This is such a weird ploy. Is there any link between the impersonator and the CCP or is it just a lone scammer intimidating immigrants? It's interesting too that "impersonating a peace officer" applies in this case.
> 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.
Chinese grad students have already copied all university research lab hard drive contents and sent them back to China. One of them admitted to my friend to doing it and being sent to the school by the Chinese military. Chinese grad students are a massive espionage risk, second only to Israeli nationals.
If there is one thing Israel is known for, it's their secret service. I'd even go and say the Mossad is miles ahead of the NSA... the NSA goes for the brute force approach: grab every piece of data they can get their hold on with enormous resources and attempt to make sense of the pile later.
The Mossad is orders of magnitude more resource-efficient, they go for surgical strikes against whomever they are targeting. And they don't care at all if their target is an allied state, a neutral state or an enemy state.
I'm not really sure how meaningful or effective that is as a strategy .. I mean it's just data. Now exfiltrating designs of devices might be a different thing but science is more about the training and becoming an expert. Learning how to do research is the most important part. Most experiments are difficult to replicate anyway.
And yet the US seemingly does nothing about it. Makes you think whether the US government is turning a blind eye or they believe there the benefits outweigh the costs.
Sometimes I think this sounds conspiratorial, and surely isn't happening. Who has the time or money to pay 5 people to just go around harassing and stalking people for political gain only?
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.
Reminds me of Gang stalking[0]. It always seems to happen to people who present themselves as generally not very mentally healthy, but sometimes you have to wonder. If you were the very unlucky target of some deniable, organized harassment effort, it would certainly take its toll on your mental health.
(Spoilers: the number of people in amphetamine psychosis is several orders of magnitude larger than the number of victims of targeted government harassment.)
Yeah, if you look at the post history of the people posting there you will see a lot of posts about meth. Or maybe their mental health is what led them to meth in the first place, because you'd think the meth induced psychosis would wane off over time. But for most of them the delusions keep getting stronger and it can last for year. It's really heartbreaking and the entire paranoid concept of gangstalking makes helping them very very difficult
Worth noting that if you actually ARE being tailed by an organized and well-resourced group, they will frequently use a team of people to do so, time and circumstances permitting.
This is probably why it's very hard to help someone who is under legitimately delusional feelings of gang stalking, because those who legitimately are and those who are delusional are likely to look the same to outsiders, and will always be considered delusional.
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.
I feel similarly about describing political aspirants as narcissistic or sociopathic based on their "delusions of grandeur" – what about when they actually become president? Not so delusional anymore, I guess? It calls into question the validity of such a diagnosis in the first place, as anything more than a measurement of deviance from some arbitrary and counterfactually ambiguous statistical mean. It's almost as if the entire field of psychiatry harbors delusions of grandeur...
I tried to go there, but I was directed to install the app and there was no option to continue browsing on the web. Reddit dark patterns have come to a point where they are literally disabling the web frontend for mobile users?
Add the old subdomain to avoid the mobile stuff. The link is a subreddit of people complaining about being stalked and then trailing off into other conspiracies.
There are several stories like this at the Stasi Museum[0]. Highly recommend checking it out if you are ever in Berlin. The Jugend Widerstands (Youth Resistance) Museum[1] has some interesting stories about life in the DDR too.
I was educated in the US and took AP US History in high school. I don't recall a specific reference to Zersetzung within that curriculum, but the idea that life in East Germany was difficult due to Stasi oppression was covered. I don't recall specific examples like the story I asked about though (besides my own extracurricular references from movies/books).
Did a quick search and didn't find it. All I remember is it was written up in a rather major publication some years ago talking about the fall of Stasi.
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!
There are a lot of cases of Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Saudi, etc. dissidents or critics being targeted overseas. I'm not sure why it's a surprise to anyone or why people think it doesn't happen.
To make sure the qualify of the brain-wash process for the whole country, which is the foundation for those countries' stability, dissidents must be eliminated or harassed enough so they shut-up, wherever they might be.
