RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18885/china-drones-dji-spying

The Chinese company DJI controls nearly 90% of the world market for consumer and commercial grade drones.

The excellent reporting on DJI by Kitchen tracks efforts by the company to lobby against passage of a bill called the American Security Drone Act (ASDA), now before Congress, to outlaw federal government use of DJI products entirely. What is the risk? Not only the data gathered by the drones themselves, but everything collected by the mobile app with which users control their drones and manage their DJI accounts. Like many other mobile applications, this includes a user’s contacts, photos, GPS location, and online activities.

Every DJI drone in the skies above America is as good as a hovering Chinese spy.

DJI is engaged in a fierce lobbying effort to prevent passage of the ASDA bill. So fierce that they have enlisted police officers from local jurisdictions to come to Washington and lobby congressional staffers about how great DJI drones are for their cash-strapped local forces…. DJI lobbyists from firms like Squire Patton Boggs, Cassidy & Associates, and CLS Strategies are taking no chances. The company spent $2.2 million in lobbying efforts in 2020 and $1.4 million last year on lobbying activities, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Much as they are doing with products such as solar panels, the Chinese realize that cornering the market in an area where reach equals access is critical to their long-term plans to dominate. Their pattern includes stealing technology they cannot create themselves and using any means available to aid in that theft. Therefore, every bit of access to information they can scour is of more value to them than the product used to get it.

Understanding these patterns is central to recognizing that the Chinese do this to their own people as well…. [through] many different forms of what we may baldly call blackmail.

The Wilson Center, a bipartisan think tank in Washington, reported in 2017 that a small community of PRC students and diplomats have engaged in intimidation tactics ranging from intelligence gathering to financial retaliation… It was just those sorts of concerns that led the Trump administration to create the “China Initiative” within the Justice Department in 2018. This effort generated plenty of convictions of Chinese nationals in the US for technology theft and other forms of industrial espionage. The Biden administration ended the program this year….

China’s strategy has for years hinged on infiltration by some Chinese scientists and researchers working abroad in the US and other western nations, with threats against their Chinese relatives as leverage for them to do so.

Chinese intelligence gathering in the US takes many forms and has different purposes. Most Americans are familiar with some of their means and tactics, but not with how widespread and persistent they are.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/house-republicans-want-know-why-tsa-allowing-robert-spencer/

Could the Biden administration all be some huge joke? A parody or some crazy dark comedy in which a career political hack with rapidly advancing dementia somehow becomes president and bumbles around as his radical handlers begin implementing a dizzying number of measures to weaken America and endanger Americans? Is there anything the Biden administration is doing that would make it clear that this is not actually what’s happening here?

The latest appalling news to come from Biden’s handlers is that they are allowing illegal immigrants to board commercial planes using their arrest warrants as identification. No, they’re not then arrested. They’re just flying the friendly skies, thanks to the munificence of Old Joe. Of course, that’s our money they’re spending, but what else is new?

Fox News reported Tuesday that some Republicans in the House are upset about this and are “calling for the Biden administration to provide additional information on what they call an ‘extremely troubling’ policy that allows illegal immigrants to board planes using civil arrest warrants and other related documents as ID.” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and twenty-three other Republicans wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, asking him why the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) allows illegal immigrants to fly around with “civil immigration arrest warrants and deportation orders” as their only identification.

The letter notes that aside from the obvious problems with this, “these documents are not secure documents and can easily be forged, copied, or otherwise manipulated. Given the fact that American citizens are constantly being reminded that their IDs will soon need to be REAL ID compliant to board an airplane, it is extremely troubling that TSA is allowing illegal aliens to use nonsecure documents as IDs to board planes.”

It’s also a testimony to the breakdown of the proper enforcement of the law under this administration’s misrule. An illegal immigrant with deportation orders shouldn’t be able to board a plane anywhere except to a destination somewhere outside the United States. Instead, the deportation papers themselves allow him or her a taxpayer-funded joyride.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/08/biden-open-door-terrorists-daniel-greenfield/

A few Republican senators are making an important point.

Ten Republican Senators sent a letter to members of the Biden administration this week demanding an explanation for a rule change that will allow some individuals who have materially supported terrorist organizations to immigrate to the U.S.

“We write because the American people deserve an explanation regarding the broad, open-ended nature of this authority for exempting individuals who would otherwise be barred from immigration to the United States for supporting a terrorist organization,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (Tenn.) and his colleagues wrote in the letter addressed to Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The point that they make in their letter is that Biden not only provided a waiver for terrorists, but made it as open-ended as possible.

The June 8 determination by the Departments of Homeland Security and State announced that people who have provided “insignificant” or “limited” material support to terrorist organizations in the past will no longer be barred from immigration.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/china-charge-us-lab-lloyd-billingsley/

The Galveston National Laboratory (GNL), part of the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) and funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), focuses on “dangerous pathogens” with the “potential to be used as weapons around the world.”

