Business
DOJ charges 7 Chinese spies with targeting US political leaders, major businesses
From LifeSiteNews
By Matt Lamb
The hackers ‘spent approximately 14 years targeting U.S. and foreign critics, businesses, and political officials’ as part of a massive Chinese espionage operation, according to the DOJ.
Hackers targeted defense contractors, American political leaders, and U.S. companies with malware as part of a surveillance operation for the Chinese Communist Party, the Department of Justice (DOJ) alleges.
The DOJ released details on the indictment of seven Chinese individuals who have been charged with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud,” according to a Monday news release.
The individuals are part of a People’s Republic of China (PRC) group who “spent approximately 14 years targeting U.S. and foreign critics, businesses, and political officials in furtherance of the PRC’s economic espionage and foreign intelligence objectives,” according to the DOJ.
Officials unsealed the indictment on Monday, though charges were originally filed in January.
The indictment provides further insight into how the CCP targets American companies and political leaders for retribution and influence using computer viruses.
The CCP and its Ministry of State Security “sought to obtain information on political, economic and security policies that might affect the PRC, along with military, scientific and technical information of value to the PRC,” the indictment states. “Among other things, the MSS and its state security departments focused on surreptitiously identifying and influencing the foreign policy of other countries, including the United States.”
The hackers used a front company called Wuhan XRZ beginning in at least 2010. They would send fake emails to U.S. senators, business leaders, and information technology companies looking to gain access. They were successful in hacking defense contractors, information technology providers, and universities, among other victims.
The DOJ itself was targeted, along the Commerce Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House.
The Justice Department alleges:
These computer network intrusion activities resulted in the confirmed and potential compromise of work and personal email accounts, cloud storage accounts and telephone call records belonging to millions of Americans, including at least some information that could be released in support of malign influence targeting democratic processes and institutions, and economic plans, intellectual property, and trade secrets belonging to American businesses, and contributed to the estimated billions of dollars lost every year as a result of the PRC’s state-sponsored apparatus to transfer U.S. technology to the PRC.
The “Conspirators,” as they are called in the filing, began sending out phishing emails in at least 2015, according to the DOJ. The emails would look like they were from “prominent American journalists” with excerpts from news sites.
“If the recipient activated the tracking link by opening the email, information about the recipient, including the recipient’s location, IP addresses, network schematics and specific devices used to access the pertinent email accounts, was transmitted to a server controlled by the Conspirators,” the DOJ stated. “The Conspirators used this method to enable more direct and sophisticated targeting of recipients’ home routers and other electronic devices, including those of high ranking U.S. government officials and politicians and election campaign staff from both major U.S. political parties.”
In just a few months in 2018, the hackers “sent more than 10,000 malicious email messages” to “high-ranking U.S. government officials and their advisors, including officials involved in international policy and foreign trade issues.”
They also targeted campaign staff for “a presidential campaign” in 2020. The filing does not state which campaign.
European Union and United Kingdom leaders who were part of the anti-Communist Inter Parliamentary Alliance on China were also targeted.
Other victims included: “a nuclear power engineering company,” a defense contractor, an aerospace contractor, and “a leading American manufacturer of software and computer services based in California.”
Telecommunications companies, law firms, and steel companies were also targeted.
The CCP impersonated real steel companies in order to gain access to their emails during a battle over tariffs on China. After the Trump administration announced new steel tariffs in 2018, the hackers “registered a malicious domain impersonating the legitimate domain of one of the largest steel producers in the United States (the ‘American Steel Company’)” as well as the International Steel Trade Forum.
“These malicious domains allowed the Conspirators to communicate with malware they installed on the network of the American Steel Company to access and surveil the victim,” the DOJ stated.
They also targeted the Norwegian government in 2018 because it was considering awarding the Nobel Prize to Hong Kong democracy activists.
The PRC is a “malicious nation state,” a federal prosecutor stated in the DOJ news release.
“These allegations pull back the curtain on China’s vast illegal hacking operation that targeted sensitive data from U.S. elected and government officials, journalists, and academics; valuable information from American companies; and political dissidents in America and abroad. Their sinister scheme victimized thousands of people and entities across the world, and lasted for well over a decade,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace for the Eastern District of New York stated in the news release.
“America’s sovereignty extends to its cyberspace. Today’s charges demonstrate my office’s commitment to upholding and protecting that jurisdiction, and to putting an end to malicious nation state cyber activity.”
Business
CBC’s business model is trapped in a very dark place
I Testified Before a Senate Committee About the CBC
I recently testified before the Senate Committee for Transport and Communications. You can view that session here. Even though the official topic was CBC’s local programming in Ontario, everyone quickly shifted the discussion to CBC’s big-picture problems and how their existential struggles were urgent and immediate. The idea that deep and fundamental changes within the corporation were unavoidable seemed to enjoy complete agreement.
I’ll use this post as background to some of the points I raised during the hearing.
You might recall how my recent post on CBC funding described a corporation shedding audience share like dandruff while spending hundreds of millions of dollars producing drama and comedy programming few Canadians consume. There are so few viewers left that I suspect they’re now identified by first name rather than as a percentage of the population.