Agreed. It seems naive to think "of course that wouldn't actually happen" without any real evidence except your own incredulity. Why shouldn't they harass people in small ways? It's cheap, annoying, and minor enough that most people will just brush it all off as coincidences. You obtain your goal of punishing those who got on your wrong side, without having to worry about attracting too much attention.
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.
That reminds me of COINTELPRO, and how the FBI tried to get MLK to commit suicide by sending him a harassing black mailing letter. It's amazing how states particularly when they have apparatuses that can go rouge or are even actually encouraged by the government like the Stasi were go to ridiculous lengths to harass people they find politically inconvenient.
I had this same thought but then I caught myself. Human nature doesn’t change that much. This basically happened at the corporate level at eBay in the last 12 months right? So factually if you are just saying it was a long time ago, then yes, that’s correct. However, I think it can and does still happen and humans from 50 years ago aren’t much different. In fact, some are even literally the same humans but just older…
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.
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.
> Anonymous discovered that HBGary was conspiring with a law/lobbying firm known as Hunton and Williams to launch a highly sophisticated campaign to subvert and sabotage the enemies of their clients. In some cases these plans involved illegal actions. The targets were journalists, labor unions, and political opponents.
> 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.
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.
I got the same speech when suggesting some of the "dangerous white supremacist (who were never arrested nor identified)" at the Canadian truck rallies might have been feds in disguised.
The stasi story was also ~30 years ago too. The point isn't a story of who's bad more than it is a story of unchecked political power. That was my point, not a "we do it too so TFA isn't bad." No, it's bad when any state does it.
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.
My favorite is the time the FBI sent a bunch of fake correspondence making it seem like a bunch of prominent civil rights leaders were cheating on their spouses and was very confused when nothing came of it because said spouses already assumed they were and didn't care.
My fav story along those lines is the KGB trying to blackmail Sukarno with videotape of dalliances with prostitutes. He asked for copies to show his friends.
It's important to remember that this was in the past. The FBI, as well as every other three-letter-agency, are the good guys now, and they are totally ashamed of doing those things. They're definitely not doing anything like that anymore!
it always is a comfort to know that the alphabet boys did bad things in the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, 1990's, 2000's but are actually totally chill now
Although leftists already seem to think the CIA started the Iraq War, when they were against it and Cheney/Rumsfeld had to invent ways to get all the intelligence agencies out of the picture so they could make something up in peace.
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.
If they were they wouldn't be able to cover it up.
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.
I didn't downvote you, but often people get downvoted because they take the discussion off-topic.
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.
At this point we can't even talk conspiracy theories without someone bringing up the meta conspiracy theories, like the Chinese saboteurs sowing division in this comment section...
The commenter was responding to someone talking about spy work in East Germany, a post that, despite being about something that also happened 50 years ago and a continent away, is the top comment under an article about China. Is you think one is relevant and not the other you're deeply blind to some ideology underlying your assumptions.
I think this is still very relevant to the discussion. Because spying is a profession in which behavior tends to degrade to the lowest common denominator, it makes criticism of such actions very hard if your own domestic agencies engage in similar behavior. The domestic populance can only influence domestic policies, so it would be even more prudent to set criticism in that direction.
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.
> which bogs down the overall discussion and generates more heat than light.
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.
what-about-isms often bother me too. That said any commenter that excuses the CCP because of US dalliances is way off base. I'd say that there is some value to pointing out that unelected agencies both domestic and foreign do this stuff to US citizens.
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.
Same with Ernest Hemingway, remembered for his paranoia later in life, specifically about the US government watching him. Going to doctors for this, to no avail.
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.
> Who has the time or money to pay 5 people to just go around harassing and stalking people for political gain only?
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.
My parents were US diplomats stationed in Moscow in the 50's. The KGB would do things like disable the elevator in their apartment block just as they got home, only to turn it back on the moment they finished walking up to the top floor. Leave music playing in a next door apartment juuust loud enough to be disruptive. Block traffic on a certain street to cause my father to be late to an important meeting with his Soviet counterpart. The list of petty harassment would be pages long if I enumerated everything.
> the Stasi did attempt to entrap individuals, as for example in the case of Wolf Biermann:
> 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?
