having your product sold out the back door.
However, for China, the threat model needs to be completely re-calibrated. Specifically, recalibrated to assume either that your product will be sold out the back door of the factory under another label, that your IP will end up in a competitor's hands, or that if it is important enough it will be expropriated by the govt either via rules requiring 'sharing' or by state-level espionage.
This is NOT to say that every person is untrustworthy. There are good people everywhere.
The difference is like that between a small rural town where everyone knows each other and leaves their doors unlocked and keys in the car, vs. a gang-ruled favela where you need to watch your back if you step outside. Both are mostly full of good & honest people, with a few problems, but you really need to calibrate your behavior differently for each.
As for "leave it to the professionals", you left out a key component from your list - the people doing the work - doing the research, building the devices. Engineers, professors. The people doing the work are the first line for any social engineering or simple vector attacks. Anyone that works with this information reads and signs things but if they haven't really been tested or understand the consequences, maybe they forget.
Having a reminder that it's OK to be impolite when somebody you don't know asks you overly specific questions you're not supposed to share is not always a bad thing.
Reminders never hurt (assuming they are reminders and not over the top bigoted screeds)
So many people think they understand what the impacts are if they bend some of these rules, or ignore them a bit for convenience. I would argue that most of the time, unless the stakes are consistently high, they do not.
Personally, I have absolutely no trust in any of these, and I completely disagree that we should "leave it to the professionals" and let them "handle discretely" whatever is going on. This is how you end up with things like FISA courts, Gitmo, and PRISM.
Here's an official factsheet (PDF): https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/file/1107256/download
Just seeing their executives get charged with international crimes is enough to avoid replying.
Believe people (individuals, groups) when they tell you who they are.
Edit: here is the clip. Skip to 1:30 https://youtu.be/xN0vUlljX0I
P.S. The first one is a meme in gaming community -- search the term you will see what it is.
I think you wanted to show that Chinese people are not friendly, but the comment only reveals the xenophobia sentiment among some American people.
How exactly is that different from the US? I don't see US politicians in power trying to do things to benefit their own population, such as by providing universal healthcare.
Less innovation will happen because more people will be secretive (since there are less protections) or we will end up with a few large companies owning everything.
You also can't deny the fact that the US is probably the most innovative country in the world and has fairly strict IP laws.
China has very lax IP laws and most companies end up just copying, because nobody wants to risk capital for R&D if it's just going to get copied by someone.
Heck, if someone really wanted to make a national-identity pitch, they'd have better luck talking about late-Ming isolationism and claiming that China is exceptional for sometimes not ripping off foreign innovations. That would be wrong too, of course, but at least it'd be better than a narrative which barely stretches back to the 1990s.
Samuel Slater brought the Industrial Revolution to America by memorizing the banned-for-export designs of water-powered spinning machines. The Brits nicknamed him "Slater the Traitor" for his trouble, but within a generation new industrial technology was being developed in the US off that basis.
British porcelain production in the 18th century was driven by the letters of a missionary in China, who secretly observed the details of Chinese production and sent them back to Europe. Mistakes in replicating that process lead to "bone china", the strongest and purest-white form of porcelain known.
Stirrups, famously (and debatably) a formative element of medieval warfare, originated in the caucasus. The Byzantines captured some of them in a war with the Avars, and within two centuries they were widespread across Europe. An invention that was at the time fueling mounted archery in Asia was combined with European iron reserves and metallurgy to (re)invent armored heavy cavalry.
Everyone excels at copying. It's much easier than inventing! That doesn't mean they won't invent further once they've caught up in a specific space.
And yes, it's possible to build infrastructure and education better suited to copying than inventing. That's not terribly surprising, and in fact downright sensible. Following WWII, both the PRC and the USSR focused heavily on replicating American nuclear and industrial developments, because they needed to not only obtain that technology but build up a core of technical talent capable of maintaining and modifying it. That didn't stop the USSR from later pursuing their own R&D to compete with projected American advances, and there's no good reason to think China won't switch to a heavier R&D footing in 10 or 20 years as current copies become widely used and understood.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/12/06/we-were-pirates-too/
[1]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/study-suggests-as...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/us/politics/us-drops-char...
https://qz.com/1116990/the-aclu-says-the-fbi-is-accusing-chi...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/aug99/sp...