This same GNL signed agreements with three Chinese labs, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), that gave China the power to destroy “secret files, materials and equipment, without any backups. “The agreements applied to “all cooperation and exchange documents, data, details and materials,” were renewable every five years, and the confidentiality terms remaining in force even after termination.

As The Epoch Times reports, the UTMB now concedes that officials signed “poorly drafted” agreements, and that the signing could violate Texas law. Also in play are violations of a more serious order.

The Galveston National Lab is a 2008 creation of NIAID, the division of the National Institutes of Health headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci since 1984. Dr. Fauci funded dangerous gain-of-function research, which makes viruses more lethal and transmissible, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, controlled by Communist China and not accountable to American officials.

In addition to some $4 million in U.S. funding, which Fauci laundered through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV received a cargo of deadly pathogens courtesy of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu. As Israeli molecular biologist Dr. Dany Shoham documented in China and Viruses: The Case of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu, the Chinese scientist came to head the special pathogens program at Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18820/iran-isis-america

The recent indictment of a member of the Iranian regime’s IRGC terror network for soliciting the assassination of former US National Security Advisor John Bolton provided a window into how Iran has targeted former Trump administration members.

The IRGC operative struck up a relationship with an Iranian-American on social media by initially offering $10,000 for photos of Bolton. This is a familiar form of espionage tradecraft in which a foreign spy solicits an American to perform a seemingly harmless and legal act, often involving photography, such as taking photos of individuals or cars, that is then revealed to be espionage committed at the behest of a foreign power. The patsy is then told that he has a choice between committing more serious crimes or being turned in to the FBI as a spy.

[I]t now appears that Iran has picked up the same trick.

Online crowdsourcing frees Iran from the need to risk the more profitable terror networks. There is evidence that the Islamic terror state is soliciting Iranians and Shiite Muslims in the United States over social media to do its dirty work while offering them sizable sums of money. It’s unknown whether the Rushdie attack came off this way, but the perpetrator’s social media was filled with Iranian Jihadist propaganda. That would have made him a likely recruitment target.

If Iran is working to duplicate its own version of the Al Qaeda and ISIS online training and recruitment system, the threat to Americans could be much more serious than the stabbing of one dissident writer in New York or a man catfished on a date in Nevada. The Islamic regime’s ideal scenario for nuclear weapons would be to detonate them with plausible deniability

For now, Tehran would prefer to carry out attacks by cultivating disposable foreign assets. And once such a capability exists and has been sufficiently tested, it could be used for mass casualty terrorist attacks.

Even nuclear ones.

The Biden administration is rushing to cut a deal with Iran that will legitimize its nuclear weapons program even as the IRGC continues to plot terror attacks in the United States. Obama’s “breakthrough” proposal to detach a nuclear deal from terrorism left us negotiating in bad faith with a regime that made no secret of its determination to kill Americans.

Crowdsourcing Jihad creates further distance between the state sponsors and funders of terrorism, the perpetrators and their victims. The Pulse gay nightclub massacre and the Boston Marathon bombings were traceable to individuals, and then only distantly to the Islamic terror groups providing information and training, and hardly at all to the governments behind them.

Iran would like to replicate this model knowing that… if there is enough plausible deniability, we will do nothing about even the worst kinds of attacks like September 11. Just ask Qatar and the Saudis.

The stabbing of author Salman Rushdie by a Lebanese Shiite Muslim from New Jersey may be the culmination of efforts by Iran to imitate Al Qaeda and ISIS by building its own online terror network to carry out attacks inside the United States of America. The latest reports indicate that Hadi Matar, Rushdie’s attacker, had been in touch with members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18790/us-agriculture-china

The more US agricultural technology China acquires, especially through theft, in order to become dominant in the agritech field, the worse the US will fare when it comes to selling its own technology, whether to China or third countries.

The specific goal is for China to be able to satisfy 95% of its demand for agricultural machinery with equipment that is manufactured in China. According to the USCC report, those policies, underpinned in part by technological theft, have negatively affected US exports to China of agricultural equipment….

China has been expanding its ownership of US land over the past decade from 13,720 acres in 2010 to 352,140 acres in 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

China’s largest purchase in the US agriculture sector so far has been Smithfield Foods in 2013, the largest pork producer in the US. China’s WH Group — a state-owned company, which began as a meatpacking business in China — owns it today. At the time of the sale, Smithfield had 25 U.S. plants, 460 farms, and contracts with 2,100 producers in 12 states and the ownership of Smithfield accounted for more than 146,000 acres of US land.

