Chinese Slaves Manufacture Covid Masks Your Wearing

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So, while we are continuing to learn only some of the actions inside the United States by the Chinese Communist Party that include:

Senator Dianne Feinstein and her husband

The entire Biden Family

Congressman Eric Swalwell

… we are now finding that Georgia Senate candidate, Jon Ossoff in a contentious run-off race lied about his Chinese Communist Party business deal and finally came clean after he was about to be sued over his false financial disclosures.

Ossoff attracting surprising levels of GOP support in Georgia special - POLITICO

There is much more to bubble to the surface as noted by the shuttering of the Chinese Consulate in Houston a few months ago and the soon to be revealing of more details. Meanwhile, U.S. corporations are also very tied to the Chinese Communist Party least of which is Apple, Google and Facebook. But what about slaves?

Few people understand that China has re-education camps and slaves known as Uighurs and the treatment of this Turkic ethnic group which is native to China.

A very large and detailed investigation completed has noted below:

Medical masks and protective equipment made by Uighur laborers in China are being sold across Europe by at least two major distributors, and have been bought by governments and health bodies in at least five countries, an investigation by OCCRP and partners has found.

The workers are ethnic Uighurs from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang who have been sent to factories in other parts of the country under a controversial “labor transfer” program that experts say is coercive and prone to abuses.

China’s government has embarked on a campaign to stamp out unrest among Uighurs in Xinjiang via a campaign of mass surveillance and detention.

The labor transfer program ostensibly provides Uighurs in Xinjiang with new opportunities to leave home for factory jobs in other provinces. But rights workers say they are often coerced into complying, amid a crackdown that has seen over a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities sent to re-education camps. Campaigners have been pushing for Western companies and governments to stop buying products made with Uighur labor.

Earlier this year, the New York Times revealed that medical masks made by Uighurs at a factory in Hubei province were being sold in the U.S. Now, OCCRP and its partners have found that some of Europe’s biggest medical distributors are also selling masks and protective equipment from this manufacturer, Hubei Haixin Protective Products. Publicly available documents show that Hubei Haixin until recently employed at least 130 Uighur workers transferred from Xinjiang.

The distributors include local branches of McKesson, a multinational giant that owns some of Europe’s largest pharmacy chains and medical wholesalers, and Swedish medical supply firm OneMed, which sold masks to health authorities and national stockpiles across the Nordic and Baltic regions.

Both McKesson and OneMed continued selling Hubei Haixin products throughout 2020, even after the Chinese company was named earlier this year by the New York Times and a think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), as using potentially forced labor by Uighurs.

Reporters also found McKesson and OneMed sold products made by Zhende Medical, a publicly traded Chinese company that has been flagged as risky by rights experts because it has supply chains and subsidiaries in Xinjiang.

In a brief response sent to reporters, McKesson Europe’s public affairs director, Ronan Brett, said: “McKesson Europe is committed to good corporate citizenship and ethical sourcing. Suppliers must agree to McKesson Sustainable Supply Chain Principles (MSSP) which covers compliance with appropriate laws along with adherence to our strict policies on protecting workers, preparing for emergencies, identifying and managing environmental risk, and protecting the environment.” He did not respond to a request for further comment.

coronavirus/Norway-Erna-Solberg.jpg  Credit: Henrik Myhr Nielsen / NRK Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg welcomes a shipment of protective equipment by OneMed on March 23, 2020. The shipment included goods from Hubei Haixin. 

OneMed’s head of operations, Robert Schmidt, said the company found out in late 2019 that the Hubei Haixin factory employed workers from Xinjiang, but continued its relationship with the producer after finding no evidence they were being coerced or mistreated.

“OneMed’s overall assessment is that there is no forced labor or discrimination against the Uighur minority population in our supply chain,” he said. “But we will of course continue to follow the issue and act if we should receive any new information.”

