General Milley Says China is not an Enemy

It was 2017 when General Milley said China is not an enemy.

Well let’s go back to some facts shall we?

Has General Milley even met FBI Director Chris Wray?

The counterintelligence and economic espionage efforts emanating from the government of China and the Chinese Communist Party are a grave threat to the economic well-being and democratic values of the United States.

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.

Then, the New York Times publishes an article on April 13, 2021 titled: ‘China Poses Biggest threat to U.S., Intelligence Report Says’

Sure, it is several years later but and after Milley says he has known his CCP counterpart for 5 years…there is this –>May be an image of text that says 'Milley reportedly made the calls before the 2020 presidential election on Oct. 30, 2020, and two days after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, on Jan. 8, 2021, and assured Zuocheng of the stability of the American government. He also allegedly assured the Chinese general that he would contact him regarding any imminent attack from the U.S. in the waning days of Trump's presidency.'

and this –>

May be an image of text that says 'Four #ChineseWarships, including a Chinese destroyer, have sailed into the United States' exclusive economic zone. Chinese state-run media says this is a warning to the United State about China's naval capabilities.'

The Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community published on April 9, 2021 is here in full. 

The 112th Congress held a hearing (House Foreign Affairs Committee) on May 28, 2012 titled: Investigating the Chinese Threat, Part I: Military and Economic Aggression. 

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?

CHINA USED STOLEN DATA TO EXPOSE CIA OPERATIVES IN AFRICA AND EUROPE
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.

In part:

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.

***

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. Joint Chiefs spokesperson confirms Milley calls with China, defends them as routine 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.

 

 

The Mailbox for Evacuation Requests at State Dept is Full

For that matter, most of the mailboxes for all of government, the same is true including those in Congress. I have called at least 9 myself several times this past week. I was only able to speak to a real person in Congressman Ken Buck’s office, her name was Monica and she had some factual interesting things to say. I made a couple of requests and like wow….she said she would call me back…..SHE DID. Mission complete with my request.

Anyway….from Jim Geraghty at National Review:

This morning I heard from a longtime NR reader who spent years in Afghanistan working for a defense contractor. This reader’s company worked on the construction of camps and garrisons, parts of bases at Bagram and Kandahar, as well as several government buildings for the Afghan military and police.

“We directly employed thousands of Afghans,” he told me. “Their lives are in danger of retaliation by the Taliban because they helped the American military. Recognizing this, on August 2nd the U.S. government created another classification of asylum/visa processing called ‘Priority 2’.”

The announcement of the Priority 2 program can be found here. An unidentified senior state department official stated, “Many thousands of Afghans and their immediate family members are at risk due to these U.S. affiliations and are not eligible for a Special Immigrant Visa because either they did not have qualifying employment, or they have not met the time-in-service requirement to become eligible; however, they may be eligible for a P-2 referral, and thus, to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.” Priority 2 covers Afghans who worked with U.S. government-funded programs, as well as those who were employed in Afghanistan by a U.S.-based non-governmental or media organization that does not require U.S. government funding.

My reader said, “I’ve been busy the last week submitting referrals to the State Department on behalf of Afghans and their families who worked for us and whose very lives have been threatened. The submission is through email to a dedicated inbox at State. We began receiving messages that the inbox is full and that we should try later. This has been going on for half a day now.”

He shared with me an  automatic reply e-mail that declared, “The recipient’s mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now. Please try resending your message later, or contact the recipient directly.”

My reader is furious. “Lives are in danger. Evacuations are in chaos  — don’t believe a damn word any American spokesman says – they’re either making it up or they are lying. And the damn system for prioritizing our Afghan workers is a cluster because the DOS can’t manage a damn email inbox! I have never been so disappointed and angry at my government than today. It is maddening.”

My reader has contacted one of his senators – a Republican – but had to leave a message on the constituent line.

I rest my case on this fact…sadly. But to continue on.

All week long, officials in the Biden administration have told us they don’t know how many Americans are stuck in various locations around Afghanistan. Only part of that is true. They know how many Americans are in Afghanistan, that is a fact…where they may be at any particular moment could be true. Understand this: anyone from the United States that travels to Afghanistan must get a visa and ensure they have a passport. Both of those things are permanent records and are maintained at the State Department in a database. As simple keyboard inquiry is all that is needed. Going deeper on the matter, is your passport and boarding pass. The TSA scans both. And in most airports with international travel gates, those two documents at the time of travel are merged. For details on the chipped passports, e-Passport or biometric passports, go here.

Is there a chance the actual database may be off on the actual number? Sure based on the traveler’s movement, but you can be assured our State Department knows the number with at least above 90% accuracy. The reason the ‘don’t know answer’ is given is because it would admit we cannot possibly get Americans out of likely peril in Afghanistan within the Biden timeline.

Once Americans arrive in Afghanistan, they are to register with the US Embassy so officials there know who is in country and why. Well, that too may now be a big problem as we evacuated the embassy and removed the flag that that database still is held by some official or was likely uploaded to a cloud system.

https://afgnews.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/US-embassy-staff-still-functioning-in-Kabul.jpg Building on the right is the US Embassy, Kabul – source

Now the Biden administration is telling us that anyone that is in Afghanistan and wants to leave, we will get them out. Really? ‘who wants to leave’? Who the hell would want to stay? C’mon are we that stupid?

Below is a map published by al Jazeera. While I have no use for this media source…at least it does given some timeline of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan as of August 15.

The Taliban has captured 26 of the 34 provincial capitals in Afghanistan, with more than half of them falling to the armed group in less than two weeks.

The armed group is now at the gate of the capital Kabul after taking major cities such as Herat, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif.

The group had already gained vast parts of rural Afghanistan since launching a series of offensives in May to coincide with the start of the final withdrawal of US-led foreign forces after 20 years of war.

***

Many in the diplomatic staff at our Kabul embassy knew precisely what the conditions on the ground were as far back as at least June. As it was getting more threatening, many of their warnings went unheard so they wrote a letter of dissent in July. Still our Secretary of State ignored the level of the threat and hence the Biden White House ignored all the same but slowly began a process.

WASHINGTON — Last month, two dozen diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, warned about the possibility of a Taliban takeover and urged the State Department to begin an airlift operation in a dissent cable sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The July 13 cable called on Washington to be firm and direct in describing atrocities by the Taliban, the source said. NBC News has not seen the cable.