“While China’s main interest in obtaining GM seeds from the United States is in improving its crop yields, the potential weaponization of agricultural IP is possible,” the USSC warned. “… Similar to hacking a computer code, Beijing could easily hack the code or DNA of U.S. GM seeds and conduct biowarfare by creating some type of blight that could destroy U.S. crops… a virus or fungus engineered to kill a GM plant could wipe out an entire crop…” — U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Staff Research Report, May 26, 2022.

The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) recently warned that China’s interest in the agriculture of the United States poses both a serious economic challenge and a security risk to the United States.

China sits on 7-9% percent of the world’s arable land, 294 million acres, but is home to nearly 20% (1.4 billion in 2020) of the global population (nearly 8 billion in 2022). By comparison, the US has more than 375 million acres of arable land and a population of 329.5 million.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/18/how-much-of-the-u-s-has-china-already-infiltrated-right-under-our-noses/

Through land grabs, media partners, and spies, the Chinese assault is less of a swift invasion and more of an endless infiltration.

Numerous pieces have been published discussing the inexorable rise of China, and the likelihood of the Chinese economy overtaking the United States’ economy. More concerning, though, is the fact that Chinese companies closely aligned with Beijing are directly influencing operations in the United States. They are buying up land, influencing news and media networks, and shaping the narratives on college campuses. The Chinese assault is less of a swift invasion and more of an endless infiltration.

Land Grabs

Fufeng Group, a company with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), recently acquired 300 acres of prime farmland in North Dakota for $2.6 million. China now owns well over 192,000 agricultural acres in the United States.

On July 25, obviously concerned by Fufeng’s purchase, Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota asked the U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to “provide clarity on whether this land purchase has national security implications.”

Burgum’s fears are most definitely warranted. Over the last decade, Chinese ownership of farmland in the United States has increased dramatically. To compound matters, only a handful of states ban foreign ownership of farmland. Since 2016, a mysterious billionaire by the name of Sun Guangxinhas spent tens of millions of dollars buying land in Texas. Sun’s ties to the CCP are well known. 

In truth, Chinese ownership of American farmland is just one part of the disturbing equation. Residential real estate is the second part. China now accounts for roughly a quarter of total foreign investment, in U.S. residential real estate, according to Market Watch. The Chinese are now the largest foreign buyers of U.S. homes and this has been the case for close to a decade. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-thousand-talents-is-999-too-many-energy-department-china-technology-transfer-research-innovation-national-lab-conflict-of-interest-appropriation-11659980858?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

When I joined the U.S. Department of Energy in 2017, I was briefed about how pervasively the Chinese Communist Party had woven itself into the U.S. government’s research and innovation efforts. Traditionally, labs and academic institutions around the world and their researchers work on projects together. And periodically, foreign institutions, including in China, compensate Americans for their efforts. The Communist Party began to use these interactions to recruit people for their technology-appropriation programs.

I should have known. Before I joined the department, I was in the nuclear industry in the private sector, and served on an Energy Department advisory board. Chinese state entities often invited me to attend nuclear conferences and tour the country—all expenses paid. I always said no, because I was too busy. In retrospect, I certainly am glad I was. The invitations have resumed since I left the government, and my answer is a well-informed no.

I learned that people working at the Energy Department’s National Laboratories had significant engagements with China. Some were paid by one of the many Chinese Communist Party Thousand Talents Plans while concurrently working at sensitive U.S. government labs. These agreements often required technology transfer as well as support for recruiting more members to the TTPs. This was also happening at other agencies, and it was recently disclosed that these include nonscience and international institutions such as the Federal Reserve and the Inter-American Development Bank.

The weakness in the Energy Department’s compliance rules was that there were no disclosure or conflict-of-interest policies regarding foreign engagement or research and technologies other than those involving strategic weapons. There were no rules about research in quantum computing and artificial intelligence, which will have a large economic impact and defense applications.

https://www.hstoday.us/featured/why-proactive-cybersecurity-is-a-must-in-todays-sophisticated-threat-environment/

In recent years, the cybersecurity focus and activities by both industry and government have been reactive to whatever is the latest threat or breach. As a result, mitigating the threats was difficult because, from the outset, cyber-defenders were always at least one step behind.

The reactive mindset has been changing due to a series of wake-up calls that have included a major series of intrusions by sophisticated threat actors against many high-profile targets (including SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline, OPM, Anthem, Yahoo, and many others) that exposed a flawed approach to defending data and operating with a passive preparedness.

As our reliance on the interconnectivity of cyber devices, enterprises, and applications on the cyber landscape has grown, so have the cyber intrusions and threats from malware and hackers. The growing and sophisticated cyber threat actors include various criminal enterprises, loosely affiliated hackers, and adversarial nation-states. The firm Cybersecurity Ventures expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025. Cybercrime To Cost the World $10.5 Trillion Annually By 2025 (cybersecurityventures.com)