According to documents obtained by reporters, OneMed contacted Hubei Haixin with concerns about Uighur workers in January, and the Chinese factory promised to return them to their homes in Xinjiang at the end of their contract in March. But in reality, the factory continued to employ them until this September, claiming that pandemic movement restrictions prevented the workers from going home. OneMed continued buying the products.

Neither Hubei Haixin nor Zhende Medical responded to requests for comment, but in a statement sent to one of its European distributors, and obtained by reporters, Zhende said, “It is not acceptable in Zhende to engage in or support the use of forced or compulsory labor.”

“The so-called ‘human rights abuses’ in Xinjiang or ‘persecution of ethnic minorities’ are lies of the century made up by extremist anti-China forces,” a representative of the Chinese Embassy in Oslo, Yang Yiding, wrote in a statement to reporters.

China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

  Credit: Matteo Civillini Hubei Haixin masks ordered from LloydsPharmacy Italy bear the name of McKesson Global Sourcing Ltd, a U.K. subsidiary of McKesson. 

“Violation of Virtually Any Kind of Ethical Policy”

Over a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are believed to have been detained in newly built detention camps in recent years. China describes the camps as re-education facilities intended to combat Islamic radicalism, following a series of deadly inter-ethnic riots in Xinjiang and attacks by Uighur militants on ethnic-majority Han throughout China.

Uighurs have been documented working both in factories within Xinjiang’s detention camps, as well as being sent to regular factories throughout China via labor transfer programs, which are billed as a way of alleviating poverty and countering religious extremism.

It is important to keep reading the full summary found here.

 

China Used ‘Mass Surveillance’ on Thousands of Americans’ Phones

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Is the Caribbean Smartphone Market Closer to Asia than America? - Droid Island

Newsweek reports: A mobile security expert has accused China of exploiting cellphone networks in the Caribbean to conduct “mass surveillance” on Americans.

China Regional Snapshot: The Caribbean - Committee on Foreign Affairs

Gary Miller, a former vice president of network security at California-based analytics company Mobileum, told The Guardian he had amassed evidence of espionage conducted via “decades-old vulnerabilities” in the global telecommunications system.

While not explicitly mentioned in the report, the claims appear to be centered around Signaling System 7 (SS7), a communications protocol that routes calls and data around the world and has long been known to have inherent security weaknesses.

According to Miller, his analysis of “signals data” from the Caribbean has shown China was using a state-controlled mobile operator to “target, track, and intercept phone communications of U.S. phone subscribers,” The Guardian reported.

Miller claimed China appeared to exploit Caribbean operators to conduct surveillance on Americans as they were traveling, alleging that attacks on cell phones between 2018 to 2020 likely affected “tens of thousands” of U.S. mobile users in the region.

“Once you get into the tens of thousands, the attacks qualify as mass surveillance,” the mobile researcher said, noting the tactic is “primarily for intelligence collection and not necessarily targeting high-profile targets.” Miller continued: “It might be that there are locations of interest, and these occur primarily while people are abroad.”

A previous analysis paper covering 2018-2019, also titled Far From Home, contained a series of similar espionage claims about SS7, alleging that “mass surveillance attacks” in 2018 were most prevalent by China and Caribbean mobile networks. More here.

But hold on…. it does not stop there….we also have the Channel Islands…

Pin on Guernsey Island

Remarkable investigative details here.

The Bureau: Private intelligence companies are using phone networks based in the Channel Islands to enable surveillance operations to be carried out against people around the world, including British and US citizens, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal following a joint reporting project with the Guardian.

Leaked data, documents and interviews with industry insiders who have access to sensitive information suggest that systemic weaknesses in the global telecoms infrastructure, and a particular vulnerability in Jersey and Guernsey, are being exploited by corporate spy businesses.

These businesses take advantage of some of the ways mobile phone networks across the world interact in order to access private information on targets, such as location information or, in more sophisticated applications, the content of calls and messages or other highly sensitive data.