A dissent channel cable is a confidential, formal way for State Department diplomats to voice disagreement or concern about U.S. policies without fear of retribution.

The cable was first Thursday by The Wall Street Journal.

The day after the cable was sent, the Biden administration announced Operation Allies Refuge, a program to transport Afghans and their families at risk of retaliation from the Taliban for their work with U.S. troops. State Department leaders sent a response a few days later thanking the writers of the dissent cable and describing the task force set up to facilitate evacuations of Special Immigrant Visa applicants, the source said.

“We value constructive internal dissent. It’s patriotic. It’s protected. And it makes us more effective,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said Thursday. “Maintaining the channel’s integrity and the notion of disciplined dissent is key to that revitalization. It’s why we keep communication strictly between the Department’s leadership and the authors of the dissent messages and why we don’t comment publicly on the substance of messages or the replies, regardless of the classification.”

Once the Taliban began the march to take over capitols and provinces, all actions needed to be launched. Nah…not until August did that even begin. Get the picture?

 

 

More Evidence of the Persistent China Threat to the US

Exactly how much is the United States going to tolerate?

Not only is the United States and the Western world concerned about the constant military threat of China in the South China Sea but the cyber war continues.

Just read through this Department of Justice report for context –>

Four Chinese Nationals Working with the Ministry of State Security Charged with Global Computer Intrusion Campaign Targeting Intellectual Property and Confidential Business Information, Including Infectious Disease Research

Indictment Alleges Three Defendants Were Officers in the Hainan State Security Department (HSSD), a provincial arm of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS)

A federal grand jury in San Diego, California, returned an indictment in May charging four nationals and residents of the People’s Republic of China with a campaign to hack into the computer systems of dozens of victim companies, universities and government entities in the United States and abroad between 2011 and 2018. The indictment, which was unsealed on Friday, alleges that much of the conspiracy’s theft was focused on information that was of significant economic benefit to China’s companies and commercial sectors, including information that would allow the circumvention of lengthy and resource-intensive research and development processes. The defendants and their Hainan State Security Department (HSSD) conspirators sought to obfuscate the Chinese government’s role in such theft by establishing a front company, Hainan Xiandun Technology Development Co., Ltd. (海南仙盾) (Hainan Xiandun), since disbanded, to operate out of Haikou, Hainan Province.

The two-count indictment alleges that Ding Xiaoyang (丁晓阳), Cheng Qingmin (程庆民) and Zhu Yunmin (朱允敏), were HSSD officers responsible for coordinating, facilitating and managing computer hackers and linguists at Hainan Xiandun and other MSS front companies to conduct hacking for the benefit of China and its state-owned and sponsored instrumentalities. The indictment alleges that Wu Shurong (吴淑荣) was a computer hacker who, as part of his job duties at Hainan Xiandun, created malware, hacked into computer systems operated by foreign governments, companies and universities, and supervised other Hainan Xiandun hackers.

The conspiracy’s hacking campaign targeted victims in the United States, Austria, Cambodia, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia, Norway, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Targeted industries included, among others, aviation, defense, education, government, health care, biopharmaceutical and maritime. Stolen trade secrets and confidential business information included, among other things, sensitive technologies used for submersibles and autonomous vehicles, specialty chemical formulas, commercial aircraft servicing, proprietary genetic-sequencing technology and data, and foreign information to support China’s efforts to secure contracts for state-owned enterprises within the targeted country (e.g., large-scale high-speed railway development projects). At research institutes and universities, the conspiracy targeted infectious-disease research related to Ebola, MERS, HIV/AIDS, Marburg and tularemia.

As alleged, the charged MSS officers coordinated with staff and professors at various universities in Hainan and elsewhere in China to further the conspiracy’s goals. Not only did such universities assist the MSS in identifying and recruiting hackers and linguists to penetrate and steal from the computer networks of targeted entities, including peers at many foreign universities, but personnel at one identified Hainan-based university also helped support and manage Hainan Xiandun as a front company, including through payroll, benefits and a mailing address.

“These criminal charges once again highlight that China continues to use cyber-enabled attacks to steal what other countries make, in flagrant disregard of its bilateral and multilateral commitments,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco. “The breadth and duration of China’s hacking campaigns, including these efforts targeting a dozen countries across sectors ranging from healthcare and biomedical research to aviation and defense, remind us that no country or industry is safe. Today’s international condemnation shows that the world wants fair rules, where countries invest in innovation, not theft.”

“The FBI, alongside our federal and international partners, remains committed to imposing risk and consequences on these malicious cyber actors here in the U.S. and abroad,” said Deputy Director Paul M. Abbate of the FBI. “We will not allow the Chinese government to continue to use these tactics to obtain unfair economic advantage for its companies and commercial sectors through criminal intrusion and theft. With these types of actions, the Chinese government continues to undercut its own claims of being a trusted and effective partner in the international community.”

“This indictment alleges a worldwide hacking and economic espionage campaign led by the government of China,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman for the Southern District of California. “The defendants include foreign intelligence officials who orchestrated the alleged offenses, and the indictment demonstrates how China’s government made a deliberate choice to cheat and steal instead of innovate. These offenses threaten our economy and national security, and this prosecution reflects the Department of Justice’s commitment and ability to hold individuals and nations accountable for stealing the ideas and intellectual achievements of our nation’s best and brightest people.”

“The FBI’s San Diego Field Office is committed to protecting the people of the United States and the community of San Diego, to include our universities, health care systems, research institutes, and defense contractors,” said Special Agent in Charge Suzanne Turner of the FBI’s San Diego Field Office. “The charges outlined today demonstrate China’s continued, persistent computer intrusion efforts, which will not be tolerated here or abroad. We stand steadfast with our law enforcement partners in the United States and around the world and will continue to hold accountable those who commit economic espionage and theft of intellectual property.”

The defendants’ activity had been previously identified by private sector security researchers, who have referred to the group as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) 40, BRONZE, MOHAWK, FEVERDREAM, G0065, Gadolinium, GreenCrash, Hellsing, Kryptonite Panda, Leviathan, Mudcarp, Periscope, Temp.Periscope and Temp.Jumper.

