Woolsey, former CIA director in the administration of Bill Clinton, said China is seeking to defeat the United States according to the dictums of the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu—without having to engage in a major conflict.
Human Rights Watch got their hands on an app used by Chinese authorities in the western Xinjiang region to surveil, track and categorize the entire local population – particularly the 13 million or so Turkic Muslims subject to heightened scrutiny, of which around one million are thought to live in cultural ‘re-education’ camps.
By “reverse engineering” the code in the “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” (IJOP) app, HRW was able to identify the exact criteria authorities rely on to ‘maintain social order.’ Of note, IJOP is “central to a larger ecosystem of social monitoring and control in the region,” and similar to systems being deployed throughout the entire country.
The platform targets 36 types of people for data collection, from those who have “collected money or materials for mosques with enthusiasm,” to people who stop using smartphones.
[A]uthorities are collecting massive amounts of personal information—from the color of a person’s car to their height down to the precise centimeter—and feeding it into the IJOP central system, linking that data to the person’s national identification card number. Our analysis also shows that Xinjiang authorities consider many forms of lawful, everyday, non-violent behavior—such as “not socializing with neighbors, often avoiding using the front door”—as suspicious. The app also labels the use of 51 network tools as suspicious, including many Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and encrypted communication tools, such as WhatsApp and Viber. –Human Rights Watch
Another method of tracking is the “Four Associations”
The IJOP app suggests Xinjiang authorities track people’s personal relationships and consider broad categories of relationship problematic. One category of problematic relationships is called “Four Associations” (四关联), which the source code suggests refers to people who are “linked to the clues of cases” (关联案件线索), people “linked to those on the run” (关联在逃人员), people “linked to those abroad” (关联境外人员), and people “linked to those who are being especially watched” (关联关注人员). –HRW
*An extremely detailed look at the data collected and how the app works can be found in the actual report.
HRW notes that “Many—perhaps all—of the mass surveillance practices described in this report appear to be contrary to Chinese law, and also violate internationally guaranteed rights to privacy, the presumption of innocence, and freedom of association and movement. “Their impact on other rights, such as freedom of expression and religion, is profound,” according to the report.
Here’s what happens when ‘irregularities’ are detected:
When IJOP detects a deviation from normal parameters, such as when a person uses a phone not registered to them, or when they use more electricity than what would be considered “normal,” or when they travel to an unauthorized area without police permission, the system flags them as “micro-clues” which authorities use to gauge the level of suspicion a citizen should fall under.
A checkpoint in Turpan, Xinjiang equiped with machines that verify ID, facial recognition and retrieve data from personal electronic divices for analysis.
IJOP also monitors personal relationships – some of which are deemed inherently suspicious, such as relatives who have obtained new phone numbers or who maintain foreign links.
Chinese authorities justify the surveillance as a means to fight terrorism. To that end, IJOP checks for terrorist content and “violent audio-viusual content” when surveilling phones and software. It also flags “adherents of Wahhabism,” the ultra-conservative form of Islam accused of being a “source of global terrorism.”
A former Xinjiang resident told Human Rights Watch a week after he was released from arbitrary detention: “I was entering a mall, and an orange alarm went off.” The police came and took him to a police station. “I said to them, ‘I was in a detention center and you guys released me because I was innocent.’… The police told me, ‘Just don’t go to any public places.’… I said, ‘What do I do now? Just stay home?’ He said, ‘Yes, that’s better than this, right?’” –Human Rights Watch
The IJOP system was developed by a major-state owned military contractor – the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC). The app itself was developed by Hebei Far East Communication System Engineering Company (HBFEC), a company that, at the time of the app’s development, was fully owned by CETC.
3D portrait and integrated data capturing passage.
Meanwhile, under the broader “Strike Hard Campaign,“ authorities in Xinjiang are also collecting “biometrics, including DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and blood types of all residents in the region ages 12 to 65,” according to the report, which adds that “the authorities require residents to give voice samples when they apply for passports.“
The Strike Hard Campaign has shown complete disregard for the rights of Turkic Muslims to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. In Xinjiang, authorities have created a system that considers individuals suspicious based on broad and dubious criteria, and then generates lists of people to be evaluated by officials for detention. Official documents state that individuals “who ought to be taken, should be taken,” suggesting the goal is to maximize the number of people they find “untrustworthy” in detention. Such people are then subjected to police interrogation without basic procedural protections. They have no right to legal counsel, and some are subjected to torture and mistreatment, for which they have no effective redress, as we have documented in our September 2018 report. The result is Chinese authorities, bolstered by technology, arbitrarily and indefinitely detaining Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang en masse for actions and behavior that are not crimes under Chinese law.
