China Security Unit Targeted US With Fake Social-Media Scheme, Prosecutors Allege (justice.gov) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the U.S. Department of Justice: Two criminal complaints filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York were unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging 44 defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the national police of the People's Republic of China (PRC) -- the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) -- to harass Chinese nationals residing in the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere in the United States. The defendants, including 40 MPS officers and two officials in the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), allegedly perpetrated transnational repression schemes targeting U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the PRC government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC. In the two schemes, the defendants created and used fake social media accounts to harass and intimidate PRC dissidents residing abroad and sought to suppress the dissidents' free speech on the platform of a U.S. telecommunications company (Company-1). The defendants charged in these schemes are believed to reside in the PRC or elsewhere in Asia and remain at large.
The two-count complaint charges 34 MPS officers with conspiracy to transmit interstate threats and conspiracy to commit interstate harassment. All the defendants are believed to reside in the PRC, and they remain at large. As alleged, the officers worked with Beijing's MPS bureau and are or were assigned to an elite task force called the "912 Special Project Working Group" (the Group). The purpose of the Group is to target Chinese dissidents located throughout the world, including in the United States. [...] The complaint alleges how members of the Group created thousands of fake online personas on social media sites, including Twitter, to target Chinese dissidents through online harassment and threats. These online personas also disseminated official PRC government propaganda and narratives to counter the pro-democracy speech of the Chinese dissidents. As alleged, for example, Group members created and maintained the fake social media accounts through temporary email addresses, posted official PRC government content, and interacted with other online users to avoid the appearance that the Group accounts were "flooding" a given social media platform. The Group tracks the performances of members in fulfilling their online responsibilities and rewards Group members who successfully operate multiple online personas without detection by the social media companies who host the platforms or by other users of the platforms.
The investigation also uncovered official MPS taskings to Group members to compose articles and videos based on certain themes targeting, for example, the activities of Chinese dissidents located abroad or the policies of the U.S. government. As alleged, the defendants also attempted to recruit U.S. persons to act as unwitting agents of the PRC government by disseminating propaganda or narratives of the PRC government. On several occasions, the defendants used online personas to contact individuals assessed to be sympathetic and supportive of the PRC government's narratives and asked these individuals to disseminate Group content. In addition, Group members took repeated affirmative actions to have Chinese dissidents and their meetings removed from the platform of Company-1. For example, Group members disrupted a dissident's efforts to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre through a videoconference by posting threats against the participants through the platform's chat function. In another Company-1 videoconference on the topic of countering communism organized by a PRC dissident, Group members flooded the videoconference and drowned out the meeting with loud music and vulgar screams and threats directed at the pro-democracy participants. "These cases demonstrate the lengths the PRC government will go to silence and harass U.S. persons who exercise their fundamental rights to speak out against PRC oppression, including by unlawfully exploiting a U.S.-based technology company," said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division. "These actions violate our laws and are an affront to our democratic values and basic human rights."
The two-count complaint charges 34 MPS officers with conspiracy to transmit interstate threats and conspiracy to commit interstate harassment. All the defendants are believed to reside in the PRC, and they remain at large. As alleged, the officers worked with Beijing's MPS bureau and are or were assigned to an elite task force called the "912 Special Project Working Group" (the Group). The purpose of the Group is to target Chinese dissidents located throughout the world, including in the United States. [...] The complaint alleges how members of the Group created thousands of fake online personas on social media sites, including Twitter, to target Chinese dissidents through online harassment and threats. These online personas also disseminated official PRC government propaganda and narratives to counter the pro-democracy speech of the Chinese dissidents. As alleged, for example, Group members created and maintained the fake social media accounts through temporary email addresses, posted official PRC government content, and interacted with other online users to avoid the appearance that the Group accounts were "flooding" a given social media platform. The Group tracks the performances of members in fulfilling their online responsibilities and rewards Group members who successfully operate multiple online personas without detection by the social media companies who host the platforms or by other users of the platforms.