According to the indictment, to gain initial access to victim networks, the conspiracy sent fraudulent spearphishing emails, that were buttressed by fictitious online profiles and contained links to doppelgänger domain names, which were created to mimic or resemble the domains of legitimate companies. In some instances, the conspiracy used hijacked credentials, and the access they provided, to launch spearphishing campaigns against other users within the same victim entity or at other targeted entities. The conspiracy also used multiple and evolving sets of sophisticated malware, including both publicly available and customized malware, to obtain, expand and maintain unauthorized access to victim computers and networks. The conspiracy’s malware included those identified by security researchers as BADFLICK, aka GreenCrash; PHOTO, aka Derusbi; MURKYTOP, aka mt.exe; and HOMEFRY, aka dp.dll. Such malware allowed for initial and continued intrusions into victim systems, lateral movement within a system, and theft of credentials, including administrator passwords.

The conspiracy often used anonymizer services, such as The Onion Router (TOR), to access malware on victim networks and manage their hacking infrastructure, including servers, domains and email accounts. The conspiracy further attempted to obscure its hacking activities through other third-party services. For example, the conspiracy used GitHub to both store malware and stolen data, which was concealed using steganography. The conspiracy also used Dropbox Application Programming Interface (API) keys in commands to upload stolen data directly to conspiracy-controlled Dropbox accounts to make it appear to network defenders that such data exfiltration was an employee’s legitimate use of the Dropbox service.

Coinciding with today’s announcement, to enhance private sector network defense efforts against the conspirators, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a Joint Cybersecurity Advisory containing these and further technical details, indicators of compromise and mitigation measures.

The defendants are each charged with one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, and one count of conspiracy to commit economic espionage, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. The maximum potential sentences in this case are prescribed by Congress and are provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencings of the defendants will be determined by the assigned judge.

The investigation was conducted jointly by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California, the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Controls Section, and the FBI’s San Diego Field Office. The FBI’s Cyber Division, Cyber Assistant Legal Attachés and Legal Attachés in countries around the world provided essential support. Numerous victims cooperated and provided valuable assistance in the investigation.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Fred Sheppard and Sabrina Feve of the Southern District of California and Trial Attorney Matthew McKenzie of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section are prosecuting this case.

***   source

The threat however does not end in the cyber realm, there is the matter of nuclear weapons. Just days ago, China threatened Japan, an ally of the United States with a nuclear attack over the matter of Taiwan.

“We will use nuclear bombs first. We will use nuclear bombs continuously. We will do this until Japan declares unconditional surrender for the second time,” a threatening video circulated among official Chinese Communist Party channels warns.

“When we liberate Taiwan, if Japan dares to intervene by force – even if it only deploys one soldier, one plane or one ship – we will not only return fire but also wage full-scale war against Japan itself.”

Tensions between Tokyo and Beijing have spiked high in recent weeks.

Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso said: “We must defend Taiwan, under our alliance with the US”.

Defence Minister Yasuhide Nakayama added Japan and the US must “protect Taiwan as a democratic country”.

This was not what Beijing wanted to hear.

 

“We will never allow anyone to intervene in the Taiwan question in any way,” retorted Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a press briefing last week.

But a Chinese Communist Party approved video channel with close ties to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) took the anger to the next level.

*** Is the Biden administration taking anything seriously? Rather Kamala? Recently Foreign Policy magazine published in part the following:

For the past couple of months, a rumor has been going around Washington that China might be dramatically expanding its arsenal of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that can strike the United States. I had heard that rumor and so had many of my colleagues.

According to a report released by the U.S. Defense Department last September, China had about 100 of those missiles but was expected to double that number in the coming years. Read in full here.

The Feds Have Hired Moonshot CVE, Be Worried

There was a time when CVE, first used by the Obama administration to describe terrorists such as the Haqqani Network, al Qaeda or Islamic State. Now, it is used to classify anyone the Federal government actually just thinks it should and that could mean you just based on your various internet searches. Your searches to find out patterns, various reports, names and dates and other detail is captured by Google (that is if you are still using Google and should not be) and then you are scored.

Sound crazy? This is a long read so hang on through it all as this post is an effort to give you full context, well as much as possible.

Ready?

Let’s begin here:

From February of 2021, a little more than a month since the J6 event in DC, The Hill reported the following:

When armed insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, Vidhya Ramalingam wasn’t surprised.

A day earlier, her company Moonshot CVE, which monitors and combats online extremism, set up a crisis team in response to a flood of indications that the pro-Trump rally scheduled for Washington could turn violent.

Moonshot works to pull back from the brink people who have been inculcated into white supremacist movements, conspiracy theories and radical ideologies, and it offered crisis intervention to some 270,000 high-risk users around the time of the Capitol breach.

“For organizations like ours that have been working on domestic violent extremism for many years, and in the run up to the election and the months that followed, this was not a surprise, that this attack happened,” Ramalingam said.

But even the 33-year-old Ramalingam, who has spent her entire career focused on the issue both domestically and abroad, says the widespread nature of radicalization in the U.S. is alarming.

“It’s a very scary moment in America right now. I mean, the implications are so wide-reaching,” she told The Hill in a recent interview. “There’s just the potential for so much more violence right now.”

Ramalingam got her start embedding herself with white nationalist groups in Sweden for two years as part of her graduate studies.

“It was really tough. I spent a lot of time around people saying and spouting lies about people of color and about immigrants and people like me, so there were moments that were really horrible to sit and listen to,” she said.

But the experience helped open a window into their world and how people become radicalized.

“Some of them had life experiences that had led them here. And for me, it was really important to see that in order to then start to piece together, well, how could you get someone out?” she said.

When far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 people in Norway in July 2011, the European Union tapped Ramalingam to lead its first intergovernmental initiative to respond to right-wing terrorism, a job she held for three years.

She worked on deradicalizing initiatives such as Exit Germany and Exit Sweden that included efforts setting up counseling interventions and training family members and loved ones.

She also sits on the board of Life After Hate, a U.S.-based group that provides similar interventions along with building a network of former extremists to push back on extremist content.

But Ramalingam says the problem needs larger-scale responses, something that became clear with the rise of ISIS and its use of social media to radicalize people.

“There was this sense of defeat, that the terrorists were winning and that they were just better than we were, they were able to use technology better,” she said.

The London-based Moonshot, which opened its D.C. office this week, seeks to scale up monitoring and intervention using the kinds of targeting that have become commonplace in business to build personalized responses.