Read the entire report from Human Rights Watch here.
Bloomberg News came out of left field on April 20, with the headline “We Should Let China Spy on Us.” The main points are fair: Close to 80 percent of the CIA’s intelligence allegedly comes from open source information, and information from spies in the past has prevented the United States from jumping into full-scale war, such as during the Cold War.
Yet, the article misses some major points. Specifically, it doesn’t seem to grasp the activities of Chinese spy operations through things like the United Front Department and the Chinese Student and Scholar Associations and instead tries to relate these to intelligence gathering—which is a minor focus for these groups.
It also doesn’t grasp the operations of Chinese hackers involved in the surveillance and intelligence operations, which it mentions, and how these interface with Chinese spies who operate on the ground.
The basis of the article assumes that Chinese spies operate in a similar manner to U.S. spies, and focus mainly on intelligence gathering. U.S. spies look to understand how a targeted country or person operates and by grasping how it operates, to understand how, and the process it would go through, to react to key issues. Open source intelligence is very useful for information like this.
But operations like that are not what spies from the United Front Department are focused on. The focus of the United Front is ideological subversion, establishing front organizations, controlling communities of overseas Chinese people, running smuggling and criminal networks, compromising individuals, and creating alleged grassroots support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Even during the Cold War, most Soviet spies weren’t focused on the James Bond-style spy operations. They were establishing nonprofits to spread disinformation, organizing activist movements to support Soviet causes, sending “experts” to give commentary to news outlets, and compromising key people in the institutions that make the United States function.
Many spies, like those in the United Front Department, are looking to create a united “frontline” for the CCP in a targeted country — not to mention the use of sleeper agents who may be used to carry out acts of chaos or violence in the event of a war. This is fundamentally different from gentle operations like intelligence gathering done through more conventional spy operations.
The same applies to the CCP’s spy operations aimed at intellectual property theft. It’s true that most of the information is likely stolen by hacker agencies. But physical spies, operating on the ground, still play a fundamental—and very damaging—role.
The Chinese hacker group that’s most commonly known is Unit 61398, which was under the Third Department of the war fighting department of the Chinese military, the General Staff Department. The CCP has since restructured its military, but when Unit 61398 was exposed, it was just one of 22 known operational bureaus. This was before the CCP reorganized these operations under its Strategic Support Force.
The Third Department was the signals intelligence branch, while next to it was the Second Department focused on human intelligence operations, and the Fourth Department focused on electronics intelligence operations. Other military branches were focused on other forms of unconventional operations that could include the use of spies, such as the General Political Department which was engaged in political warfare.
Yet, even the CCP’s military hackers worked closely with spies on the ground. According to a 2013 report from the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army research institute, which was outlined by the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, the CCP’s military hackers operated in three tiers.
The first tier, it said, was military units “employed for carrying out network attack and defense,” the second tier was civilian organizations and government offices “authorized by the military to carry out network warfare operations,” and the third tier included groups outside the government and military “that can be organized and mobilized for network warfare operations.”
Also included in the operation were front companies. A 2010 report from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency said that the CCP operated more than 3,200 military front companies in the United States dedicated to theft.
Google is once again helping the Chinese government and its Orwellian control over the flow of information.
Earlier this month, evidence emerged suggesting that Google has continued to develop the “Dragonfly” censored search engine despite claiming they had abandoned it after an internal revolt.
Now, ZDNet reports that Google has banned ads for virtual private network (VPN) products targeting Chinese users – citing “local legal restrictions.”
VPNs are the only way Chinese users can circumvent draconian internet filters which have blocked sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Gab, Instagram, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, WikiLeaks, Google and Gmail. Blocked news websites include Zero Hedge, BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, WSJ, NYT and Business Insider.
“It is currently Google Ads policy to disallow promoting VPN services in China, due to local legal restrictions,” Google said in a Wednesday email.
The email was received and shared with ZDNet by VPNMentor, a website offering advice, tips, and reviews of VPN products.