The spy companies see phone operators in the Channel Islands as an especially soft route into the UK, according to industry experts, who say the attacks emanating from the islands appear to be targeted at individuals rather than cases of “mass” surveillance. The Bureau understands that the targets of this surveillance have been spread across the globe, and included US citizens as well as people in Europe and Africa.

Ron Wyden, the Oregon senator and privacy advocate, described the use of foreign telecom assets to spy on people in the US as a national security threat.

“Access into US telephone networks is a privilege,” he said in response to the Bureau’s findings. “Foreign telecom regulators need to police their domestic industry – if they don’t, they risk their country being cut off from US roaming agreements.”

Markéta Gregorová, the European Parliament’s chief negotiator on trade legislation for surveillance technology, called for “immediate regulatory, financial and diplomatic costs on companies and rogue jurisdictions” that enabled these practices.

“Any commercial or governmental entity, foreign or domestic which enables the facilitation of warrantless cyber-attacks on European citizens deserves the full force of our justice system,” she told the Bureau.

Stop Using Zoom, Second Warning

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The first warning came last March.

March: As remote work surges amid the coronavirus pandemic, the FBI issued a public bulletin Monday warning Zoom and other video teleconferencing services may not be as private, or as secure, as users may assume.

Use of Zoom and similar services has exploded in recent weeks as companies, schools, governments, and individuals increasingly turn to its teleconferencing as ways to keep businesses and classrooms afloat while sheltering in pace or working from home. However the shift also represents an opportunity for attackers, as white supremacists, hackers and other trolls barge into digital meetings, a phenomenon known as “Zoombombing.”

In Massachusetts, there have been several incidents, including an unintended participant joining a high school’s virtual classroom only to yell profanities and reveal personal information about the teacher, according to the FBI. Another unwelcome participant with swastika tattoos joined a separate Massachusetts school’s Zoom meeting, the FBI reports.

“The FBI has received multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic and/or hate images and threatening language,” the FBI cautioned. “As individuals continue the transition to online lessons and meetings, the FBI recommends exercising due diligence and caution in your cybersecurity efforts.”

It’s not just private businesses and children whose meetings could be Zoombombed. Privacy and security issues in conferencing software may also pose risks to national security, as world leaders convene Zoom meetings. In some cases, world leaders such as U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson have shared screenshots of their teleconferencing publicly only to reveal Zoom meeting IDs, raising concerns that sensitive information could be compromised. More here.

Stupidly, government officials at all levels are using Zoom including the Biden presidential team. How dangerous is that? Those officials are not reading the warnings or the news? Yeesh

 

Zoom Biden Rally

For more proof, again this month…

Justice Department/December 2020: China-Based Executive at U.S. Telecommunications Company Charged with Disrupting Video Meetings

It is not only the U.S. that is sounding the warnings. The Telegraph reports warnings that “opportunistic criminals” (a formulation that’s practically redundant), can be expected to use bogus invitations to sessions in their social engineering efforts.

Connecticut Teen Arrested for Allegedly 'Zoom Bombing ... source

A security executive with the video-tech giant Zoom worked with the Chinese government to terminate Americans’ accounts and disrupt video calls about the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy activists in Tiananmen Square, Justice Department prosecutors said Friday.

The case is a stunning blow for Zoom, one of the most popular new titans of American tech, which during the pandemic became one of the main ways people work, socialize and share ideas around the world. The California-based company is now worth more than $100 billion.

But the executive’s work with the Chinese government, as alleged by FBI agents in a criminal complaint unsealed Friday in a Brooklyn federal court, highlights the often-hidden threats of censorship on a forum promoted as a platform for free speech. It also raises questions about how Zoom is protecting users’ data from governments that seek to surveil and suppress people inside their borders and abroad.

Prosecutors said the China-based executive, Xinjiang Jin, worked as Zoom’s primary liaison with Chinese law enforcement and intelligence services, sharing user information and terminating video calls at the Chinese government’s request.