The company counts a slew of governments, the United Nations and major tech companies such as Facebook and Google among its funders, and groups including the Anti-Defamation League among its partners.

“Technology can actually have the power to scale up really deeply personalized interactions the same way that every single advertisement we see is personalized towards me, my gender, my behavior online, my identity, where I live,” said Ramalingam.

“It really is literally the same thing that Coca-Cola is doing to sell us more Coke. We’re using those same tools to reach people and try and offer them safer alternatives, and either save their lives or save other people’s lives.”

Those efforts, which range from widely used platforms such as Google and Facebook to more niche ones such as Gab and Telegram, have led to some surprising results.

While countering facts and ideological debates seldom work to engage people online, a more empathic approach seems to yield gains. In a recent round of tests, Moonshot’s target audience was 17 percent more likely to engage with posts featuring the simple message that “anger and grief can be isolating” compared to other tested messages.

Other content focused on deescalating anger and even breathing exercises also found fertile ground.

But Ramalingam says the threat is also evolving.

“We’ve seen this kind of blending and metastasization of various once-distinct ideologies, groups and movements. You know, everything from white supremacist and neo-Nazis with armed groups and anti-vaxxers and election conspiracies,” she says.

“These groups weren’t always coordinating, and now we’re suddenly seeing this mess online come together.”

There are a slew of factors at play, including what Ramalingam says is a tepid response from technology companies that have “systematically overlooked and been unwilling to respond” to the threat, though the Capitol insurrection last month could be changing that. Tech platforms, she notes, were far more aggressive when dealing with ISIS and have proven tools on issues such as suicide prevention that show how much more they could be doing.

Another major contributor to the problem has been the willingness of people in positions of power to bolster conspiracy theories and misinformation, whether through full-throated endorsements or more subtle means, such as winking claims that questions remain in actual clear-cut cases or that certain facts are unknowable.

“Political leaders and people in that level of power should absolutely not be lending any credence to conspiracy theories and disinformation. Lending even the tiniest inkling of credence to those conspiracy theories is hugely dangerous because of the position of power that they’re in,” she said.

Ramalingam is no stranger to Washington, having grown up just a few hours away and later testifying before Congress on the threat of white nationalism.

She says she has been in touch with senior members of the Biden administration on how to take a whole-of-government approach to combatting right-wing extremism, which FBI Director Christopher Wray says is the top terrorism threat the country faces.

She worries that the country will assume that the events of Jan. 6 were the apex of a movement, rather than simply the latest in a series of deadly attacks ranging from Charlottesville, Va., to Pittsburgh to El Paso, Texas.

“For those of us that have been working on this form of extremism for 10 plus years now, it would be misleading to say that this is the — kind of the crescendo and now it’s going to dissipate,” she said.

“I think there’s a risk for the U.S. government, that the response following the Jan. 6 events focuses on public statements and on Band-Aids and not on the changes and the real shifts that need to take place in the entire system to deal with domestic violent extremism,” she said.

Got it? Hold on here comes the terrifying part….

From Fast Company:

How do you pull people out of the rabbit holes that lead to violent extremism, or keep them from falling in? If conspiracy-laced hate is another kind of pandemic pushed by online superspreaders, could we build something like a cure or a vaccine?

The deadly Capitol riot on January 6 has set off a fresh scramble to answer these questions, and prompted experts like Vidhya Ramalingam to look for new ways to reach extremists—like search ads for mindfulness.

“It’s so counterintuitive, you would just think that those audiences would be turned off by that messaging,” says Ramalingam, cofounder and CEO of Moonshot CVE, a digital counter-extremism company that counts governments like the U.S. and Canada and groups like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Life After Hate among its clients. But Moonshot’s researchers recently found that Americans searching for information about armed groups online were more likely than typical audiences to click on messages that encourage calmness and mindful thinking.

“Our team tried it, and it seems to be working,” Ramalingam says. The finding echoes previous evidence suggesting that some violent extremists tend to be more receptive to messages offering mental health support. “And that’s an opening to a conversation with them.”

It’s a promising idea in a growing multimillion-dollar war—an effort that, even decades after 9/11 and especially after 1/6, is still hungry for tools to reach extremists. Old currents of violence and hate, amplified by a virtuous cycle of platforms and propagandists, are straining relationships and communities, draining wallets, and putting new pressure on the U.S. government to steer its anti-terror focus toward homegrown threats. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security said it was granting at least $77 million toward ideas for stopping what the agency says now represents the biggest danger to Americans’ safety: “small groups of individuals who commit acts of violence motivated by domestic extremist ideological beliefs.” 

The risk of violence is buoyed by a rising tide of conspiracy theories and extremist interest, which Ramalingam says has reached levels comparable to other “high risk” countries like Brazil, Sri Lanka, India, and Myanmar. In terms of indicators of extremism in the U.S., “the numbers are skyrocketing.”

How to reach people—and redirect them

To get those numbers, Moonshot goes to where the toxicity tends to spread, and where violent far-right groups do much of their recruiting: Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, but also niche platforms like MyMilitia, Zello, and Gab. But core to its strategy is the place where many of us start seeking answers—the most trafficked website of all. “We all live our lives by search engines,” Ramalingam says.

 

From an analysis of U.S. social media and search data by Moonshot and the ADL [Image: courtesy of Moonshot]

Social media tends to get the bulk of the attention when it comes to radicalization, but Google is also integral to the extremism on-ramp. And unlike social media, with its posts and shares and filters, a search can feel like a more private, largely unmoderated, experience. “We tell Google our deepest, darkest thoughts,” Ramalingam says. “We turn to Google and ask the things that we won’t ask our family members or partners or our brothers or sisters.”

Search can also convey to users an illusory sense of objectivity and authority in a way that social media doesn’t. “It’s important that we keep our eye on search engines as much, if not more than we do social media,” Safiya Noble, associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and cofounder and codirector of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, recently wrote on Twitter. “The subjective nature of social media is much more obvious. With search, people truly believe they are experiencing credible, vetted information. Google is an ad platform, the end.”

