Saturday, April 7, 2007

Chinese Espionage Against the U.S.: No Better Tool

Not that anyone likes having their asses handed to them, but since China claims to be peaceful... I wonder if they would give us ours on a silver platter. We're so caught up with news about dead models and fear that the intelligence agencies are looking into our purchasing behavior that, as Americans, we have lost sight of the enemy. They are here my friends: among us!

Chinese espionage directed against the United States has met with "total success for China" and "total failure" for America's own intelligence operations, said an author and reporter on national security issues.

Counter-intelligence operations have allowed the Chinese to block and manipulate U.S. electronic eavesdropping operations while the theft of U.S. technology has helped accelerate Beijing's military ambitions, Bill Gertz said Friday at a gathering of the Defense Forum Foundation on Capitol Hill.

Chinese operatives now have the ability to feed false information about the true nature and strategic aims of the communist regime, Gertz said in his talk. For that reason it is now easier for the Beijing government to circulate misinformation about a "peaceful rise" that belies potential hostility toward the United States, he added.



Not If, But When Will China Attack the U.S.

Many readers of CFA already know that China is attacking the U.S. daily. From black operations against U.S. citizens (mostly those who prescribe to Falun Gong), to front companies stealing technology. Recent news highlights the mass amount of this with the trial of Chi Mak, who stole piles of U.S. Naval technology. This fits with China's "soft power" initiative... but when will there be an all out military assault. The date is closing in... and fast.

Pentagon officials said intelligence estimates indicate that China will have produced enough satellite interceptors by 2010 to destroy most U.S. low-earth orbit satellites. It was hoped that the Chinese would disclose to Gen. Pace more details about the anti-satellite weapons program, which also includes ground-based lasers and electronic jammers that -- if used against both military and civilian satellites -- would severely damage U.S. government and society.

China's Easy Target: FALUN GONG


Reports continue to expand on one of the most amazing stories in 2006: China harvests organs from prisoners. The Falun Gong have been claiming that China is taking the organs from arrested Falun Gong practitioners... most arrests are unjustified and inhumane. Now we begin to see the Chinese Military connection to the practice. As this story unfolds, we will have to decide if China is ready to stand with the civilized world, and be considered an equal.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

January 31, 2007: Investigations into the growing organ transplant industry in China indicate that a major player is the Chinese military. There is a worldwide shortage of organs for transplant. Since China still executes hundreds of criminals each year, and has thousands of political prisoners, who often go into prison camps and just disappear, there always seems to be available organs for transplant in China. Desperate, and well heeled, foreigners come to China, get their life-saving transplant, and notice that there are a lot of military personnel working in the hospitals. The military is a major player in Chinese medical care, with a large network of hospitals for its millions of troops and their dependents.

Study: China's Army Harvesting Body Parts From Live Prisoners, Particularly Falun Gong Members

China's military is harvesting organs from unwilling live prison inmates, mostly Falun Gong practitioners, for transplants on a large scale — including to foreign recipients — according to a study.

The report's authors — Canada's former secretary of state for the Asia Pacific region David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas — implicated dozens of hospitals and jails throughout China in July, after a two-month investigation.

"The involvement of the People's Liberation Army in these transplants is widespread,'' Kilgour said at a press conference.

Chinese Covert Operations In The U.S.

Sounds like the stuff movies are made out of. Spend a little time reading the headlines and it wont take you long to understand there is a greater chance that not that Chinese operatives are working their MOJO on U.S. soil.

For now, their hostile operations seem to be directed at dissidents such as the Uigurs and Falun Gong. Of course, read through my previous posts and you'll get a good history of their U.S. based operations respective of Front Companies, Economic Espionage, Political Influence, and Theft of Sensitive U.S. Technology.

In an interesting article, Forbes outlines a number of Chinese black operations. With black operations comes, sleeper cells, safe houses, and spys..... the stuff spy movies are made of. Sexy stuff huh?

FORBES

Overseas Falun Gong practitioners are, for example, leading an underground campaign to hack China's Internet firewalls to counter the Chinese Communist Party's news blackout and propaganda in the Middle Kingdom. But there are many skirmishes between Chinese communism and Chinese spiritualism taking place on U.S. soil.

Last year, however, Falun Gong practitioners worldwide were themselves barraged with harassing phone calls, including death threats. Some of these campaigns involved hours of continuous and simultaneous ringing of work and home phones and private cell phones.