Since then I’ve learned a lot more about CBC performance and about the broadcast industry in general.
For instance, it’ll surprise exactly no one to learn that fewer Canadians get their audio from traditional radio broadcasters. But how steep is the decline? According to the CRTC’s Annual Highlights of the Broadcasting Sector 2022-2023, since 2015, “hours spent listening to traditional broadcasting has decreased at a CAGR of 4.8 percent”. CAGR, by the way, stands for compound annual growth rate.
Dropping 4.8 percent each year means audience numbers aren’t just “falling”; they’re not even “falling off the edge of a cliff”; they’re already close enough to the bottom of the cliff to smell the trees. Looking for context? Between English and French-language radio, the CBC spends around $240 million each year.
Those listeners aren’t just disappearing without a trace. the CRTC also tells us that Canadians are increasingly migrating to Digital Media Broadcasting Units (DMBUs) – with numbers growing by more than nine percent annually since 2015.
The CBC’s problem here is that they’re not a serious player in the DMBU world, so they’re simply losing digital listeners. For example, of the top 200 Spotify podcasts ranked by popularity in Canada, only four are from the CBC.
Another interesting data point I ran into related to that billion dollar plus annual parliamentary allocation CBC enjoys. It turns out that that’s not the whole story. You may recall how the government added another $42 million in their most recent budget.
But wait! That’s not all! Between CBC and SRC, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) ponied up another $97 million for fiscal 2023-2024 to cover specific programming production budgets.
Technically, Canada Media Fund grants target individual projects planned by independent production companies. But those projects are usually associated with the “envelope” of one of the big broadcasters – of which CBC is by far the largest. 2023-2024 CMF funding totaled $786 million, and CBC’s take was nearly double that of their nearest competitor (Bell).
But there’s more! Back in 2016, the federal budget included an extra $150 million each year as a “new investment in Canadian arts and culture”. It’s entirely possible that no one turned off the tap and that extra government cheque is still showing up each year in the CBC’s mailbox. There was also a $93 million item for infrastructure and technological upgrades back in the 2017-2018 fiscal year. Who knows whether that one wasn’t also carried over.
So CBC’s share of government funding keeps growing while its share of Canadian media consumers shrinks. How do you suppose that’ll end?
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ESG
Can’t afford Rent? Groceries for your kids? Trudeau says suck it up and pay the tax!
Watch Canada’s Prime Minister tell an anti-poverty group, your ability to buy “groceries for my kids” is less important than sacrificing to pay his carbon tax.
In case you still thought there might be even the tiniest chance Justin Trudeau might come around.. well this settles it. He is as they say, ‘beyond the pale’.
Sure we’ve pieced this together over the last number of years, but it’s still SHOCKING to see him say it directly, proclaim it proudly. This week Trudeau received applause from an audience of the intellectually suffering at something called the “Global Citizen Now” panel discussion on the sidelines of the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Rio.
Much appreciation for the first short video below to Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre who shared his ferocious reaction to Trudeau’s anti-human comments, challenging the current PM to call an immediate election.
Or course there will be no quick election call. To Justin, it’s more important to cling to the undercarriage of a taxpayer funded jet so he can fly the globe stunning audiences unfortunately already stunned by their utter terror of losing the planet.
In their horror at their inability to turn the switch off and let us all freeze/starve to death this winter, they applaud lovingly for their intellectual leader/sock model as he describes how hard it is to convince angry, hungry people they really need to suck it up.
If only he read a history book.. any history book.. apologies, any book at all. Truly even spending some time with the literary version of an Al Gore video rant would at lest keep JT occupied so he couldn’t speak for a few moments. I’m pretty sure every time he opens his mouth, the temperature in Canada rises as millions of frustrated hotheads (hello there) explode, spewing steam high up into the upper atmosphere where water particles do much more damage to our planet than the final exhaling of a non grocery-eating-planet-loving-Canadian.
Watch Pierre Poilievre’s video and assuage the ensuing headache by mapping out your route to a polling booth. If this doesn’t sell a couple of those ‘Axe the Tax’ shirts for the Poilievre team, well.. enjoy your stroll to the foodbank.
Here’s a link to his entire discussion. If you have a strong stomach and 20 minutes of your life to donate to a higher cause… No silly, not the intended cause of the anti-poverty group… But to the intellectual cause of understanding just how twisted the logic has become for those who fly around the world to wine and dine, only to break long enough to tell us they think it’s perfectly fine if we can’t buy groceries for our kids.
By the way, please save a bit of your shock and disappointment for the hapless host of the ‘anti-poverty’ Global Citizen. This was apparently on the sidelines of a G20 Summit. I would expect this drivel to be called out at a respectable middle school debate. Apparently the ‘anti-poverty’ Global Citizen people aren’t overly concerned with poverty. Do we need to say that not being able to afford groceries is in fact THE definition of poverty? Or course not. It would be much easier for them to change their name to Former Global Citizens.
You were warned.
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