Moonshot began in 2015 with a simple, insurgent strategy: Use Google’s ad platform—and the personal data it collects—to redirect people away from extremist movements and toward more constructive content. The idea, called the Redirect Method, was developed in partnership with Google, and widely touted as a way to reach people searching for jihadist content, targeting young men who were just getting into ISIS propaganda, or more radicalized people who might be Googling for information on how to sneak across the border into Syria. The idea is to steer potential extremists away—known as counterradicalization—or to help people who are deep down a rabbit hole find their way out through deradicalization. That might mean connecting them with a mentor or counselor, possibly a former extremist.

 

[Image: courtesy of Moonshot]

Ramalingam has seen these methods work up close. A decade ago, as part of her graduate studies, she embedded herself among neo-Nazis in Scandinavia, where a system of counseling and exit programs was helping bring people back to sanity and family. In 2015, she and another counter-extremism researcher named Ross Frenett started Moonshot to drive that approach using search ads, with a name that described their far-reaching goal. “If we knew that that worked offline,” she says, “couldn’t we test whether this would work online?” 

What began with a focus on jihadism and European white supremacy is now part of an effort to track a nexus of extremism, conspiracy theories, and disinformation—from QAnon to child exploitation content—from Canada to Sri Lanka. But for Moonshot, the U.S. is a new priority. Last month, Ramalingam, who grew up in the states, returned to open the company’s second office in D.C., where it can be closer to policy makers and practitioners. The company is also dropping the acronym from its birth name, Moonshot CVE: “Countering violent extremism” has become nearly synonymous with a misguided overemphasis on Muslim communities, Ramalingam points out, and in any case, old tactics aren’t sufficient. As extremist ideas have stretched into the mainstream, Moonshot’s once tiny target audiences now number in the millions.

“We can’t rely on what we knew worked when we were dealing with the dozens and the tens of people that were really on the fringes,” she says. “We need to be testing all sorts of new messaging.”

Understanding the data

If you were among the thousands of Americans who Googled for certain extremist-related keywords in the months around the election—phrases like “Join Oath Keepers Militia,” “I want to shoot Ron Wyden,” and “How to make C4″—you may have been targeted by the Redirect Method. It could have been a vague, nonjudgmental message at the top of your search results, like “Don’t do something you’ll regret.” Click, and you could end up at a playlist of YouTube videos with violence-prevention content, like a TED Talk by a would-be school shooter or testimonies from former neo-Nazis. Or you might encounter videos promoting calmness, or a page directing you to mental health resources. Around January 6 alone, Ramalingam says more than 270,000 Americans clicked on Moonshot’s crisis-counseling ads.

To do this, Google has given Moonshot special permission to target ads against extremist keywords that are typically banned. But while Moonshot launched the Redirect Method with Google’s help, these days it typically pays the ad giant to run its campaigns, just like any other advertiser. And now, given the sheer scale of the audiences Moonshot is reaching in the U.S., “the costs are off the charts,” Ramalingam says. Regarding its recent ADL-backed campaign, she says, “We’ve never paid this much for advertising in any one country on a monthly basis.”

This ad data comes with caveats. When looking at extremist search terms, for instance, Moonshot can’t be certain it’s measuring individual people or the same person searching multiple times. It also can’t know if it’s targeting an extremist or a journalist who’s simply writing about extremism.

 

Sample of U.S. Google search data during the three months around Election Day [Image: courtesy of Moonshot]

Still, the company is bringing more empirical evidence and scientific rigor to a field that sorely needs it, says Colin Clarke, the director of policy and research at the Soufan Center, an independent non-profit group that studies extremism. Moonshot’s data is even more concerning, Clarke says, because of another statistic that’s not exactly captured in Google analytics.
“At a time when people have been locked in their homes and consuming disinformation, with record levels of domestic violence, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, what’s the antidote? People have bought guns and ammunition in record numbers. So they’re anxious, they’re angry, isolated, and they’re well-armed,” he says. “It’s a perfect storm.”

In a recent analysis, done in partnership with the ADL and gathered in a report titled “From Shitposting to Sedition,” Moonshot tracked tens of thousands of extremist Google searches by Americans across all 50 states during the three months around Election Day. It saw searches spike around big political events, but also along geographic and political lines. In states where pandemic stay-at-home orders lasted 9 or fewer days, white-supremacist-related searches grew by only 1%; in states where stay-at-home orders were 10 days or longer, the increase was 21%.

The politics of the pandemic fomented domestic extremist interest, but also helped unite disparate fringe movements, from militias to climate denialists to anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. “We started to see this worrying blending and metastasization of all these different ideologies in the U.S.—far-right groups blending and reaching across the aisle to work with anti-vax movements,” Ramalingam says. And it’s during times of crisis, she notes, “when we see these actors just grasping to turn fear and anxiety in society into an opportunity for them to grow.”

But Ramalingam isn’t just concerned about the most hard-core armed believers. After the election and the events of January 6, she worries now about splintered far-right groups and disaffected conspiracy theorists who are grappling for meaning. That puts them at risk of further radicalization, or worse.

“There are a lot of people who basically just feel misled, who feel like they’ve lost a lot because they followed these conspiracy theories,” she says. QAnon channels filled up with anxiety, self-harm, and talk of suicide, “like a father saying, ‘My son won’t speak to me,’ people who have lost their jobs, people who said, ‘I lost my family because of this,’ ” Ramalingam says. “And so there’s a real moment now where we need to be thinking about the mental health needs of people who, at scale, bought into these conspiracy theories and lies.”

What to say 

To reach violent radicals or conspiracy theorists to begin with, Ramalingam urges caution with ideological arguments. Shaming, ridiculing, and fact-based arguing can prove counterproductive. In some cases, it can be more effective to use nonjudgmental and nonideological messages that don’t directly threaten people’s beliefs or tastes but that try to meet them where they are. For instance, as Frenett suggests, if someone is searching for Nazi death metal, don’t show them a lecture; instead, show them a video with a death metal score, but without the racism.

Simple reminders to be mindful, and to think about how one’s actions impact others, may help. In its recent campaign, some of Moonshot’s most effective messaging asked people to “reflect and think on their neighbors, their loved ones, the people in their immediate community around them, and just to reflect on how their actions might be harmful to their loved ones,” Ramalingam says.

People interested in armed groups were most receptive to messages of “calm” offering mindfulness exercises. For all audiences, Moonshot found particularly high traction with an ad that said, “Anger and grief can be isolating.” When people clicked through, to meditation content or mental health resources, Ramalingam notes that “they seem to be watching it, or listening to it, or engaging with it for a long time.”