Even corporations do this kind of thing, not just state agents. There was an interesting case where Ebay harassed two old couple for running a blog that was critical of Ebay practices. Ebay went so far as to cause long-term psychological damage to the couple by mailing them bloody pig masks, signing them up to naughty magazines and sending them to their neighbors, van stalking them, and all other kinds of crazy stuff you wouldn't believe. Everything was directed by senior leadership at Ebay, and 'encouraged' by the CEO.
> Wenig texted Wymer weeks later: "Take her down."
> 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.
Sounds conspiratorial/not my experience doesn't mean not true. Humans are great at conspiracies. The word gets used dismissively because paranoid types claim conspiracy without evidence and experience. If you went to your local court you'd hear about many people witnessing conspiracies
> Sometimes I think this sounds conspiratorial, and surely isn't happening.
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.
> Who has the time or money to pay 5 people to just go around harassing and stalking people for political gain only?
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.
> No other country has managed to accomplish what CCP has in its coordinated campaign across the globe.
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.
They haven’t been a superpower for nearly as long as the US has been, and it didn’t overlap with the zenith of “overthrowing governments as the means to foreign policy”. Moreover, it’s easy to criticize Cold War eta interventions when the stakes were very high, but there’s much less justification for “peacetime repression”. Further still, “overthrowing governments” isn’t the only way to measure meddling and repression.
> Moreover, it’s easy to criticize Cold War eta interventions when the stakes were very high
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?
I'm not defending any particular action, I'm cautioning against context-less comparisons. But to answer your other questions, the stakes were very high for the whole world (global thermonuclear war, communism, etc) and the USSR was primarily responsible for escalating though no doubt the west was not uniformly virtuous.
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 is supporting murderous regimes all over Africa right now, which is why so many African nations abstained from the Ukraine vote at the UN recently.
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.
It’s pretty easy to look at North Korea, Cambodia, or Eastern Europe during the Cold War and say “hmm, it’s worth going to extreme lengths to prevent this from happening elsewhere”. That may have been misguided in many instances, but the basic motivation is sound. Characterizing the situation as “overthrowing democratic governments in favor of brutal dictators” is a vast oversimplification if not outright wrong at least in many cases.
> It’s pretty easy to look at North Korea, Cambodia, or Eastern Europe during the Cold War and say “hmm, it’s worth going to extreme lengths to prevent this from happening elsewhere”. That may have been misguided in many instances, but the basic motivation is sound.
Careful, this is literally Moscow's reason for its invasion of Ukraine -- to prevent the rise of a hostile fascist entity in its frontyard.
A bad actor claiming reasonable motivation does not make the motivation unreasonable... Obviously you have to also be sincere (debatable in Russia's case) and correct (Russian claims are simply wrong).
Russian claims of an interest in controlling the government of Ukraine are at least as legitimate as US claims of an interest in controlling Korea, or Afghanistan.
And is the Ukrainean state actually fascist? How about Korea? In the absence of UN intervention, would there have arisen an authoritarian state that was a menace to not only its own citizens but every neighbouring country?
Clearly Ukraine is not fascist and Korea would have been. There is a difference.
North Korea is fascist, but harmlessly so. Despite endless flexing and threat inflation, they haven't actually done much harm since invading the South 70 years ago.
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.
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.
> If you truly believe that, I don't think you're going to have a productive discussion on this topic here.
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.
I suppose you're not concerned about the misery they inflict on their own citizens? While they don't do ethnic cleansing per se (not many ethnicities to cleanse in North Korea), they absolutely do wipe out entire bloodlines for crimes of a single member. And I won't even get into the rest of their human rights record.
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.
Except Ukraine isn't a "hostile fascist entity", and Putin knows that.
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.)
We're seeing the fascism part of full display as Zelensky refuses to surrender, instead preferring to throw civilian bodies to the altar in sacrifice of the Nation. Imagine cheering on Saddam Hussein as he hopelessly hung onto power and sacrificed thousands of innocents. This is precisely what the Western establishment media is doing right now, modulo Zelensky, because he's the "good guy".
