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China has been an aggressor when it comes to Taiwan. The two nations have had separate governments since 1949 but under Chinese President Xi, he is determined to have full dominion over the small island nation. Major threats have been prevalent in recent years by China and President Trump took action more than a year ago.
In the last few days, more than 150 Chinese aircraft have challenged Taiwan airspace by flying into the Taiwan Air Defense Zone.
On October 1, China’s National Day, two waves of aircraft flew near Taiwan’s airspace; the first maneuver included 25 jets, and the second one involved an additional 13 planes. In total, the aerial flotilla included 28 Shenyang J-16 multirole fighters, six Russian-made Su-30 multirole fighters, two Xian H-6 long-range bombers, one Shaanxi Y-8 anti-submarine warfare plane, and one Shaanxi KJ-500 airborne early warning aircraft.
And then there were more in the days following.
Yet, Taiwan did respond.
Taiwan’s air force is trained to resist invasion, including operating from strips of highway if air bases are rendered inoperable.
Twitter/ROC Ministry of Defense
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The Trump administration is said to be encouraging Taipei to purchase dozens of F-16s, a sale that, like other major arms deals, would require congressional approval. The last time the United States sold these fighter jets to Taiwan was 1992. If the sale goes through, it would mark another departure from the Obama administration, which declined to sell the jets to avoid escalating tensions with Beijing. But experts say a sale would be put on hold until after the United States seals a trade deal with China.
WSJ: A U.S. special-operations unit and a contingent of Marines have been secretly operating in Taiwan to train military forces there, U.S. officials said, part of efforts to shore up the island’s defenses as concern regarding potential Chinese aggression mounts.
About two dozen members of U.S. special-operations and support troops are conducting training for small units of Taiwan’s ground forces, the officials said. The U.S. Marines are working with local maritime forces on small-boat training. The American forces have been operating in Taiwan for at least a year, the officials said.
The U.S. special-operations deployment is a sign of concern within the Pentagon over Taiwan’s tactical capabilities in light of Beijing’s yearslong military buildup and recent threatening moves against the island.
The special-operations unit and the Marine contingent are a small but symbolic effort by the U.S. to increase Taipei’s confidence in building its defenses against potential Chinese aggression. Current and former U.S. government officials and military experts believe that deepening ties between U.S. and Taiwan military units is better than simply selling Taiwan military equipment.
The U.S. has sold Taiwan billions of dollars of military hardware in recent years, but current and former officials believe Taiwan must begin to invest in its defense more heavily, and smartly.
“Taiwan badly neglected its national defense for the first 15 years or so of this century, buying too much expensive equipment that will get destroyed in the first hours of a conflict, and too little in the way of cheaper but lethal systems—antiship missiles, smart sea mines and well-trained reserve and auxiliary forces—that could seriously complicate Beijing’s war plans,” said Matt Pottinger, a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution who served as a deputy national security adviser during the Trump administration.
First it was the comprehensive investigation by the Wall Street Journal for the inside corruption at the social media giant Facebook. Then, after that was exposed, the same whistleblower, Frances Haugen made a shocking appearance on 60 Minutes and explained further that Facebook was putting profits before public safety. Haugen is an algorithms expert, an engineer and a Masters Degree holder from Harvard and has worked at Facebook for many years. She disclosed tens of thousands of documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to the Wall Street Journal in hopes of some legislative corrections and consequence and some major fixes within the social media organization. Facebook currently has 1.908 billion daily active users (DAUs) on average and those users communicate for thousands of difference reasons across the globe including family connections, transferring money and well even some more nefarious reasons like human trafficking.
So, could it be that the major outage across all Facebook platforms including Instagram and WhatsApp. What is even more interesting is the network is also down for the third party developers that are contracted by Facebook. Could Jack Dorsey at Twitter be gloating? Perhaps, but take caution Mr. Jack.
The tweet was written in response to one user’s post saying, “Instagram should stay offline forever.” Mosseri replied, “Them fighting words… but it does feel like a snow day.”
Sources told the New York Times technology reporter Ryan Mac that “no one can do any work” at Facebook, which has caused internal declarations of a “snow day.”
