The 912 Special Project: Investigating the Propaganda of a People’s Republic of China with the National Police in the United States
The national police of the People’s Republic of China were charged by the Justice Department with harassing Chinese citizens in the US that were critical of the Chinese government.
They are expected to appear in federal court in New York on Monday, according to John Marzulli, a spokesman for the US Attorney in the Eastern District of New York. A police station has been shut down since a search warrant was executed last fall, a spokesman said.
According to the Justice Department, 34 people are believed to live in China. The Chinese government launched a campaign called the 912 Special Project working group to influence global views of the People’s Republic of China.
The agents were allegedly directed by the MPS to create and maintain accounts that looked like they were run by American citizens. According to prosecutors, the topics of the propaganda machine include US foreign policy, rights in Hong Kong, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd.
According to court documents, the secret police station was set up in early 2022 to identify, track and intimidate Chinese dissidents within the United States.
A person living in California who was a PRC dissident and PRC pro-democracy advocate reported to the FBI that he was the target of a PRC pressure campaign and that he was going to run for Congress in New York.
During an interview with the FBI, Lu said that he had established the office, which he called an “oversees service center,” to help Chinese nationals living in the United States “renew Chinese government documents.” Lu told investigators during the interview that Chen acted as the primary point of contact with officials back in China.
According to court documents, Chen initially denied having any contact with the Chinese government during a separate interview, but later changed his mind.
Chen took a seven-minute bathroom break during the interview, in which an agent told him not to keep his phone in the bathroom. When agents later searched the phone, they found that chat logs with MPS officials had been cleared.
First Associated FBI Arrests on Charges Tied to a Black Hole in the U.S.: A United Nations Attorney’s Perspective On “Transnational Repression”
The arrests were the first of their type anywhere in the world, even though China is believed to be operating secretive police outposts around the globe.
The head of New York’s FBI field office said at the news conference that this is a violation of national sovereignty.
The men, both US citizens, were taken into custody at their homes on Monday morning. A lawyer for Lu didn’t say anything. An email message seeking comment was left with a lawyer for Chen.
“New York City is home to New York’s finest: the NYPD,” said U.S. Attorney Breon Peace, the top federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, whose office brought the cases. “We don’t need or want a secret police station in our great city.”
Justice Department officials in recent years have prioritized prosecutions of what’s known as “transnational repression,” in which foreign governments work to identify, intimidate and silence dissidents in the U.S.
A signature case concerning China was announced in 2020, when the Justice Department charged more than a half-dozen people with working on behalf of the Chinese government in a pressure campaign aimed at coercing a New Jersey man wanted by Beijing into returning to China to face charges. The Justice Department charged three men in an alleged plot that originated in Iran to kill an Iranian American activist who had spoken out against human rights abuses there.
“In America, the law protects all of us equally from persecution, violence and threats of violence,” said David Newman, a top official in the Justice Department’s national security division.
“As authoritarian governments — whether the PRC, Russia, Iran, or others — become more brazen in their efforts to trample the rights and liberties that are the bedrock of our democracy, the Department of Justice will redouble its efforts to defend our democracy, our democratic institutions, and our sovereignty,” Newman said, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
In a separate scheme announced Monday, the Justice Department charged 34 officers in the Ministry of Public Security with creating and using thousands of fake social media accounts on Twitter and other platforms to harass dissidents abroad.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/17/1170571626/fbi-arrests-2-on-charges-tied-to-chinese-outpost-in-new-york-city
Report on the Troll Farms of Zoom at the Beijing Broadcasting Spectrum (B2B) Prisoner’s Dilemma
At the time, Jin served as Zoom’s primary liaison with Chinese government law enforcement and intelligence services, regularly responding to requests by the Chinese government to terminate meetings and block users on Zoom’s video communications platform, authorities said.
As for the other two criminal cases announced today that target Chinese trolling, disinformation, and censorship, Harth says Safeguard Defenders hasn’t seen evidence that such troll farms are operated from within the MPS’s secret facilities overseas, but she’s not surprised to learn that they’re linked to the MPS. She says that her organization’s public communications are frequently flooded with criticisms from shady accounts that she’s long suspected were organized by the Chinese state. “It’s very tellingly troll or bot sort of work,” she says.