The investigation also uncovered official MPS taskings to Group members to compose articles and videos based on certain themes targeting, for example, the activities of Chinese dissidents located abroad or the policies of the U.S. government. As alleged, the defendants also attempted to recruit U.S. persons to act as unwitting agents of the PRC government by disseminating propaganda or narratives of the PRC government. On several occasions, the defendants used online personas to contact individuals assessed to be sympathetic and supportive of the PRC government's narratives and asked these individuals to disseminate Group content. In addition, Group members took repeated affirmative actions to have Chinese dissidents and their meetings removed from the platform of Company-1. For example, Group members disrupted a dissident's efforts to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre through a videoconference by posting threats against the participants through the platform's chat function. In another Company-1 videoconference on the topic of countering communism organized by a PRC dissident, Group members flooded the videoconference and drowned out the meeting with loud music and vulgar screams and threats directed at the pro-democracy participants. "These cases demonstrate the lengths the PRC government will go to silence and harass U.S. persons who exercise their fundamental rights to speak out against PRC oppression, including by unlawfully exploiting a U.S.-based technology company," said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division. "These actions violate our laws and are an affront to our democratic values and basic human rights."
Chances may be high that (Score:5, Insightful)
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Agree. So when are you people going to stop modding me down?
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hush now, just show us on this doll where the bad prcs touched you ...
sure this news has nothing to do with the us just recently being caught red-handed spying on their allies and lying their asses off. nothing to do at all!
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no, i live in what is officially a democracy that regularly abuses the law to persecute and jail political dissidents but i'm free as one can be. you are probably just pissed because i said "the us just recently being caught red-handed spying on their allies and lying their asses off" but what can i say? that's what it is. sorry to burst your bubble. not really :P
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The US has been spying on allies since long before I was born. News about it still happening is just white noise at this point, to be honest.
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So what are you suggesting? Everyone bend over and accept the status quo and donâ(TM)t draw attention to it? Or are you suggesting the US' "allies" should take retaliatory action rather than just complaining?
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i'm aware. it's also old news. i'm just speculating why it is being regurgitated just now.
then again lately it has been china bashing season all around the year so i it might be just baseline noise.
The Problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
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If they are all chinks and they are intimating other chinks why does this matter so much to you?
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You seem to be implying that just because prosecution cannot be successfully accomplished, one should pretend that the crime didn't happen. From indirect evidence I find the accusations extremely plausible.
There's a problem that the legal system is supposed to presume the accused are innocent, but that doesn't mean or imply that I should make the same presumption unless I am involved with their case...and I'm not.
I can quite accept that even were they innocent, they might well not desire to stand trial. B
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Were any of the defendants under US jurisdiction or have been arrested? Or is this simply another charging someone abroad with a crime, with no hope of prosecution, simply for political consumption?
It is also for the edification of literate people throughout the free world, and for the permanent historical record. Winnie's best friend, an indicted war criminal, will probably never stand trial either, but he still owns the title for evermore. Winnie might even earn that title himself one day.
PRC created a Police Station in Chinatown (Score:5, Informative)
https://abc7ny.com/chinese-pol... [abc7ny.com]
They did same in Australia
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne... [dailymail.co.uk]
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https://abc7ny.com/chinese-pol... [abc7ny.com]
They did same in Australia https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ne... [dailymail.co.uk]
Creating it in Chinatown makes more sense than creating it in Little Italy.
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And in Canada. Probably in any free country Chinese nationals manage to escape to from their shithole dictatorship.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/rcmp-i... [www.cbc.ca]
This needs to be called what it is. (Score:2)
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100% this ^^
This should result in swift and significant reprisal against China. If it does not, it shows how corrupt the Biden administration is.
China should be given a choice, reparations or we hang their people as spies.
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The Biden administration has taken objectively harder positions on China than his predecessors in this century.
Don't get mad, get even (Score:3)
Serve them their own medicine: insert pro-Taiwan messages into jillions of mainland sites and apps. To top it off, include "Xi Pooh is a piss-baby dictator!"
Create PoohGPT to invent lots of varieties to make it harder for spam filters to catch them. Use wide-ranging and indirect language, such as nicknames for Taiwan, Winnie, and the Tiananmen tank person so that they accidentally filter out tons of legitimate messages, creating chaos and administrative finger-pointing. Good Times!
US arrests for clandestine Chinese Police Station (Score:2)
THE UNITED STATES HAS arrested two residents of New York City for allegedly conspiring to create and operate a clandestine police station run by the Chinese government in the borough of Manhattan. The arrests come a month after authorities in Canada launched an investigation into allegations that the Chinese government was running at least two clandestine police stations in Montreal and four more in Toronto. THE UNITED STATES HAS arrested two residents of New Yo