To reach QAnon supporters, Moonshot found the most success with messages that seek to empathize with their need for psychological and social support. “Are you feeling angry? Learn how to escape the anger and move forward,” said one Moonshot ad directed at QAnon keywords, which saw a click-through rate around 6%, twice that of other types of redirect messages. Clicking on that took some users to r/Qult_Headquarters, a subreddit that includes posts by former adherents.

Preventing the spread of violent extremist ideas involves a broader set of strategies. To bolster trust and a shared reality among the general public—people who haven’t yet gone down the rabbit hole—researchers are exploring other countermeasures like “attitudinal inoculation,” alerting people to emerging conspiracy theories and warning of extremists groups’ attempts at manipulation.

Experts also urge enhancing public media literacy through education and fact-checking systems. Governments may not be trusted messengers themselves, but they could help in other ways, through a public health model for countering violent extremism. That could mean funding for local community activities that can keep people engaged, and for mental health and social programs, an idea that then-Vice President Joe Biden endorsed at a 2015 White House summit on countering violent extremism.

Speaking of the White House, Ramalingam emphasizes that extremist ideologies warrant stern condemnation from public figures. Companies should deplatform the superspreaders of racism and disinformation, and political, cultural, and religious leaders should vehemently denounce them.

“Rhetoric that’s shaming of those ideologies can be really important and powerful from people in positions of power,” Ramalingam says. That’s for an already skeptical audience “that needs to hear it reinforced, but also the audience that is in the middle and doesn’t really know or doesn’t care that much. And that audience really needs to hear, ‘This is not okay. This is not acceptable. This is not a social norm.’ ”

But when addressing more extremist-minded individuals, Ramalingam suggests a gentler approach. “If someone is coming at you with an attack, you kind of pull yourself back into a corner and stand your ground and defend it,” she says. “And so if that’s our approach with the most extreme of society, that will actually worsen the problem.”

Does this work?

In the face of the domestic terror threat, mindfulness and compassion might sound like entering a space-laser fight with a water pistol or a hug.

But to Brad Galloway, who helps people exit right-wing extremist groups, Moonshot’s messaging makes sense. In a previous life, he used chat rooms and message boards to recruit people into a neo-Nazi group. After he joined—drawn in largely by camaraderie and music—what had been a U.S.-only organization eventually grew to 12 countries, thanks largely to the internet. Now Galloway is a coordinator at the Center on Hate, Bias and Extremism at Ontario Tech University, where he often urges his mentees to be more mindful, especially online.

“I ask people to think, Do I really need to watch this video of a school shooting?” Instead he encourages “positive content” to displace the stuff that can accelerate or even provoke radicalization.

Galloway, who has worked with Moonshot, Life After Hate, the Organization for the Prevention of Violence, and other groups, says the same principle of positive content applies to real life, too: Connecting with old friends and finding fun new activities can help people leave corrosive extremist communities. “What’s positive to that user, and how do we make that more prominent to them?”

 

Sample of U.S. Google search data around Election Day [Image: courtesy of Moonshot]

That’s not just a rhetorical question. What content works with which audience? Who is reachable? What counts as success? And how do strategies like the Redirect Method influence extremists? 

A 2018 Rand Corp. report on digital deradicalization tactics found that extremist audiences targeted with Redirect “clicked on these ads at a rate on par with industry standards.” Still, they couldn’t say what eventual impact it had on their behavior. As new funding flows in, and as experts throw up an arsenal of counter-radicalization ideas, there’s still scant evidence of what works.

For its part, Moonshot says its data suggests that some of its target audiences have viewed less extremist content, and points to the thousands of people it has connected to exit counseling and mental health resources. Still, Ramalingam says that the company sees “greater potential for us to assess whether our digital campaigns can lead to longer-term engagement with users, and longer-term change.”

There are other serious concerns as well. The missteps of previous digital wars on terror haunt Moonshot’s work: secret and extralegal surveillance systems, big data political warfare by military counter-radicalization contractors-turned-conspiracy mongers, untold violations of privacy and other civil rights. If Moonshot is tracking what messaging influences who, what data does it collect about “at risk” users, and where does that end up, and why? And who is at risk to begin with?

Ramalingam worries about the privacy concerns; she acknowledges that thanks to ad platforms and brokers, Moonshot can tap into “actually a heck of a lot of data.” But, she stresses, Moonshot isn’t accessing people’s private messages, and its work is bound by the stricter European personal data protections of the GDPR, as well as by an ethics panel that helps evaluate impacts. In any case, she argues, Moonshot is simply taking advantage of the multibillion-dollar digital platforms that drive most of the internet, not to mention the markets.

“As long as Nike and Coca-Cola are able to use personal data to understand how best to sell us Coke and sneakers, I’m quite comfortable using personal data to make sure that I can try and convince people not to do violent things,” Ramalingam says. Should that system of influence exist at all? “I’m totally up for that debate,” she says. “But while we’re in a context where that’s happening, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for us to use that sort of data for public safety purposes.”

What about the platforms?

The tech giants have run their own redirect and counter-speech programs as part of ongoing efforts to stem the toxicity that flourishes on their platforms. Google touts its work with Moonshot battling ISIS, its research on extremism, and its efforts to remove objectionable content and reduce recommendations to “borderline” content on YouTube. In December, its rights group Jigsaw published its findings on the digital spread of violent white supremacy.

Facebook tested the Redirect Method in a 2019 pilot in Australia aimed at nudging extremist users toward educational resources and off-platform support, a system that echoes its suicide-prevention efforts, which use pop-ups to redirect at-risk users to prevention hotlines. In an evaluation commissioned by Facebook last year, Moonshot called the program “broadly successful,” and recommended changes for future iterations. Facebook has also tested the program in Indonesia and Germany.

Ramalingam praises the tech platforms for their efforts, and supports their decisions to deplatform vast numbers of far-right and QAnon-related accounts, even if that’s made researching online extremism harder. Still, she says, Big Tech is doing “not nearly enough.”

Extremist content continues to slip through the platforms’ moderation filters, and then gets rewarded by the algorithms. Facebook’s own researchers have repeatedly shown how its growth-focused algorithms favor extremist content. Despite YouTube’s moderation efforts, political scientist Brendan Nyhan recently reported, the site’s design can still “reinforce exposure patterns” among extremist-curious people.

