walkman
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Bio-weapon from China
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Apr 23 14:01 UTC 2020 |
It has already been established that China knew about the virus back
in November and rather than control the situation, denied it existed
and took the precaution of locking down and protecting Communist
party officials while letting Wuhan residents continue as is. In the
meantime, over a half a million Chinese traveled to America.
Deception
China denied human to human transmission as late as February, while
knowing that this new Corona virus was highly contagious and deadly.
Now it has been revealed that China employed agents to sow fear and
uncertainty that caused a virus panic. It is my contention that
based on the evidence, China is an obvious bad player, likely had
engineered a bio-weapon in a Wuhan virus lab, covered it up, sent
people abroad to spread the virus, covered it up, blamed America and
spread disinformation to cause panic and economic devastation. China
is no longer a "favored nation" frenemy. It is an adversary. America
needs to cut all economic ties to China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/coronavirus-china-
disinformation.html
Because NYT has a paywall, the article is below:
Chinese Agents Helped Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in
U.S., Officials Say
American officials were alarmed by fake text messages and social
media posts that said President Trump was locking down the country.
Experts see a convergence with Russian tactics.
WASHINGTON The alarming messages came fast and furious in mid-
March, popping up on the cellphone screens and social media feeds of
millions of Americans grappling with the onset of the coronavirus
pandemic.
Spread the word, the messages said: The Trump administration was
about to lock down the entire country.
They will announce this as soon as they have troops in place to
help prevent looters and rioters, warned one of the messages, which
cited a source in the Department of Homeland Security. He said he
got the call last night and was told to pack and be prepared for the
call today with his dispatch orders.
The messages became so widespread over 48 hours that the White
House s National Security Council issued an announcement via Twitter
that they were FAKE.
Since that wave of panic, United States intelligence agencies have
assessed that Chinese operatives helped push the messages across
platforms, according to six American officials, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity to publicly discuss intelligence matters. The
amplification techniques are alarming to officials because the
disinformation showed up as texts on many Americans cellphones, a
tactic that several of the officials said they had not seen before.
That has spurred agencies to look at new ways in which China, Russia
and other nations are using a range of platforms to spread
disinformation during the pandemic, they said.
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The origin of the messages remains murky. American officials
declined to reveal details of the intelligence linking Chinese
agents to the dissemination of the disinformation, citing the need
to protect their sources and methods for monitoring Beijing s
activities.
The officials interviewed for this article work in six different
agencies. They included both career civil servants and political
appointees, and some have spent many years analyzing China. Their
broader warnings about China s spread of disinformation are
supported by recent findings from outside bipartisan research
groups, including the Alliance for Securing Democracy and the Center
for a New American Security, which is expected to release a report
on the topic next month.
Two American officials stressed they did not believe Chinese
operatives created the lockdown messages, but rather amplified
existing ones. Those efforts enabled the messages to catch the
attention of enough people that they then spread on their own, with
little need for further work by foreign agents. The messages
appeared to gain significant traction on Facebook as they were also
proliferating through texts, according to an analysis by The New
York Times.
American officials said the operatives had adopted some of the
techniques mastered by Russia-backed trolls, such as creating fake
social media accounts to push messages to sympathetic Americans, who
in turn unwittingly help spread them.
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The officials say the Chinese agents also appear to be using texts
and encrypted messaging apps as part of their campaigns. It is much
harder for researchers and law enforcement officers to track
disinformation spread through text messages and encrypted apps than
on social media platforms.
American intelligence officers are also examining whether spies in
China s diplomatic missions in the United States helped spread the
fake lockdown messages, a senior American official said. American
agencies have recently increased their scrutiny of Chinese diplomats
and employees of state-run media organizations. In September, the
State Department secretly expelled two employees of the Chinese
Embassy in Washington suspected of spying.
Other rival powers might have been involved in the dissemination,
too. And Americans with prominent online or news media platforms
unknowingly helped amplify the messages. Misinformation has
proliferated during the pandemic in recent weeks, some pro-Trump
news outlets have promoted anti-American conspiracy theories,
including one that suggests the virus was created in a laboratory in
the United States.
American officials said China, borrowing from Russia s strategies,
has been trying to widen political divisions in the United States.
As public dissent simmers over lockdown policies in several states,
officials worry it will be easy for China and Russia to amplify the
partisan disagreements.