Jin monitored Zoom’s video system for discussions of political and religious topics deemed unacceptable by China’s ruling Communist Party, the complaint states, and he gave government officials the names, email addresses and other sensitive information of users, even those outside China.

Jin worked also to end at least four video meetings in May and June, including video memorial calls with U.S.-based dissidents who’d survived the crackdown by Chinese military forces that killed thousands of students and protesters. The Chinese government works to censor any acknowledgment of the massacre, including on social media outside China.

A Zoom spokesperson said in a statement Friday that the company has cooperated with the case and launched its own internal investigation. Jin, the company said, shared “a limited amount of individual user data with Chinese authorities,” as well as data on no more than 10 users based outside China. Jin was fired for violating company policies, the statement said, and other employees have been placed on administrative leave until the investigation is complete.

In an updated statement on Zoom’s website, the company said it “fell short” by terminating the meetings instead of only blocking access to participants in China, to abide by Chinese law. The company said it has reinstated the victims’ accounts and will no longer allow requests from the Chinese government to affect users outside mainland China.

“As the DOJ makes clear, every American company, including Zoom and our industry peers, faces challenges when doing business in China,” the company said in its statement. “We will continue to act aggressively to anticipate and combat ever-evolving data security challenges.”

Jin could not be reached for comment. Though Jin lives in China and is not in U.S. custody, officials said he could be transferred to the United States to face prosecution if he travels to a country that has an extradition treaty with the U.S.

A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.

Human-rights activists this summer said their Zoom accounts had been abruptly terminated shortly before or after they’d hosted video calls commemorating the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, a bloody crackdown captured in the iconic photo of a man standing in front of a Chinese tank.

Zoom said in a statement then that the company “must comply with laws in the countries where we operate.” While the company said it regretted “that a few recent meetings with participants both inside and outside of China were negatively impacted,” the statement said it was not in the company’s power “to change the laws of governments opposed to free speech.”

Zhou Fengsuo, a student leader during the Tiananmen Square protests who had his paid Zoom account terminated this summer, told The Washington Post on Friday that he had worked with the FBI on the case and saw the charges as “tremendous news.”

“It’s so eye-opening to me how this U.S. company, having this connection, would report directly to” the Chinese Communist Party and “disrupt our meetings regularly on behalf of the CCP,” he said. “This executive was working for the government and police as an agent of persecution, and Zoom was paying this guy for doing that job.”

Prosecutors charged Jin, also known as Julien Jin, with conspiracy to commit interstate harassment and to transfer a means of identification. Jin, 39, had worked at the company since 2016, most recently as a “Security Technical Leader,” the complaint said.

Quoting from electronic messages between Jin and other Zoom employees, FBI agents outlined a months-long, high-pressure campaign by China’s “Internet Police” to view users’ video calls and suppress unwanted speech. In one April message, Jin said he had been summoned to a meeting with Chinese government officials who demanded that Zoom develop the capability to terminate any “illegal meeting” within one minute. In others, Jin sent meeting passwords and other sensitive internal data directly to Chinese law enforcement.

In the complaint, FBI agents said that Zoom employees in the U.S. had agreed to a Chinese government “rectification” plan that entailed migrating data on roughly 1 million users from the U.S. to China, thereby subjecting it to Chinese law. Zoom also agreed, the complaint states, to provide “special access” to Chinese law enforcement and national-security authorities. In one message cited in the complaint, Jin wrote that the authorities had wanted him to share detailed lists of the company’s “daily monitoring” of “Hong Kong demonstrations, illegal religions” and other subjects.

To terminate the Tiananmen Square calls, the complaint alleges, Jin’s co-conspirators fabricated evidence that they were intended to discuss child abuse, racism, terrorism and violence. Jin’s co-conspirators also entered some calls with fake accounts that used pornographic or terrorist-related profile images, and Jin pointed to those images as evidence to terminate the meetings and suspend the hosts’ accounts.

