China’s top anti-espionage agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), announced on Monday it has arrested an official it says is a spy for the CIA.
Beijing claims Chinese ministry official is CIA recruit, second arrest China lays at feet of US spy agency in a month
Related:
[2017] Killing C.I.A. Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations
Company name change may be Musk’s next step to launch X, the “everything app.”
Twitter “no longer exists” as a company, merges into Musk’s X Corp
By Alan Macleod / MintPressNews
For quite some time, TikTok has been recruiting former State Department officials to run its operations.
TIKTOK: Chinese “Trojan Horse” Is Run By State Department Officials
Bill to Ban Tik Tok Would Give Government Sweeping Powers to Crackdown on Tech
A person who violates the act could be fined up to $1 million or punished with up to 20 years in prison. The broad and vague definitions in the legislation caused many to wonder if people could be handed such harsh punishments for using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to get around future government censorship that could come as a result of the bill.
A spokesperson for Warner insisted that the legislation wasn’t designed to target individual users and pointed to the language that says someone “must be engaged in ‘sabotage or subversion’ of American communications technology products and services, creating ‘catastrophic effects’ on US critical infrastructure, or ‘interfering in, or altering the result’ of a federal election, in order to be eligible for any kind of criminal penalty.”
But the bill will give the Commerce Secretary the authority to deem what is considered “sabotage or subversion” or any of the other threats listed above. The legislation has grave implications for civil liberties and could be used against any individuals or tech and media companies the Biden administration, or any future administration would want to target.
Previously:
Tik-Tok bills could dangerously expand national security state
Congressional proposals to address Chinese ownership of the popular app go well beyond the hearing soundbites. Let’s explore.
Tik-Tok bills could dangerously expand national security state
from the the-1st-amendment-still-matters dept
Freedom of speech and association include the right to choose one’s communication technologies. Politicians shouldn’t be able to tell you what to say, where to say it, or who to say it to.
The US Government Has Not Justified A TikTok Ban
You may have heard that the Biden administration has told TikTok that it must be divested from ByteDance or it will be banned in the US. At least that’s what TikTok said the administration has said. The end result of this might well be that ByteDance divests of TikTok, but we should be clear: the threat, and any potential block, would be a clear, blatant, dangerous violation of the 1st Amendment.
Yes, The US Government Threatening To Block TikTok Violates The 1st Amendment
Previously:
The US government is trying to force ByteDance to sell TikTok
China’s suspected spy balloon had Western-made components with English writing on them, report says
Related:
EXPLAINER -What we know and don’t know about the Chinese balloon
By looks and by size, it resembles balloons made by U.S. firm Aerostar, whose own balloon was mistaken for the Chinese one while flying over Memphis.
Aerostar is an aerospace and defence contractor that supplies stratospheric balloons to the likes of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) made out of polyethylene film that can fly for over 200 days and carry hundreds of pounds.
It also previously had a deal with Google to use such balloons to provide internet to rural areas.
Other companies that develop stratospheric balloon systems include U.S. space tourism firm World View and French firm CNIM Air Space.
Stratollites can maintain position over specific areas of interest for days, weeks, and eventually months on end. This allows for more sustained measurements and monitoring capabilities over a targeted area. Stratollites can carry a wide variety of commercial payloads (sensors, telescopes, communications arrays, etc.), launch rapidly on demand, and safely return payloads back to earth after mission completion.
Worldview Stratollites are commercial high altitude balloons like Google Loon – Worldview had an explosion December 2017
U.S. Press Starts To Figure Out College TikTok Bans Are A Dumb Performance
One, the bans are generally designed to agitate a xenophobic base and give the impression the GOP is “doing something about China.” But the party that couldn’t care less about rampant corruption or privacy violations isn’t doing much of anything meaningful to thwart China. In fact, letting adtech, telecom, and app companies run rampant with little oversight runs contrary to any such goal.
Two, the bans distract the public and press from our ongoing failure on consumer privacy and security issues. Banning TikTok, but doing nothing about the accountability optional free for all that is the adtech and data-hoovering space, doesn’t actually fix anything. China can just obtain the same data from a universe of other international companies facing little real oversight on data collection.
Three, the ban is really just about money. Trump gave the game away with his proposal that TikTok be chopped up and sold to Oracle and Walmart. That cronyistic deal fell through, but it’s pretty clear that this moral panic is designed to either help TikTok’s competitors (Facebook lobbyists are very active on this front), or force the sale of the most popular app in modern history to GOP-allies. At which point they’ll engage in all the surveillance and influence efforts they pretend to be mad about.
Related:
Read More »
And, that wasn’t just in the US. Twitter was among the most vocal companies pushing back on foreign governments and their demands for information or their demands to censor people. Just as one example, in India, the government demanded that Twitter remove users critical of the government, and Twitter fought back, even as the government threatened to jail Twitter employees. And when India passed a law to give the government more control over internet censorship, Twitter sued the Indian government. In fact, this lawsuit was something that Elon Musk complained about, suggesting that he’s way more willing to go along with government demands. Indeed, Musk also praised the EU’s new Digital Services Act, which is a highly censorial bill that demands all sorts of content takedowns and other censorial actions. Twitter, under [Vijaya] Gadde’s leadership, was one of the most vocal companies in calling out how the Digital Services Act could harm speech online.
Related:
Elon Musk’s plan to turn Twitter into a super app is a step closer now that he owns the platform
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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