The hostile part has been obvious for 8 years, and escalated last year. 14,000 dead, war declared on Russian Crimea last year, etc.
"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)
Thanks I hadn't been aware of some of those later points. I found some more referenced in another article[1]. I'll try read the full NY Times link but reached limit of my free access for the month.
It is in fact so wrong, I can't help but feel this is a bit? Like, I don't understand how you could keep this all consistent in your head. Without even going into history of the 20th century or even any facts whatsoever: why would, for example, the U.S. not do corollary acts of espionage and infiltration? Because of ethical principles? Or is the idea here that western nations are not as good at this as others?
Well from a birds eye view of history, the USA, in particular, most definitely deserves to be meddled with in the same way it has for 100 years. But they are also doing a good job themselves in ungracefully losing its empire.
Somehow, throughout the recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the US was able to predict and pre-announce, step by step, the Russian army's plans, moves and goals, at an absurd level of granularity and accuracy.
You only see the news cover the people who get caught.
The US was doing the same thing for years, cultivating CCP agents from early in their careers and even paying the bribes they needed to rise in the hierarchy. This was supposedly caught when the CIA's information sharing network got busted in China and dozens of agents were killed.[1]
I wouldn't think it's that one. They definitely have huge influence, but the country that I think of as having actually infiltrated the US government is a different one in that part of the world.
I think poster is referring to the fact that the U.S. gives Israel almost 4 billion dollars in aid a year.
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.
Infiltration is barely an accomplishment. What material things has China done to any other country outside of the ones it has border disputes with, ever?
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.
China claims hurt feelings and starts trade retaliations based on wildly false statements anytime another country thinks anything negative about them. They've been doing it to Australia for a few years now over a suggestion their covid policy wasn't the best.
> No other country has managed to accomplish what CCP has in its coordinated campaign across the globe.
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.
While there is some potential for over-reach, and a kind of stereotyping of Chinese academics, this is not without basis. A lot of them have abused their welcome, and done actions against USA - all while funded by US taxpayer. The Chinese govt has many people in its pay, some willing, likely most unwilling and coerced. But a spying operation is an offense.
China is a dictatorship and any Chinese student can be put under pressure with their families at home. That said, the vast majority don't study in foreign countries to spy for the CCP. But obviously with this leverage there is a limit on what you can say in public. Especially since a lot of platforms decided that there have to be consequences for speech. Those demanding it most strongly just tend not to be the brightest stars in the night sky because that in turn has the consequence of vastly empowering repressive tactics so that people take more care of what they say.
Australia a country with a smaller population than Texas has about 50,000 Chinese "spies". They are not James Bond-type spies but informants on other Chinese in Australia. In East Germany, one in five people were informants for the Communists. Canada would have a similar number as well.
Do you have a source for that? Sounds too high to be plausible. With a population of around 25 million, that would mean that 1 out of every 500 people would be an informant.
The Chinese "Spies" are not what you think of as Spies. They are Chinese foreign college students in Australia who report back to China if any of their classmates do something that the Chinese government would not approve of. They also steal information when they can and just basically tow the party line while overseas. They all do it because the government is paying for their education and they are proven loyal to CCCP (That's why the government pays for their education overseas).
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.
Absolutely no source. Remember that Fox news has minority viewership in US but in Australia it controls 90% of the news (Murdoch is from Australia).
Most of the news, almost all the time are sensationalist nonsense like this. 10 years ago it was complaining about the Lebanese then the vietnamese and then finally its the turn of Chinese.
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
"Informant" doesn't have to be a high bar. Even in the West, the law enforcement and intelligence agencies will have huge networks of "casual" informants.
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.
local Chinese media in NZ is 100% pro CCP, serious downer as I'm an Asian and people automatically assume I side with CCP ideologies. Didn't Australia passed some law on Espionage and Foreign Interference? From what I can tell it greatly subsided public activities over there, we need something like that in NZ to be honest...
These details are wild, scary, and fascinating. Fascinating from the perspective of how easy it is for foreign governments on the other side of the world to try to scare the shit out of US citizens by hiring some scumbag PI for probably as little as $5k.