Social-media managers outside Facebook have also called Monday a social-media “snow day” on Twitter, while apologizing for not being able to reach clients and customers.
Workplace, a communications tool owned by Facebook and used by 7 million paid subscribers, is also down. During a similar Facebook outage two years ago, small businesses lost thousands of dollars in revenue, according to a report by The Verge.
Downdetector has received more than 86,000 user reports of Facebook outages since 11:25 a.m. ET on Monday, according to its website. Of these issues, 79% were related to Facebook’s website, 12% were related to server connections, and 9% were related to the app.
Facebook said in a tweet, “We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.”
Companies that maintain Facebook sign-ins for their customers such as Airbnb or Strava and suffering during the outage as well.
The issue may affect other Facebook products, too: some users have also reported issues with the company’s Oculus virtual reality gaming services. Noted Facebook and Twitter data miner Jane Manchun Wong warned users via tweet not to restart their Oculus devices during the outage lest they lose their games
And the outage might have affected Facebook’s real-world infrastructure as well: according to a tweet by New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel, a Facebook employee reportedly can’t even enter company buildings due to malfunctioning badges.
Facebook outages: what’s going on?
None of the Facebook, Whatsapp, or Instagram accounts have explained what originally caused the outage, leading to speculation and analysis. At this point, most agree that this isn’t a hack or directed attack on Facebook’s infrastructure – instead, evidence shows the company’s network paths to the outside web just disappeared without explanation.
Confirmed: The DNS records that tell systems how to find https://t.co/qHzVq2Mr4E or https://t.co/JoIPxXI9GI got withdrawn this morning from the global routing tables. Can you imagine working at FB right now, when your email no longer works & all your internal FB-based tools fail?
WASHINGTON — Americans across the country could start seeing slowdowns in mail delivery as early as Friday, when the US Postal Service implements its new service standards.
The changes, which include longer first-class mail delivery times and cuts to post office hours, are part of embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s 10-year plan for the agency that he unveiled earlier this year.
According to USPS spokesperson Kim Frum, the service changes won’t affect about 60% of first-class mail and nearly all periodicals. Within a local area, standard delivery time for single-piece, first-class mail will remain at two days.
However, mail traveling longer distances will take longer to arrive in some cases, due to the USPS increasing transit time.
“These changes would position us to leverage more cost-effective means to transport First-Class packages via ground rather than using costly air transportation, which is also less reliable due to weather, flight traffic, availability constraints, competition for space, and the added hand-offs involved,” Frum said.
Many Democrats have called for the ouster of DeJoy, a major donor to the GOP and former President Donald Trump.
But as there is Federal government scrutiny on the private banking system(s), crypto-currency and all alternate forms of monetary exchange such as PayPal, Facebook, Venmo, Zelle or ApplePay…now it is the US. Postal System that is entering the industry.
USPS is testing the program at just four post offices on the East Coast. It will enable individuals to deposit payroll or business checks of up to $500 onto a single-use debit card for a flat fee of $5.95. The offering is far short of the much more comprehensive suite of financial services many advocates and left-leaning lawmakers have sought for years, but still takes USPS in a surprising direction under the leadership of embattled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
Postal management worked with the American Postal Workers Union to set up the pilot. APWU has also long advocated for postal banking, including by negotiating it into a previous collective bargaining agreement.
The four sites, located in Washington, D.C.; Falls Church, Virginia; Baltimore; and the Bronx, New York, will not accept any checks larger than $500. The debit cards, to which USPS is referring as “gift cards,” will allow users to withdraw cash from an ATM for a fee or purchase goods online or at retail stores. The American Prospect first reported the pilot.
The initial sites and services are meant to be a “proof-of-concept” test for the Postal Service, APWU officials said. The union is hopeful that USPS will expand the pilot in early 2022, both in terms of services offered and locations where they are available. The easiest areas for expansion would be to allow for gift cards for checks of more than $500. Thousands of post offices already offer Visa gift cards, and management concluded there would be few legal hurdles to simply accepting another form of payment for them. The cards USPS currently has in stock are capped at $500, hence the current maximum. Management is looking to both raise the cap on those and allow for the bundling of multiple cards.