John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, said the firm had, like many others that do business in China, put itself in a difficult position by operating in an authoritarian country whose laws and practices often “run antithetical to our values.”

“The company was focused on complying with Chinese law and the expectations of Chinese law enforcement,” Demers said. “But what happened over time is those expectations increased. So it goes from, ‘Well, respond to our lawful requests,’ to ‘You must take action within a minute to shut down any action on your platforms’ – not just in China, but outside – that hits upon topics of sensitivity to the Chinese government.”

That pressure, he noted, spans many industries: He cited the controversy last year involving the National Basketball Association, in which the general manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted in support of Hong Kong protesters, leading to a backlash in China.

“The case is an illustration of the choices that companies are forced to make when they do business in China . . . [and] how the Chinese government will take advantage of the leverage they have over you to push their agenda,” he said. “You’ve got a consistent pattern of the Chinese government using economic leverage – the opportunity to access markets, foreign investments – in order to further political goals.”

John Scott-Railton, a researcher at the Citizen Lab in Toronto, said the filing showed how authoritarian governments have increasingly looked at major tech companies as top-priority intelligence targets ripe for infiltration and recruitment.

He pointed to another case last year against two former Twitter employees charged with spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia, including by sending the personal information of thousands of people, including Saudi critics and prominent dissidents.

The charges were announced on the same day that the Trump administration added four Chinese companies to the Commerce Department entity list for enabling human rights abuses within China by providing DNA-testing materials or high-technology surveillance equipment to the Chinese government. They were among 59 Chinese companies Commerce add to its export control entity list, including companies that have been accused of stealing trade secrets and using U.S. exports to support the Chinese military.

Zoom has faced questions before about how it guards against the potential misuse of video data by the Chinese government, which censors major news and social media websites beneath what’s known as a “Great Firewall.”

This spring, Scott-Railton and another researcher found the company had routed American users’ data through Chinese servers, potentially opening it to Chinese-government data requests. The company later said it had “mistakenly” sent American video calls to Chinese data centers amid a flood of calls.

Zoom employs more than 2,500 people around the world, including, as of last year, more than 500 in China who develop the software installed in computers around the world.

The company’s billionaire chief executive, Eric Yuan, was born in China but moved to Silicon Valley in the late ’90s, where he worked for the video start-up WebEx before founding Zoom in 2011.

The Federal Trade Commission last month reached a settlement with Zoom, in which the company resolved allegations that it had misled users about their data privacy and encryption measures by agreeing to new security rules.

Questions over business dealings in China have become more commonplace as a new wave of Chinese tech start-ups has gained international popularity and acclaim. TikTok, the wildly popular short-video app owned by the Beijing-based tech company ByteDance, drew suspicions of censorship from users last year because searches on the site related to topics suppressed by the Chinese government, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, showed few or no videos.

Internal guidelines for the site also mimicked Chinese-government censorship policies, and former employees for the company told The Post last year that key content-moderation decisions for international users were made in China. TikTok has said it has worked in recent months to distance its U.S. operations from the company’s Chinese headquarters.

Wang Dan, a Chinese dissident whose Zoom call on Tiananmen Square was also disrupted this spring, said the case showed how China could threaten free expression for people in the West.

“Interfering with the freedom of speech of those who have settled and lived in the United States in exile is . . . a serious attack to American sovereignty,” he told The Post on Friday. “The American people should also pay more attention to the [Chinese Communist Party’s] threat of American democracy.”

 

Increased Alarm over Intrusion into U.S. and Sandia/Los Alamos

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal authorities expressed increased alarm Thursday about an intrusion into U.S. and other computer systems around the globe that officials suspect was carried out by Russian hackers. The nation’s cybersecurity agency warned of a “grave” risk to government and private networks.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in its most detailed comments yet that the intrusion had compromised federal agencies as well as “critical infrastructure” in a sophisticated attack that was hard to detect and will be difficult to undo.