A few days before the July 1999 crackdown in China, Falun Gong Web sites in Canada and the U.S. began to crash. According to Ethan Gutmann, author of Losing the New China, a Falun Gong practitioner in Washington traced the "denial of service" hacker attacks through an Asia-Pacific Internet registry, to No. 14 East Chang'an Street, Beijing, where China's Ministry of Public Security is located.

The Chinese government's persecution of Falun Gong followers is allegedly run by the notorious Office 6-10, a specially created unit that has overseen a terror campaign, which survivors say includes mass arrests, imprisonment in labor camps, brainwashing, torture and, in some cases, murder, for all those who failed to renounce their allegiance to Falun Gong.

Consulte Gets JIggy WIth It!


Seems the Chinese Consulate in Houston has been sleeping at the wheel. Someone forgot to tell one of their officials "Chen Guangda" that China is killing, torturing, and cutting organs out of the Falun Gong. But hey, it's never to late to learn. He could always read Cover For Action to learn about China's persecution of the FLG.


NEWS ALERT!!!! Chinese Consulate in Houston wants to help the Falun Gong. Let me guess, "we can help you sell your organs".


Related story below:



Chen Guangda at the Chinese consulate in Houston denied the allegations. "The Chinese government never persecuted Falun Gong practitioners. We just outlawed Falun Gong because it is anti-social, anti-humanity and anti-science cult," Guangda said. "We just want to help them."

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

New News

Now readers of Cover For Action (CFA) can get the latestest print and video of CFA realted China News. Simple hit the links and updates on the right-hand side of my blog space.

Click a tag on the right-hand tool bar to bring up the latest articles respective of the tag. Video will load at the top of the page.

Smoof

Why Bobby Fletcher Is Off His Rocker

Why Fletcher Is Off His Rocker. Below is a post from Fletcher to an article on the Chi Mak news. My comments follow his post.

----------------------------------------

Bobby Fletcher's Post

Original charges against Chi Mak et al have been dropped. Government's petition to hold without bail has been denied.

It seems the prosecution have lied on so many things, it's beginning to smell like another Wen Ho Lee.

- no classified document; not about weapons at all
- files were not encripted in music; It's zipped for size
- no such list from China asking for data
- map of Knolls Atomic Lab turned out to be a hotel map from an old visit
- wiretap showed Chi Mak had no interested in the broken down Mak ancestrial home in Hong Kong

With no charge to nail the sister in-law, prosecution have trumped up a "fake marriage" charge, insinuating she whored herself out. Shame on us America:

Posted by bobby fletcher | February 14, 2006 6:52 PM
------------------------------------------------
Info below from the credible CI Centre.

Authorities say Mak and his wife copied the information onto CDs and then delivered them to Tai Wang Mak who encrypted the disks then was scheduled to fly to Hong Kong on Oct. 28 with Li. From there, Mak allegedly planned to travel to Guangzhou in China to meet a contact.

According to the 42-page affidavit, agents combing through the trash at Chi's residence found a number of documents torn into small pieces.

One document was machine-printed in China and instructed Chi to "join more [professional] associations and participate in more seminars with special subject matters" and then compile the special conference material on a disk. The document also lists the military technologies that were being sought including:

  • Space-based electromagnetic intercept system
  • Space-launched magnetic levitational platform
  • Electromagnetic artillery system
  • Submarine torpedoes
  • Electromagnetic launch system
  • Aircraft carrier electronic systems

A second document, hand-printed in Chinese, contained another list of technologies sought:

  • Water jet propulsion
  • Ship submarine propulsion technology, non-air reliant
  • Power system configuration technology, weapons standardization, modularization
  • Early warning technologies, command and control systems technology, defense against nuclear attack technology
  • Permanent electromagnetic motor, overall solution for shipboard power system
  • Shipboard internal and external communications systems
  • Establishment of high frequency, self-linking, satellite communications
  • Submarine HF transient launch technology
  • DDX (next generation destroyer)
OTHER INFO ON MAK

-
Gaylord testified that the FBI found letters written by a Chinese aviation official to a Boeing engineer named Greg Chung, who worked on the space shuttle program. The official, a representative of China's ministry of aviation, identified Mak as a relative in the letters and sought design information for the “development of the space shuttle,” Gaylord said.