“The tech companies have an obligation to use their great privilege . . . of being a conduit of information, to get information and helpful resources to people that might be trapped in violent movements,” Ramalingam says.

As companies and lawmakers and law enforcement scramble for solutions in the wake of the events of January 6, Ramalingam also cautions against rash decisions and short-term thinking. “There’s an imperative to act now, and I have seen in the past mistakes get made by governments and by the tech companies just delivering on knee-jerk responses,” she says. “And then once the conversation dies down, they go back to essentially the way things were.”

Emotional reactions are understandable, given the shock of January 6, or of a family member who’s fallen down a rabbit hole, but they tend to be counterproductive. What works for battling violent extremism on a personal, one-on-one level, Ramalingam says, can also help fight it on a national scale: Avoid assumptions, be mindful, and consider the actual evidence.

“The way counselors and social workers do their work is they start by asking questions, by trying to understand,” she says. “It’s about asking questions so those people can reflect on themselves.”

Not finished yet….it gets worse.

From CSP:

The Defense Department, led by controversial diversity chief Bishop Garrison, has commissioned a study to investigate “extremism” in its ranks. But the chosen contractor may raise additional questions for a DOD that is already facing increasing Congressional scrutiny over accusations of politicization.

The U.S. Military Academy reportedly is working with a London, England based firm, Moonshot CVE [Countering Violent Extremism], whose CEO is Vidhya Ramalingam, a former Obama Foundation leader. Ramalingam is also the author of a 2013 paper on immigration in Europe funded by a grant from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

Ramalingam told Defense One she spoke with Garrison personally last month about how the Pentagon could use technology developed by her company to “find and eliminate extremism in the ranks.”

Why would the Pentagon hire a U.K.-based company to study allegations of extremism in the U.S. military? Why hire a politically connected group like Ramalingam’s?

It suggests that Garrison and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin may be looking for a predetermined answer. A deeper dive into Moonshot CVE might help unravel what they have in mind.

Moonshot CVE co-founder Ross Frenett expressed his support for Critical Race Theory (CRT) on Twitter last month, calling the opposition “Horrifying.” Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley recently faced stiff criticism from congressional Republicans over the military’s recent moves to incorporate CRT elements into their training.

Moonshot CVE’s website dismisses Antifa’s and Black Lives Matter’s Marxist leanings and claims that those who assert its Marxism have engaged in a “white supremacist disinformation” campaign “as a means of delegitimizing it.”

“These sources echo far-right extremist disinformation narratives about BLM protesters trying to overthrow the republic and harm American citizens in a Marxist coup,” Moonshot CVE wrote in a paper jointly published with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Of course, Antifa and BLM groups haven’t been shy about identifying themselves as Marxists. A popular graphic that circulated on pro-Antifa websites and Telegram accounts during the so-called “George Floyd Rebellion” of June 2020 claimed, “Militant networks will defend our revolutionary communities. Liberation begins where America dies” and the status of BLM founders as self-identified “trained Marxists” has been only discussed in the press.

Ramalingam and her organization claim that Antifa is unorganized, ignoring evidence of significant local, regional and international Antifa networks, and substantial material support from an extensive far-left network (including, as noted above, the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.) An extensive social media network including utilizing peer-to-peer encryption apps also exist, where BLM and Antifa activists share propaganda and techniques.

Why does Moonshot CVE fixate exclusively on “far-right” extremism, and work to minimize or deny the evidence of left-wing extremism?

One reason might be Moonshot’s apparent association with a German far-Left organization which is overtly pro-Marxist and pro-Antifa, and whose leaders have historical ties to Russian intelligence.

Ramalingam is a regular contributor to programs for an initiative at American University in Washington, D.C. called The Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). She participated in PERIL-sponsored seminars in October 2020, in April, and last month.

PERIL has partnered  with The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS), the think tank of the German political party Die Linke (The Left). Die Linke is the successor of the former East German communist party. The think tank is named for Rosa Luxemburg, a German Communist revolutionary whose ideas pioneered the Marxist examination of race and gender, and was killed during the 1919 German communist uprising. A 2008 report by the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution calls “the memory” of Luxemburg a “traditional element of Left-wing extremism.”

This alliance could be revealing about Ramalingam’s and PERIL’s ideological orientation.

PERIL’s description of the RSL is misinformation and raised questions about what else it glosses over.

PERIL unsurprisingly omits the fact the organization’s top leaders belonged to East Germany’s ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and/or were either employees or informants of the Soviet KGB-run STASI. Many former STASI members shifted their allegiance to the KGB following its disbanding, a defector told “The Washington Post” in 1990. Die Linke is a pro-Russia stalwart. RLS’s representative in Moscow is a woman named Kerstin Kaiser, a former STASI employee who provided reports that were given to the KGB.

Kaiser belongs to the Petersburger Dialogue, along with Andre Brie another RLS leader and former STASI employee. Vladimir Putin and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, an important figure in Russia’s controversial Nordstream 2 pipeline, created the group in 2001 to foster closer Russian-German relations.

“It stands in the tradition of the workers’ and women’s movements, as well as anti-fascism and anti-racism,” PERIL says on its website.

Given that The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung was founded in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, known officially as the “Antifascist Protection Barrier” one might have questions about what “traditions” of antifascism the group actually stands for.

PERIL’s head Cynthia Miller-Idriss wrote a blog for the RLS’s New York office on “radicalization” during COVID last year. She thanked RLS for the opportunity to write for it on Twitter.

Miller-Idriss and Ramalingam both participated in a conference in Jena, Germany called “Hate Not Found” sponsored by the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society last December where Miller-Idriss was the keynote speaker. Rosa Luxemburg Foundation member Maik Fleilitz was on a panel at the conference that discussed “deplatforming the far-Right.”

Ramalingam and Miller-Idriss both contributed articles to a journal on “radicalization” on the Far-Right in November of 2020.

RLS’s global head Dagmar Enkelmann belonged to the SED and the East German parliament before the wall fell. Gregor Gysi, who helped open the RLS’s New York office in 2012 and who visited last month, headed the SED when it rebranded itself as the “Party of Democratic Socialism” in December 1989. Gysi allegedly informed on his legal clients to the STASI. A bloc in the German Bundestag expelled him in 1992 for seeming to defend the STASI.