Other services in discussion are a bill pay product, making the cards branded to the Postal Service and reloadable, and wire transfers from one post office to another. USPS has expressed an openness to setting up its own ATMs, though that may require additional statutory authority and is therefore only expected much further down the road. USPS offered banking services for more than 50 years, but stopped in 1967.
Tatiana Roy, a USPS spokeswoman, said that offering “affordable, convenient and secure” services was aligned with DeJoy’s 10-year plan to fix the mailing agency’s finances. The Postal Service this month implemented another key element of DeJoy’s plan, slowing down delivery times for about 40% of First-Class mail while also raising prices above the normal inflation-based rate.
The banking pilot “is an example of how the Postal Service is leveraging its vast retail footprint and resources to innovate,” Roy said.
APWU renewed its push for banking services earlier this year and management took a serious interest. While the union sought a wider array of services in more locations, management told the labor group that “the best way to get started was to get started.”
“It’s a baby step but we’re thrilled to be moving in the right direction,” one union official said.
USPS and APWU have not set specific figures for the number of sites to which the pilot could expand, but those discussions are ongoing. Before Monday when the program gained attention in national media outlets, USPS only announced the availability of the check cashing service through signs in the four affected post offices. The Postal Service is in the midst of soliciting proposals from the private sector for check verification services.
Research from the University of Michigan has found that one-in-four U.S. Census tracts, which are home to 21 million people, do not have any banks within their borders. Advocates for postal banking have highlighted that the private sector often charges high fees for check cashing services and that historically disadvantaged communities are disproportionately impacted by them. APWU has suggested expanding the pilot to all of the Bronx, all of Puerto Rico or to an entire rural county.
Postal management has put together a training session for impacted employees to get them up to speed on the pilot. An APWU official said its members were excited by the new task and recognized it could play a vital role in the future of the Postal Service.
The push for postal banking has gained steam in recent years, even becoming a part of the official platform of the Democratic Party. A House-backed funding bill for fiscal 2022 would require USPS to implement a banking pilot in five rural and five urban ZIP codes. Democratic lawmakers have also put forward legislation to create a public banking system backed by the Federal Reserve, which users would access at post offices. Porter McConnell, co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition, praised USPS for launching the pilot but said it was “not enough.”
“Given that experts and elected officials have been calling on the USPS to pilot postal banking for years, these pilots are long overdue,” said McConnell, the daughter of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. “They are late to this party, but they have at least rung the doorbell.”
Apple threatened to remove Facebook from its App Store after a report about an online slave market.
The BBC in 2019 reported that human traffickers were using Facebook’s services to sell domestic workers.
Apple threatened to kick Facebook off its App Store after a 2019 BBC report detailed how human traffickers were using Facebook to sell victims, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The paper viewed company documents that show a Facebook investigation team was tracking down a human trafficking market in the Middle East whose organizers were using Facebook’s services. What appeared to be employment agencies were advertising domestic workers that they could supply against their will, per the Journal.
The BBC published a sweeping undercover investigation of the practice, prompting Apple to threaten to remove Facebook from its store, the paper said.
An internal memo found that Facebook was aware of the practice even before then: A Facebook researcher wrote in a report dated 2019, “was this issue known to Facebook before BBC inquiry and Apple escalation?,” per the Journal.
Underneath the question reads, “Yes. Throughout 2018 and H1 2019 we conducted the global Understanding Exercise in order to fully understand how domestic servitude manifests no our platform across its entire life cycle: recruitment, facilitation, and exploitation.”
Apple and Facebook did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Source: The dozens of internal Facebook documents obtained by the outlet showed how employees have expressed concerns about how the social media giant is being used in countries across the globe and how Facebook has failed to properly respond to these issues.
Some of the documents reportedly showed that Facebook employees raised concerns about human trafficking organizations in the Middle East that used Facebook to attract women. Other documents showed Facebook employees alerting their higher-ups of groups involved in organ selling and pornography.
The news outlet reported that while some of the groups and pages flagged by employees have been taken down, dozens of others remain active on the social media site.