The official, identified as Gu Wei Hao, wrote he would find a way to pay Chung cash in person for expenses incurred while collecting or purchasing information and said he could channel information through Chi Mak.




China's Growing Treat: How Many More Maks Are Out There?

China's Spying

If you have not been paying attention, read a little about Chi Mak. And for those who've been paying attention, recall Bobby Fletcher said this case was much ado about nothing, and that the U.S. lied about Chi Mak. Now, you can decide, first bit is Bobby Fletcher's post and the second is from Bloomberg. You decide.
---------------------------------------------------

Original charges against Chi Mak et al have been dropped. Government's petition to hold without bail has been denied.

It seems the prosecution have lied on so many things, it's beginning to smell like another Wen Ho Lee.

- no classified document; not about weapons at all
- files were not encripted in music; It's zipped for size
- no such list from China asking for data
- map of Knolls Atomic Lab turned out to be a hotel map from an old visit
- wiretap showed Chi Mak had no interested in the broken down Mak ancestrial home in Hong Kong

With no charge to nail the sister in-law, prosecution have trumped up a "fake marriage" charge, insinuating she whored herself out. Shame on us America:

Posted by bobby fletcher | February 14, 2006 6:52 PM

------------------------------------------------

China's Spying

April 2 (Bloomberg) -- In a Santa Ana, California, courtroom, 66-year-old engineer Chi Mak listens to federal prosecutors describe how he and his family stole secrets from his employer, L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. The alleged target: data about Navy submarine engines that run silently to avoid detection.

U.S. intelligence officials say the Mak case is unusual -- not in the nature of the charges brought against him, but that charges were brought at all.

For every person caught and accused of passing U.S. military and trade secrets to China, they say, scores of others go undetected. Taking advantage of an outmanned counterintelligence effort drained and distracted by the wars in Iraq and against al-Qaeda, current and former officials say, China has systematically managed to gain sensitive information on U.S. nuclear bombs and ship and missile designs.

``Iraq and the struggle with terrorism are sucking resources across the board,'' says Joel Brenner, the top counterintelligence official in the office of Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell. Meanwhile, ``the Chinese are really making a run at us.''

Adds Keith Riggin, a former senior official at the Central Intelligence Agency who focused on China issues: ``If the American people knew the number of officers going against the Chinese, they would be appalled.'' He says his frustration with the lack of resources was one reason he ended a 24-year career in 2006.

`Troublesome'

While 140 foreign intelligence services are trying to penetrate U.S. agencies, China's is the most aggressive, Brenner says. He describes China's activities as ``an intensifying and troublesome pattern.''

Chinese officials say the U.S. allegations are meritless.

``I wonder why people always feel threatened by others and treat others as thieves,'' Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, said at a March 15 press briefing in Beijing. ``It indicates these people have a chip on their shoulders and have fragile psychologies.''

While the Federal Bureau of Investigation tripled the size of its China unit in 2001, plans for further expansion were scotched when the Iraq war began, says Rudy Guerin, a China expert who retired from the bureau last year. David Szady, the FBI's former assistant director for counterintelligence, says the FBI should hire another 1,500 agents, and most should be used against China's espionage within the U.S.

More Agents

Stephen Kodak, an FBI spokesman, declines to say how many more might be necessary. At the same time, he adds that ``the bureau would always welcome additional assets.''

Central Intelligence Agency spokesman Paul Gimigliano says his agency has enough resources, and that ``it would be wrong to suggest that other priorities have diluted the attention we pay to China. Over the past five years, the opposite has been true.''

The FBI spent $2.2 billion on counterterrorism and counterintelligence programs last year; the CIA budget is classified. The U.S. won't disclose how many counterintelligence agents are working on China-related issues.

U.S. officials say there's overwhelming evidence that China has a well-thought-out plan to employ thousands of professional spies and amateurs to get sensitive U.S. military and business data, sometimes directly from sympathetic employees, sometimes through a joint venture or third party.

Submarine Data

Mak, his wife, brother, sister-in-law and nephew were indicted on charges of conspiring to export U.S. defense articles to China's government. In court papers, prosecutors say he copied submarine data from L-3's Anaheim, California-based Power Paragon unit onto compact discs and enlisted the other family members to encrypt the information and help smuggle it to China. Brenner says the disks also contained information on the U.S. Navy's next-generation DD(X) warship.