CISA did not say which agencies or infrastructure had been breached or what information taken in an attack that it previously said appeared to have begun in March.

“This threat actor has demonstrated sophistication and complex tradecraft in these intrusions,” the agency said in its unusual alert. “CISA expects that removing the threat actor from compromised environments will be highly complex and challenging.”

President Donald Trump, whose administration has been criticized for eliminating a White House cybersecurity adviser and downplaying Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, has made no public statements about the breach.

President-elect Joe Biden said he would make cybersecurity a top priority of his administration, but that stronger defenses are not enough.

“We need to disrupt and deter our adversaries from undertaking significant cyberattacks in the first place,” he said. “We will do that by, among other things, imposing substantial costs on those responsible for such malicious attacks, including in coordination with our allies and partners.”

The cybersecurity agency previously said the perpetrators had used network management software from Texas-based SolarWinds t o infiltrate computer networks. Its new alert said the attackers may have used other methods, as well.

Over the weekend, amid reports that the Treasury and Commerce departments were breached, CISA directed all civilian agencies of the federal government to remove SolarWinds from their servers. The cybersecurity agencies of Britain and Ireland issued similar alerts.

A U.S. official previously told The Associated Press that Russia-based hackers were suspected, but neither CISA nor the FBI has publicly said who is believed be responsible. Asked whether Russia was behind the attack, the official said: “We believe so. We haven’t said that publicly yet because it isn’t 100% confirmed.”

Another U.S. official, speaking Thursday on condition of anonymity to discuss a matter that is under investigation, said the hack was severe and extremely damaging although the administration was not yet ready to publicly blame anyone for it.

“This is looking like it’s the worst hacking case in the history of America,” the official said. “They got into everything.”

The official said the administration is working on the assumption that most, if not all, government agencies were compromised but the extent of the damage was not yet known.

This hack had nothing to do with President Trump firing Director Krebs at CISA even though Associated Press keeps suggesting. But things just took a turn for the bad bad side –>

Sandia National Laboratories - From the Manhattan Project to a National Lab Sandia

Texas A&M System part of team awarded lucrative Los Alamos National Lab contract | The Texas Tribune Los Alamos

The Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, have evidence that hackers accessed their networks as part of an extensive espionage operation that has affected at least half a dozen federal agencies, officials directly familiar with the matter said.

On Thursday, DOE and NNSA officials began coordinating notifications about the breach to their congressional oversight bodies after being briefed by Rocky Campione, the chief information officer at DOE.

They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation and the Richland Field Office of the DOE. The hackers have been able to do more damage at FERC than the other agencies, the officials said, but did not elaborate.

Federal investigators have been combing through networks in recent days to determine what hackers had been able to access and/or steal, and officials at DOE still don’t know whether the attackers were able to access anything, the people said, noting that the investigation is ongoing and they may not know the full extent of the damage “for weeks.”

Spokespeople for DOE did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The attack on DOE is the clearest sign yet that the hackers were able to access the networks belonging to a core part of the U.S. national security enterprise. The hackers are believed to have gained access to the federal agencies’ networks by compromising the software company SolarWinds, which sells IT management products to hundreds of government and private-sector clients.

DOE officials were planning on Thursday to notify the House and Senate Energy committees, House and Senate Energy and Water Development subcommittees, House and Senate Armed Services committees, and the New Mexico and Washington State delegations of the breach, the officials said.

The FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged the “ongoing” cybersecurity campaign in a joint statement released on Wednesday, saying that they had only become aware of the incident in recent days.

“This is a developing situation, and while we continue to work to understand the full extent of this campaign, we know this compromise has affected networks within the federal government,” the statement read.

NNSA is responsible for managing the nation’s nuclear weapons, and while it gets the least attention, it takes up the vast majority of DOE’s budget. Similarly, the Sandia and Los Alamos National Labs conduct atomic research related to both civil nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The Office of Secure Transportation is tasked with moving enriched uranium and other materials critical for maintaining the nuclear stockpile.