STASI informants played a key role in promoting the climate of fear that kept East German society under control. RLS hosted former East German spy chief Werner Grossmann in 2010 for a talk on his book.

East Germany’s last Premier Hans Modrow is an RLS member, and the RLS manages his foundation, The Hans Modrow Stiftung. Modrow had close KGB ties, including to KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, who ran the Soviet spy agency     his tenure as Dresden Communist Party boss. Modrow supervised the dismantling of the STASI together with Grossmann. Today, Modrow received the Order of Friendship from the Vladimir Putin in 2017. He remains embittered toward Mikhail Gorbachev for allowing the collapse of the East German regime.

As a young KGB major, Putin supervised a local STASI office in Dresden, while Modrow was the local party boss.

The STASI trained the Red Army Faction (RAF), a predecessor of today’s Antifa.

RLS funded Antifa activities in Germany, and Die Linke openly supports Antifa. The Hamburg, Germany Antifa chapter even promoted a Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung panel on its Facebook page. Friedrich Burschel, editor of “Antifascitisiches Info Blatt, advises the foundation on subjects related to right-wing extremism and fascism at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. “Antifascitisiches Info Blatt”  ̶  the oldest ANTIFA publication, having first entered publication in 1987 in East Berlin  ̶  publishes articles on the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung-funded website Linksnet, a collaboration of far-Left magazines.

The RLS hosted two BLM founders, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi in 2014 and 2015 respectively. Garza attended the RLS-sponsored “Mapping Socialist Strategies” seminar in August 2014. RLS leader and former “unofficial STASI employee” Michael Brie spoke at this event. His brother Andre Brie spoke at a 1994 “Committees of Correspondence for Liberation and Socialism” conference along with Angela Davis, who has become influential in BLM. Davis worked closely with the East German regime in the 1970s, and she was a guest of honor at an event sponsored by Die Linke a decade ago. RLS’s New York office hosted BLM propagandist Shaun King in 2017.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is another PERIL partner who Ramalingam has worked with. The SPLC also has received money from the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. The SPLC is an extremely controversial organization which has been accused by its own former employees of bias and deliberately overinflating supposed far right threats for fundraising.  SPLC has defended Antifa. Former SPLC Intelligence Project Director Heidi Beirich and SPLC Intelligence Project Senior Analyst Evelyn Schlatter participated in a June 2017 RLS-sponsored session in New York called “Strategies Against the Far Right.” Ramalingam and Beirich are both advisory group members of a pan-European “anti-radicalization” project called The DARE Consortium.  In October, Ramalingam, Beirich and Miller-Idriss collaborated on a podcast on countering extremism sponsored by the ADL.

Moonshot CVE’s alliance with RLS-backed PERIL reinforces the perception that the Biden Pentagon’s hunt for extremism actually is an excuse for classifying dissenting view as “extremist.” And the pro-Russian/ex-STASI controlled RLS’s endorsement of the same talking points as Moonshot CVE shows it comes from a far-Left extremist perspective. U.S. troops shouldn’t be subjected to ideological warfare.

The fact Moonshot CVE equates opposing Antifa with extremism reminds us that this company doesn’t deserve taxpayer money or the Pentagon’s cooperation.

You’re already guilty just by the research you do while so many other cases are not prosecuted at all. Take caution reader…..

Even Federal contracts have gone to universities….

George Washington University School of Law’s Program on Extremism has created an online resource for tracking the hundreds of criminal cases filed by the Biden Justice Department against United States citizens for their alleged actions on January 6th. The Administration has charged people from all 50 states, and as is reflected in the“Capitol Hill Siege” project archive, every case has been filed in the District of Columbia. Read more here.

 

 

 

Yandex, a Russian tech company is on 250 US University Campuses

It is no wonder they are hacking America to death…

Do we really know what is inside these machines?

Forbes:

Yandex, a Russian tech company working on self-driving systems, is partnering with GrubHub to deploy a fleet of delivery robots on selected college campuses in the United States later this year.

Yandex NV Tests Autonomous Delivery Robots on Russian Streets

© 2020 Bloomberg Finance LP

Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

Yandex often compares itself to Google. It offers arange of services, including a search engine, ride-hailing and food delivery. The company began operating food delivery robots, called Rovers, in 2019 in Moscow, Tel Aviv and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“We chose to partner with GrubHub for campus delivery because of GrubHub’s unparalleled reach into college campuses across the United States, as well as the flexibility and strength of their ordering platform,” said Dmitry Polishchuk, CEO of Yandex Self-Driving Group. “We are delighted to deploy dozens of our rovers, taking the next step in actively commercializing our self-driving technology in different markets across the globe.’’

The partnership plans to launch the Rovers on 250 campuses.

“While college campuses are notoriously difficult for cars to navigate, specifically as it relates to food delivery, Yandex robots easily access parts of campuses that vehicles cannot,” Brian Madigan, GrubHub vice president of corporate and campus partners, said in a statement.

Yandex robot fleets have logged seven million autonomous miles since the team was founded in 2017, second only to Alphabet’s Waymo. That’s up from two million miles in February 2020.

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Yandex employs about 400 engineers, plus operational and support staff.

Artem Fokin, Yandex’s head of business development, told Forbes.com that the company has spent only $100 million dollars on development in the four years since inception. That’s relatively frugal compared to Silicon Valley teams, which have raised billions toward the same goal.

The company’s Rovers deliver take-out meals, groceries, and retail consumer goods. Yandex has increased the dimensions and carrying capacity of the Rovers over time, to accommodate larger loads.

“We’ve worked to make the cost of Rover delivery extremely economical,” spokesman Yulia Shveyko, told Forbes.com contributor David Silver in May. “In Russia, human delivery is very price-competitive, and we have to be even more affordable than that.”

Unlike public roads, where vehicles travel in lanes and their travel patterns are predictable, Yandex vehicles must navigate sidewalks and other pedestrian paths where people’s movements are less orderly.

They can operate in broad daylight and in the dark of night, in moderate snowfall and rain, as well as in controlled and uncontrolled pedestrian crossing scenarios. But they can only travel at speeds up to 5 miles per hour.

Yandex owns 73% of its Self-Driving Group, while Uber owns 19% and a group of Yandex employees own the remaining 8%.