Another document detailed a Facebook employee’s investigation into a Mexican drug cartel that was active on the social media site. The employee, who was a former police officer, was able to identify the Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s network of accounts on both Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.
The employee wrote in the report that his team had found Facebook messages between cartel recruiters and potential recruits “about being seriously beaten or killed by the cartel if they try to leave the training camp.”
The documents reportedly showed that the cartel was open about its criminal activity, with several pages on the social media site showing “gold-plated guns and bloody crime scenes.”The Wall Street Journal reported that even after the employee recommended Facebook increase its enforcement on the groups, documents showed that Facebook didn’t completely remove the cartel from its site and instead said that it removed content tied to the group. Just nine days after the report from the employee, his team found a new Instagram account tied to the cartel, which included several violent posts.
Many of the documents apparently showed employees raising concerns about how the social media giant was being used in developing countries, such as militant groups in Ethiopia using Facebook to promote violence against minority groups.
Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president, told the Wall Street Journal that the social media site sees these issues in developing countries as “simply the cost of doing business.”
“There is very rarely a significant, concerted effort to invest in fixing those areas,” Boland said.
In a statement sent to Newsweek, a Facebook spokesperson said: “In countries at risk for conflict and violence, we have a comprehensive strategy, including relying on global teams with native speakers covering over 50 languages, educational resources, and partnerships with local experts and third-party fact-checkers to keep people safe.”
In a series of tweets on Thursday, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone wrote, “As the Wall Street Journal itself makes clear, we have a team of experts who help us uncover patterns of harmful behavior so we can disrupt it. We’ve got arguably more experts and resources dedicated to this work than any other consumer technology company in the world.”
The Chinese government is employing tactics that seek to influence lawmakers and public opinion to achieve policies that are more favorable to China.
At the same time, the Chinese government is seeking to become the world’s greatest superpower through predatory lending and business practices, systematic theft of intellectual property, and brazen cyber intrusions.
China’s efforts target businesses, academic institutions, researchers, lawmakers, and the general public and will require a whole-of-society response. The government and the private sector must commit to working together to better understand and counter the threat.
How about APT 40 (Advanced Persistent Threat) published by CISA? Can we really safeguard our trade secrets, intellectual property and infrastructure from the Chinese cyber war? Did General Milley discuss any of this in any other phone calls with his Chinese Communist Party counterpart?
China hacked Microsoft. Chinese hacking goes back several years. How about NASA, the World Bank, the State Department (East Asia Division), the Commerce Department, the Naval War College or the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter program?
Remember when President Obama removed all CIA operatives from China? That was because the Chinese military was killing our operatives in country. How did they know?
The discovery of U.S. spy networks in China fueled a decadelong global war over data between Beijing and Washington.
Around 2013, U.S. intelligence began noticing an alarming pattern: Undercover CIA personnel, flying into countries in Africa and Europe for sensitive work, were being rapidly and successfully identified by Chinese intelligence, according to three former U.S. officials. The surveillance by Chinese operatives began in some cases as soon as the CIA officers had cleared passport control. Sometimes, the surveillance was so overt that U.S. intelligence officials speculated that the Chinese wanted the U.S. side to know they had identified the CIA operatives, disrupting their missions; other times, however, it was much more subtle and only detected through U.S. spy agencies’ own sophisticated technical countersurveillance capabilities.
More than a thousand visiting researchers from China working at US universities have left the country since the summer, according to John Demers, chief of the Department of Justice’s national security division. This exodus comes as the Department of Justice has intensified its investigations of espionage by scientists at US institutions who are secretly affiliated with the Chinese government or military.
This summer, the Department of Justice has had at least five researchers from China arrested. They all had US visas but hadn’t disclosed their affiliations with the Chinese Communist party or military in their visa applications, Demers explained at a 2 December virtual summit of the Aspen Institute, a global non-profit think tank based in Washington DC. Those handful of arrests were ‘just the tip of the iceberg’, Demers stated.
‘Between those five or six arrests, and the dozens of interviews that the [FBI] did with individuals who were here under similar circumstances … more than 1000 [People’s Liberation Army]-affiliated Chinese researchers left the country,’ he claimed.