> 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.
At least partly because interfering with the election of the US president is quite a bit more significant than interfering with the election of one representative.
On the flip side, though, I could easily see a government spend very little money (say, a couple hundred thousand dollars) to disrupt the campaigns of several tens of potential US Representatives. Given how things work in the House, a state actor could nudge things in the direction they want by disrupting a fairly small percentage of elections.
Presidential election interference would seem to cost a lot more than that, and be a bit more difficult to hide.
Back in college, I did a bit of "spying" for foreign companies. Nothing bad spirited, of course. They simply wanted me to photograph the entrance of the offices of local companies they partner with to see if the local company is at the address they claim to be.
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).
Anyone else curious about the ages of the defendants? 59, 73 and 62 years old respectively. Is it harder for the PRC to recruit younger "spies" or are older ones just more reliable?
I am totally shooting from the hip on all this, but I do wonder if/when there is a trade-off point between the expertise and energy youth can put into the trade versus the benefits and efficiencies of experience.
Yes, I noticed that too. Seems like they're tapping older people with connections and resources. I imagine there's going to be more younger gen assets to tap in future, a lot more nationalist PRC diaspora in west now vs older gen who fled PRC/China when it was a shitshow.
I've been surprised how nationalist some older Chinese expats are. In particular, I found some older HKers were very pro PRC. This was all before the Umbrella Movement. I put it down to becoming more conservative as you age (anecdotal evidence).
My feeling is older Chinese diaspora comes in roughly two flavours, dissidents who still see PRC as politically repressive shithole (fair) or economic migrants who left broke China but are now proud of rich China. I think folks intuitively group Chinese diaspora together with ex Soviet State diaspora, people who fled failing communism states that remain stagnant. But modern China is more "new country" than "old country". Combine with influence of pro PRC media ecosystem = resurging nationalism.
He probably meant to say the cases are related, the suspect of the linked murder case when leaving the Flushing 109th Precinct was yelling "You are Chinese, but you want to be anti-communist"
> You can start thinking now, aside from violence, what other plans are there? Huh? But in the end, violence would be fine too. Huh? Beat him [chuckles], beat him until he cannot run for election. Heh, that’s the-the last resort. You-you think about it. Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked [chuckles], right? Don’t know, eh, whatever ways from all different angles. Or, on the day of the election, he cannot make it there himself, right?
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....
I mentioned it the other day in another thread about Tibet where the discussion of political prisoners came up... and it seems relevant here too.
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?
195 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] thread> 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.
The Mossad is orders of magnitude more resource-efficient, they go for surgical strikes against whomever they are targeting. And they don't care at all if their target is an allied state, a neutral state or an enemy state.
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.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_stalking
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Gangstalking/
Edit: old.reddit.com/r/gangstalking
[0] https://stasimuseum.de/
[1] https://widerstandsmuseum.de/
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!
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.
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...
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.
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
But there's not a ton of reason to believe that things have changed so fundamentally.
> 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.
and 00s/10s (https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/mar/14/cia-black-site-d...)
But they SURELY have changed in 2020s!
How weird.
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.
[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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Not what-about-ism: You are right! And here is another example in support of your point!
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.
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.
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.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/ebay-execs-sent-...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/lawsuit-ebay-tri...
> 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?
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.
The DOJ is explicitly accusing five specific persons of conspiring:
> In one of these schemes, the co-conspirators sought to interfere with federal elections
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout
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.
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.
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?
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.
Careful, this is literally Moscow's reason for its invasion of Ukraine -- to prevent the rise of a hostile fascist entity in its frontyard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge
> 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...
You only see the news cover the people who get caught.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spie...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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
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.
[0] https://www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something
> 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.
Presidential election interference would seem to cost a lot more than that, and be a bit more difficult to hide.
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)
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).
Organised and pro criminal are not dumb. They know what brings the heat.
https://queenseagle.com/all/2022/3/16/queens-atty-stabbed-to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7MbXJyxMHQ
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?
Bad -- maybe cover of the investigation got blown?