Under questioning, Mak admitted sending information to Chinese operatives since 1983 on technology that included radar systems of Aegis cruisers, which are used to defend against multiple missile attacks, Brenner says.

Mak and his relatives pleaded innocent to the charges. His lawyer, Ronald Kaye, says he was taking the disks for a conference with fellow engineers, and that the information about the Navy engine was obsolete. The engineer also got approval from his supervisor to make presentations at the conference, Kay says.

`Asset to His Country'

Mak ``was not only an asset to the company but a profound asset to his country,'' he says. Mak's relatives will go on trial in May.

U.S. officials say China's effort encompasses industrial secrets as well as national-security ones. Brenner cites the case of Gary Min, a DuPont Co. chemist who admitted obtaining information on company products, including materials used in airplane construction, that prosecutors valued at $400 million.

Authorities say that between August and December 2005, Min, 43, downloaded 22,000 confidential abstracts from the Wilmington, Delaware-based company's electronic library. The documents included information on all DuPont's major product lines as well as emerging technologies.

Some of the searches focused on Vespel, a synthetic resin used to coat car, airplane and oil pump parts, and Declar, a plastic material used in the automotive and energy industries and in airplane interiors, according to court papers.

Shredded Documents

U.S. law-enforcement authorities said that when they searched Min's Grove City, Ohio, home, they found computers containing confidential files, garbage bags filled with shredded company documents and the remains of DuPont papers that had been burned in the fireplace. In court documents, DuPont said the information would be ``highly valuable'' on the open market in ``foreign countries, specifically China.''

A call to Min's lawyers wasn't returned. Min hasn't been charged with being a Chinese spy.

Brenner says his office is still assessing the damage from another case involving Katrina Leung, who the FBI had used for 20 years as a double agent to obtain information from the Chinese, and who prosecutors in turn accused of being a Chinese agent herself.

Authorities accused Leung, 52, of taking documents from James Smith, head of the FBI's Chinese counterintelligence operation in Los Angeles, over the course of a nearly 20-year affair with him.

Peter Lee

Some of those documents related to ``Royal Tourist,'' the FBI code name for the investigation of Peter Lee, an employee of defense contractor TRW Inc. Lee, who was accused of giving radar technology being developed to track submarines to Chinese scientists, pleaded guilty in 1997 to willful transmission of national defense information to a person not entitled to receive it.

While the case against Leung was dismissed in 2005, Smith pleaded guilty to making a false statement to the FBI about his relationship with her. Smith was one of the FBI's most seasoned China experts, a resource the agency has struggled to replace, intelligence officials say.

The CIA also hasn't been able to replace its veteran China experts when they retire, Riggin says. ``We're losing huge experience in this area.''

With the CIA occupied with preventing U.S. government secrets from falling into the wrong hands, Riggin and others say, companies doing business in China are especially vulnerable to losing non-defense information. U.S. businesses are paying particular attention to the first intellectual-property suit brought in a Chinese court by Santa Clara, California-based Intel Corp., the world's biggest semiconductor maker.


Sunday, April 1, 2007

Chinese Slave Drivers At It Again

Chinese authorities in the northwestern Xinjiang region are forcing tens of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs into producing almonds for the county government without pay, local residents and one official say.

Another Chinese Spy

The last article I posted would have us believe that the Chinese use propaganda spys to influence and push a particular agenda, as it alluded in the Bobby Fletcher article. But they are after just more than propaganda.

SANTA ANA, Calif. — The career of a Chinese-born electrical engineer, Chi Mak, over four decades is a textbook example of how China's spy services encourage their agents to burrow into American society in order to steal America's defense secrets, federal prosecutors said yesterday.

Mr. Mak was arrested in 2005 after FBI agents stopped his brother and sister-in-law at the Los Angeles airport as they were about to travel to Guangzhou, China. In carry-on bags, the couple had a compact disc containing music files, as well as encrypted technical papers pertaining to quiet propulsion and other projects Mr. Mak worked on at Power Paragon.

Mr. Staples said the high-grade encryption was the hallmark of an espionage operation. "It's not an encryption program that you can go to Fry's or Office Depot and buy. It was a custom-made encryption program and its author was a Chinese man," the prosecutor said.

Bobby Fletcher: In The News

Amazing how Bobby Fletcher gets around...so much so that he's in the news now! He's been to my blog several times.... to bad the article did not address the other pro-communist comments that have come out of Bobby.... i.e. Wen Ho Lee, Chi Mak, etc. etc.