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/arti...
For example, Walter Liew stealing the titanium dioxide formula (with help from paid off non-Chinese), or the engineering student in Chicago sending off recruiting profiles...all Chinese or Taiwanese.
I am extremely worried by China's panopticism, especially in Xinjiang[1]. But violating the rights of Chinese students so egregiously that you're unable to secure a conviction because your evidence is "fruit of the poisonous tree"[2] harms American interests by handing a propaganda victory to the PRC.
The FBI needs to ensure they follow the law when they investigate espionage so that offenders can be changed and convicted.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
The FBI may very well have been overzealous here (especially considering the history of the organization), but I think we'd need to look at the facts of each case in detail, rather than only the charge and conviction statistics by nationality. The case with the Temple professor appears to have resulted from a misinterpreted email.
In general, you shouldn't be taking cases to trial you can't win, whether if it's due to evidence being thrown out or evidence not being present in the first place.
Hmmm...
Pretty much all of it's propaganda these days.
(EDIT: deleted "with my colleagues" because another commenter says it sounds like something other than reporters working with editors to put out an article.)
???
You just did.
I know that likely read like I was trying to be snarky, but I wasn't.
Or about the digital credit system.
Or about claiming international waters.
Or about the countries that won't be able to pay back the investments of the one-road. Where locals don't get any benefits from.
Or that the worldwide loans to other countries make it clear that china is not a developing country anymore.
What's the chance of that?
( Sorry, but I'm more worried since I know China is actively sponsoring pro-China news agencies close to home ( Londen)). The sooner it fails, the better.
And no, it's not personal against you. It is however personal against me ( manipulating news close to home).
And Xi is pretty smart and hard-working. He is going for the long/slow haul, it's not what he's doing now, it's what he can do tomorrow.
What I see now, is what I thought it would be. He is waiting till Trump is gone, because he will be in charge longer.
> Well, I only trust a news agency that would also report about the people in captivity there ( a couple of million Muslims).
The two most recent pieces on Xinjiang:
US lawmakers want this man punished over China’s treatment of Muslims https://www.inkstonenews.com/politics/us-lawmakers-urge-sanc...
US condemns Muslim camps that China calls ‘boarding schools’ https://www.inkstonenews.com/politics/us-highlights-mass-det...
> Or about the digital credit system. ‘Worse than doing time’: life on the wrong side of China’s social credit system https://www.inkstonenews.com/china/chinas-13-million-discred... Got bad social credit? Your son isn’t going to college https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/chinas-social-credit-sy...
We've got plenty of that on CNN and FOX.
No need to go all the way out to China to get your fix. And the Chinese will likely be serving up Chinese propaganda anyway. If you want American propaganda, why not just consume it here in America?
I don't see any version of "alanwong" on the article. We have a political piece written by a journal/website/news source that is apparently owned by a Chinese company and authored by a woman named "Viola Zhou". Now we have someone calling themselves "alanwong" claiming to have created the article but whose name appears nowhere on said article. This looks like team effort to me, a badly executed one.
(Alanwong claims to be the editor, not author, but I don't see the editor listed on the website)
my main question is what can we realistically do about the problem of chinese spying while preserving the integrity of our institutions here. we have chinese expats sprinkled heavily into all of our research groups, tech groups, you name it -- and it is my assumption that the overwhelming majority of these people are innocent of any crime, so it wouldn't be acceptable to subject them to additional scrutiny. these people are valuable members of our teams and we're lucky to have them in the quantity that we do.
i'm not sure what the right move is here -- it's just my nightmare that the federal government / FBI implements some hamfisted policy that damages Boston's primary economic activities.
Got a source on this one, bud?