It appears that those departures were in addition to about a thousand Chinese graduate and postgraduate students whose visas were revoked by the State Department back in September under a ‘proclamation’ announced by outgoing President Trump. That directive prohibited individuals from studying or conducting research in the US if they were found to have links with the Chinese government or its military.
Bill Evanina, the US government’s top counterintelligence official, said at the summit that of the 1000-plus Chinese researchers who left the US he is ‘most concerned about the graduate-level students’. These researchers all came to the US ‘at the behest of the Chinese government and intelligence services’, and are going to particular universities to study specific fields that are expected to benefit China, he claimed.
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CHICAGO (WLS) — The spy case against a former U.S. Army reservist and student at Illinois Institute of Technology wasn’t a one-man espionage show, according to federal investigators.
Ji Chaoqun’s federal court appearance in Chicago on Thursday is routine, in an anything-but-normal case. Chaoqun is charged against the backdrop of a possibly wider Chinese scheme to siphon intelligence information overseas.
Chaoqun and a similarly-accused spyman in Cincinnati, Ohio, shared the same foreign connection according to authorities, what’s known in intelligence circles as a “handler.” That link is pointed out in federal court records examined by the I-Team.
Chinese national Chaoqun, 30, is charged with providing intelligence officials in China with background check information on eight American citizens including defense contractors, federal investigators say. He had arrived in Chicago in 2013 with a student visa to study electrical engineering at IIT on the South Side but since being arrested has been locked up at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop for allegedly violating America’s Foreign Agents Registration Act.
In the Cincinnati case, Yanjun Xu is being held on charges he tried to steal trade secrets from GE Aviation, the giant military contractor and manufacturer. Xu, 40, is accused of downloading GE Aviation records onto his personal laptop and then smuggling them on a flight to China. As part of the charged scheme, federal authorities said Xu had posed as a technology association official and invited a GE Aviation employee to travel to China for a presentation. Xu became the first suspected Chinese intelligence official ever extradited to the U.S. He was arrested in Belgium and is now being detained at the federal penitentiary in Milan, Michigan.
So, what’s the connection between Cincinnati’s Xu and Chicago’s Chaoqun? While there is no indication the men were actual associates, commiserated in crime, or even ever met, the alleged link is buried in a Chicago court file.
Chaoqun’s criminal complaint cites a “clandestine and overt human source collection” used by Chinese officials to recruit spies and gather stolen intelligence.
“Chinese intelligence services conduct extensive overt, covert, and clandestine intelligence collection operations against U.S. national security entities, including private U.S. defense companies, through a network of agents within and outside of China,” states FBI Special Agent Andrew K. McKay.
According to the FBI, Chaoqun and Xu shared the very same covert, Chinese handler. U.S. authorities say the Chinese man assigned to secretly oversee both assignments, met with each alleged operative separately. They would get together in secret locations, frequently hotel rooms, but for the same alleged purpose: provide “information as a benefit to the Chinese government.”
Did General Milley discuss of of this with Li Zuocheng? Remember it is said that China was a little rattled at the potential instability of the United States and needed hand holding before and after the election of 2020 and the January 6 chaos in Washington DC. Seems, we Americans need hand holding from the woke Joint Chiefs of Staff and Pelosi.
Calls are routine? But the subject matter is hardly routine much less loyal to the homeland and the Constitution. Greg Nash
Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesperson Col. Dave Butler on Wednesday confirmed that Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley called his Chinese counterparts after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol but said those calls were routine.
Butler said in a statement that Milley “regular communicates with Chiefs of Defense around the world, including China and Russia. These conversations remain vital to improving mutual understanding of U.S. national security interests, reducing tensions, providing clarity and avoiding unintended consequences or conflict.”
The statement comes in response to reports that a forthcoming book says Milley once told his Chinese counterpart that he would give a heads up before any attack on China by the U.S.
“You and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise,” Milley said, according to an excerpt from a new book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward and The Washington Post’s Robert Costa.
“All calls from the Chairman to his counterparts, including those reported, are staffed, coordinated and communicated with the Department of Defense and the interagency,” Butler said in Wednesday’s statement.
Greg Nash