The company said Google prevented its employees from placing Google search ads for the Chinese version of its site. –ZDNet
In January 2017, Beijing cracked down on VPN services – requiring that all providers active in China register for authorization from the CHinese government. In July, China forced Apple to remove all VPN apps from its App Store. After that, a “full-out ban on all VPNs was imposed on March 31, 2018,” according to ZD – though some apps continued to function regardless.
Nonetheless, Chinese officials are now using the ban to go after users caught using VPNs. The first fine for using a VPN product was issued earlier this year to a Guangdong.
Despite banning consumers from using VPN apps, China remains one of the top sellers of VPN technologies. A November 2018 study found that almost 60 percent of the top free mobile VPN apps are run by companies with Chinese ownership or based in China.
We wonder if Google employees will protest yet another example of helping China to keep its citizens in the dark?
In part three of Hello World Shenzhen, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Ashlee Vance heads out into a city where you can’t use cash or credit cards, only your smartphone, where AI facial-recognition software instantly spots and tickets jaywalkers, and where at least one factory barely needs people. This is the society that China’s government and leading tech companies are racing to make a reality, with little time to question which advancements are net positives for the rest of us.
Part One – Inside China’s Future Factory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLmaI…
Part Two – China’s High Stakes Robot Wars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrhvZ…
https://www.bloomberg.com/hello-world
The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.
-Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
The world is racing toward war. The reasons have nothing to do with trade. This is not about cultures colliding. This is about power, and the American South is about to be at the forefront of that struggle.
On one side there is China, an ancient empire that has reemerged over the past three decades. It seeks to reclaim its historical domination over Pacific affairs that it held until about the early 16th century when the Asian empire went into relative obscurity and decline. For millennia, China has occasionally found itself subservient to a long list of newcomers, only to eventually overcome them through sheer force. The Mongols, the Japanese, the Russians, and now, the Americans.
On the other side is the United States, a modern empire that has dominated global affairs for a century. Despite its ebbs and flows, American cultural dominance has been the glue that ensured its preeminence. Americans do not conquer with tanks and bullets; they punish with tanks and bullets. Americans conquer with Barbie dolls, McDonald’s, and media programming that sells “Americana.”
No one lives in a vacuum and that includes the South.
In fact, of any region in the world’s most dominant empire since her British for bearer, the American South should be more cognizant of global affairs than any other region, not less so. That is because the South is America’s modern Sparta. Of any given region, the South produces the majority of the very troops used to subjugate people around the world. Identity Dixie has explored this topic before. While modern Yankee boys are taught to cross their legs at Starbucks and sip soy lattes like good little genderless f—gots, Southern boys are being taught how to kill – from hunting season to hunting season, until they arrive to boot camp.
The North produces prey who lack manners; the South produces genteel predators.
Consequently, as the war drums begin to beat stronger between the United States and China, who do you think will be tasked with fighting that war? The answer is almost codified in the distinctions of the regions and through general military recruitment goals. The Southern boy, of course.
But, what are the chances of an actual war between the US and China? Based on my vast experience and education in foreign policy, the chances are highly likely. War is coming.
The reasons for war between the two powers are numerous.
The seeds of our trade imbalance with China began with the former President George H. W. Bush. He single handedly ensured that the US would eventually shift production to that massive block of unskilled, cheap laborers. But, Bill Clinton really led the effort in 2000, with Republican Congressional support, way back when Labor Union Democrats hated the idea of outsourcing jobs to cheap manufacturers. Of course, now Labor Union Democrats love the idea of outsourcing jobs to China, as evidenced by their animus toward Donald Trump – the only president in three decades to push back against the Communist Chinese. Regardless, both Republicans and Democrats have eagerly surrendered economic hegemony to the Communist Chinese. Some, like the Clintons, required extensive bribes to sell out their country. Others did it for free. Bush II gave China Permanent Normal Trade Relations with the US on 27 December 2001 for no discernible reason, even after they had downed a US reconnaissance aircraft earlier that same year. Evidently, no big deal.
Nearly every decision of the American Empire related to China since 1989 has served to harm the economic interests of the Southern working class, man or woman. How about military decisions? It is even worse.
The decisions of the Empire over the past three decades, as it pertains to Communist China, seem purposely designed to get a lot of Southern boys killed and lose a war.