Hackers may have been casting too wide a net when they targeted DOE’s Richland Field Office, whose primary responsibility is overseeing the cleanup of the Hanford nuclear waste site in Washington state. During World War II and the Cold War, the U.S. produced two- thirds of its plutonium there, but the site hasn’t been active since 1971.

The attack on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission may have been an effort to disrupt the nation’s bulk electric grid. FERC doesn’t directly manage any power flows, but it does store sensitive data on the grid that could be used to identify the most disruptive locations for future attacks.

21 hardened drug dealers’ at UNC, Duke, App State

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Nearly two dozen people, including current and former students at UNC, Duke and Appalachian State universities, have been charged in connection with the investigation of a large-scale drug ring, local and federal law enforcement officials announced Thursday.

Many of the 21 people charged were connected with the Phi Gamma Delta, Kappa Sigma and Beta Theta Pi fraternal organizations, officials said. The investigation is continuing, and more charges are possible.

Thursday’s news conference was held “to save lives,” said Matthew G.T. Martin, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina, who was joined at a news conference by Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood and other law enforcement officials.

“I want to make this clear,” Martin said outside the Sheriff’s Office in Hillsborough. “This was not the situation where you have single users — a 19-year-old sipping a beer or you have someone who is taking a puff of a joint on the back porch of a frat house. These are 21 hardened drug dealers.”

***

Source: The suspects were responsible for moving thousands of pounds of marijuana, hundreds of kilograms of cocaine, LSD, molly, mushrooms, steroids, HGH, Xanax and other narcotics.

The investigation started years ago. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office and the Drug Enforcement Agency launched an investigation in November 2018 into cocaine being sold in the Chapel Hill area.

It soon became clear that the illegal drug distribution was happening at or near UNC fraternity organizations.

UNC Chapel Hill Investigates Underage Drinking :: WRAL.com

Court filings specifically point to UNC chapters of Phi Gamma Delta, Kappa Sigma, and Beta Theta Pi from 2017-2020 being sites of illegal drug activity.

“Dealers set up inside these houses, poisoning fellow members of their fraternity, fueling a culture. And that’s why I say today is about saving lives. Because this reckless culture has endangered lives,” Martin said.

An Appalachian State fraternity member is also accused of being part of the drug ring, selling to fellow App State students as well as people in Chapel Hill.

Investigators also identified a female Duke student as being responsible for distributing cocaine to students at Duke and to fraternity members at UNC.

A primary supplier from California was the first person charged. According to court documents, from March 2017 until March 22, 2019, he supplied approximately 200 pounds of marijuana and two kilograms of cocaine weekly to a cooperating defendant in Orange County. Law enforcement operations at locations associated with the subject in Carrboro and Hillsborough resulted in the seizure of 148.75 pounds of marijuana, 442 grams of cocaine, 189 Xanax pills, steroids, human growth hormone, other narcotics, and approximately $27,775 in U.S. currency.

The investigation showed that payment for drugs was made using Venmo and by sending cash through the U.S. mail. That supplier pleaded guilty to on Nov. 24 and was sentenced to 73 months in prison.

The five defendants indicted for conspiracy to distribute cocaine and conspiracy to distribute marijuana face terms of imprisonment ranging from 10 years to life.

“College communities should be a safe haven for young adults to get a higher education. Not a place where illegal drugs are easily accessible,” DEA agent Matt O’Brien said. “The arrest of these drug traffickers makes these college campuses and their respective communities safer.”

UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz issued the following statement about the allegations; “We are extremely disappointed to learn of these alleged actions on our campus. The University is committed to working with law enforcement to fully understand the involvement of any university individuals or organizations so that disciplinary action can be taken. Although none of the individuals named today are currently enrolled students, we will remain vigilant and continue to work with our law enforcement partners to identify and address any illegal drug use on our campus. Our community can be certain that the University will enforce the student conduct code to the fullest extent possible.”