Western Standard (Alberta): Sowing Confusion; Embarrassed by reports of live organ harvesting, China's sympathizers launch a high-tech disinformation campaign

Copyright 2007 Western Standard
All Rights Reserved
Western Standard (Alberta)

April 9, 2007 Monday
Final Edition

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 24

LENGTH: 699 words

HEADLINE: Sowing Confusion; Embarrassed by reports of live organ harvesting,
China's sympathizers launch a high-tech disinformation campaign

BYLINE: Kevin Steel, Western Standard

BODY:


He posts his messages everywhere under several different names on Internet
blogs and discussion groups. He writes letters to the editor anywhere and
sends e-mails to anyone--anyone who might take seriously shocking evidence
that the Chinese government "harvests" and sells live organs from political
prisoners. His main message is that the Falun Gong--the group which first
brought evidence of live organ harvesting to light--and the Epoch Times
newspaper that broke that story are spreading propaganda against China's
Communist government. And he's not even Chinese. He is Charles Liu, a
40-year-old Taiwanese-born technology consultant who lives in Issaquah,
Wash., and does business in China.

Liu has been so active and so pro-Beijing in his writings that some Falun
Gong supporters--in particular Epoch Times reporter Jana Shearer--have
accused him of being an agent for the Chinese government, waging a
disinformation campaign against them, trying to confuse people, and
deliberately wasting everyone's time.

It's a charge that upsets Liu, who dismisses it as "a bunch of kooky friends
making unfounded accusations. It's just a bunch of blog BS." As for why he
devotes so much energy to attacking the Falun Gong and the organ harvesting
allegations, he says, "My position is that I simply don't agree with their
brand of politics, because I observed their politics turning from
anti-Communist party, to anti-China, . . . and recently it's morphed into
this anti-Chinese hysteria and that's going to be hurting people," he says.
As an Asian-American, he says he decided to speak up.

He doesn't really explain, when asked, why he started a blog last year
called "The Myth of Tiananmen Square Massacre" under the name of Bobby
Fletcher (one of his online aliases, which he also uses to comment on the
Western Standard's online blog). On that blog, he pushes the minimal 250
casualty figure that the Chinese government has always maintained died that
night in 1989 (more reliable estimates put the figure at at least ten times
that).

Liu's actions mirror disinformation campaigns waged by the Chinese
government in the past. Typically, these include the deliberate spreading of
false or misleading facts to sow confusion or doubt among the conflicting
accounts. The classic example is the Tiananmen Square massacre; the Chinese
government has maintained that no one died in the square itself, that there
was only pushing and shoving on the streets around the square, resulting in
a few military casualties. Overseas, the CCP relies on its United Front Work
department, part of the Chinese intelligence service, to propagate its
message. During the Cold War, the Soviets employed many overseas flunkies
through their Disinformation Department.

Former Canadian MP David Kilgour, who co-authored a report on China's
macabre organ harvesting industry, has received many propaganda e-mails from
Liu. For instance, Liu has written repeatedly that a U.S. congressional
committee looked into the organ harvesting allegations and found nothing.
"[David] Matas and I gave evidence to that subcommittee and got support from
both the Republican chairman and the Democratic vice-chair," says Kilgour.
"I just came to the conclusion he was trying to waste my time, and I have
other things to do."

Winnipeg-based human rights lawyer, and Kilgour's co-author, David Matas,
really doesn't know what to make of Liu. "I don't know who he is, but what
he does is spend a lot of time replicating nonsense to defend the Chinese
government," Matas says.

The only concern Matas has is that Liu seems to know who he and Kilgour met
with in the United States to discuss their report. Matas discovered Liu had
sent e-mails to politicians--and their staff--prior to the meetings. "The
only people who would have that information would potentially be the Chinese
government. I can't imagine how Liu would know we were meeting with those
people," Matas says. "We're not super-secretive, but you can't find
information on the Internet or in any public place about who we're meeting
with, where and when." He himself has received at least 10 e-mails from Liu,
all of which he's ignored. Maybe Matas is onto something with that approach.

GRAPHIC:
Colour Photo: CP, Dave Cahn; David Kilgour (left) and David Matas,
co-authors of a report on China's organ harvesting industry: How does Liu
know who they're meeting with? ;

LOAD-DATE: March 29, 2007