First, the military aggression of the Communist Chinese has recently gotten more pronounced. The Communists now control twenty-seven islands – some man-made – in the South and East China Seas. They unilaterally stole islands from Vietnam and the Philippines. These islands are now fitted with missile systems capable of destroying a US warship from as far away as Guam. Consequently, Communist Chinese aggression denies the freedom of navigation that the American Navy and commerce has supported since Alfred Thayer Mahan and the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Worse, not only did the Obama Administration sit by and watch the Chinese take over critical Asian sea lines of communication, Obama cut the ability to defend against the missiles now on the islands he watched them build. Compounding the ability to defend against their missiles, the Chinese have known what is in our missiles for the past two decades. Bill Clinton made that possible when he sold the technical details to the Communist Chinese in 1998. Whereas George W. Bush seemed to take a much harder line on Communist China militarily, the relations behind the scenes depict a much friendlier approach toward Chinese military aggression.
Enter Trump.
For whatever the reason, Trump did a one-hundred-eighty degree turn on American relations with China. Unlike Obama, who called the Communists a “strategic partner” not an enemy, Trump has outright called the Chinese a threat. To United States interests, he is correct, and Trump has taken significant steps to kill that threat.
First, Trump attacked the underpinnings of their economy in a very successful way. As of January 2019, the Chinese economy has dropped to its slowest growth since 1990. Meanwhile, militarily, Trump has not only revitalized missile defense systems, he ordered the US Navy to confront the Chinese head-on in the South China Sea. As recently as two weeks ago, analysts have predicted the threat of war between two global nuclear powers as the highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Communist Chinese have prominent military officers arguing for a war with the United States.
Whether or not war is in American interests may be a moot point. A strong China certainly does not serve Washington’s interests. But what about Southern interests?
Like it or not, the US and the South are tied at the hip on this one. There is no universe by which a Communist Chinese victory on any front – economically, diplomatically, or militarily – aids the Southern people. The Chinese only accept nationalism when it involves their people. Otherwise, they are the largest exporters of Communist rhetoric in the world today. The antifa scum who target members of the Dissident Right are bought and paid for, in part, by the Communist Chinese government.
Nothing says “Anti-Facsist” like ensuring the continuation of cheap manufactured goods from labor exploiting Communist China into the United States to the detriment of the American worker.
Anyway, the Chinese purposely seek to destroy all that makes the South unique, which is a different approach than modern Russia, which views an independent South positively for different strategic reasons. To the Chinese, boys from Texas and Tennessee constitute a very real threat to their ideological causes and are impossible to manage. They feel the same way about Idaho and Montana, but there are simply not that many of our kin in the Rocky Mountains. Understanding this fact, the South will have to support the American Empire in a war against China, if only to push back against a Maoist tsunami at home.
Unfortunately, like every war in the past century, that means a lot of Southern boys will fertilize the soil with their blood. A lot of Southern mothers will salt the earth with their tears. A lot of pines will be chopped down for boxes in South Georgia. All the while, Yankee men make money on commodities futures back home, sipping on lattes with their legs crossed, while their teenage son is being transformed into a drag queen and their wives are on Facebook celebrating their child’s transgenderism and diverse dating practices.
This trend will continue until the South is free.
Alex Newman, Journalist for the New American Magazine, says “one of the most important and under reported stories of the last century” is how China is being incorporated into the New World Order plan to enslave and rule the planet.
Newman says, “I did a cover story (about China) a few years ago, and people said I was just being conspiratorial. My article was about how the communist Chinese dictatorship was ‘Staking Claim in the New World Order.’
I wasn’t speculating and I wasn’t theorizing. You had people like George Soros saying that communist China needs to ‘own the New World Order.’ He said they have a better functioning government than the United States, and that, basically, China should run the New World Order that these people had been building for decades and generations now.
Communist China rose to power and prominence with deliberate assistance from key people in our State Department, in our Defense Department and almost all of them members in the Council on Foreign Relations or actual communist agents.” In closing, Newman says, “It’s not too late to turn this around. It’s really not, but if we allow these radicals and their puppet masters to run around tearing down our institutions and tearing down our civilization, we will reap horrifying consequences.”
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Alex Newman, Foreign Correspondent for The New American Magazine.
“Governments above the county level can set up education and transformation organizations and supervising departments such as vocational training centres, to educate and transform people who have been influenced by extremism.”