It is part of the playbook of spreading division, said Senator
Angus King, independent of Maine, adding that private individuals
have identified some social media bots that helped promote the
recent lockdown protests that some fringe conservative groups have
nurtured.
The propaganda efforts go beyond text messages and social media
posts directed at Americans. In China, top officials have issued
directives to agencies to engage in a global disinformation campaign
around the virus, the American officials said.
Some American intelligence officers are especially concerned about
disinformation aimed at Europeans that pro-China actors appear to
have helped spread. The messages stress the idea of disunity among
European nations during the crisis and praise China s donation
diplomacy, American officials said. Left unmentioned are reports of
Chinese companies delivering shoddy equipment and European leaders
expressing skepticism over China s handling of its outbreak.
Mr. Trump himself has shown little concern about China s actions. He
has consistently praised the handling of the pandemic by Chinese
leaders Much respect! he wrote on Twitter on March 27. Three
days later, he dismissed worries over China s use of disinformation
when asked about it on Fox News.
They do it and we do it and we call them different things, he
said. Every country does it.
Asked about the new accusations, the Chinese Foreign Ministry
released a statement on Tuesday that said, The relevant statements
are complete nonsense and not worth refuting. Zhao Lijian, a
ministry spokesman, has separately rebutted persistent accusations
by American officials that China has supplied bad information and
exhibited a broader lack of transparency during the pandemic. We
urge the U.S. to stop political manipulation, get its own house in
order and focus more on fighting the epidemic and boosting the
economy, Mr. Zhao said at a news conference on Friday.
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An Information War
The United States and China are engaged in a titanic information war
over the pandemic, one that has added a new dimension to their
global rivalry.
President Trump and his aides are trying to put the spotlight on
China as they face intense criticism over the federal government s
widespread failures in responding to the pandemic, which has killed
more than 40,000 Americans. President Xi Jinping and the Chinese
Communist Party are trying to shore up domestic and international
support after earlier cover-ups that allowed the virus to spread.
As diplomatic tensions rose and Beijing scrambled to control the
narrative, the Chinese government last month expelled American
journalists for three U.S. news organizations, including The Times.
The extent to which the United States might be engaging in its own
covert information warfare in China is not clear. While the C.I.A.
in recent decades has tried to support pro-democracy opposition
figures in some countries, Chinese counterintelligence officers
eviscerated the agency s network of informants in China about a
decade ago, hurting its ability to conduct operations there.
Chinese officials accuse Mr. Trump and his allies of overtly
peddling malicious or bad information, pointing to the president s
repeatedly calling the coronavirus a Chinese virus or the
suggestion by some Republicans that the virus may have originated as
a Chinese bioweapon, a theory that U.S. intelligence agencies have
since ruled out. (Many Americans have also criticized Mr. Trump s
language as racist.)
Republican strategists have decided that bashing China over the
virus will shore up support for Mr. Trump and other conservative
politicians before the November elections.
Given the toxic information environment, foreign policy analysts are
worried that the Trump administration may politicize intelligence
work or make selective leaks to promote an anti-China narrative.
Those concerns hover around the speculation over the origin of the
virus. American officials in the past have selectively passed
intelligence to reporters to shape the domestic political landscape;
the most notable instance was under President George W. Bush in the
run-up to the Iraq War.
ImageZhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, has
rebutted accusations that Beijing has not been transparent during
the pandemic.
Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, has
rebutted accusations that Beijing has not been transparent during
the pandemic.Credit...Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters
But it has been clear for more than a month that the Chinese
government is pushing disinformation and anti-American conspiracy
theories related to the pandemic. Mr. Zhao, the Foreign Ministry
spokesman, wrote on Twitter in March that the U.S. Army might have
taken the virus to the Chinese city of Wuhan. That message was then
amplified by the official Twitter accounts of Chinese embassies and
consulates.
The state-run China Global Television Network produced a video
targeting viewers in the Middle East in which a presenter speaking
Arabic asserted that some new facts indicated that the pandemic
might have originated from American participants in a military
sports competition in October in Wuhan. The network has an audience
of millions, and the video has had more than 365,000 views on
YouTube.
What we ve seen is the C.C.P. mobilizing its global messaging
apparatus, which includes state media as well as Chinese diplomats,
to push out selected and localized versions of the same overarching
false narratives, Lea Gabrielle, coordinator of the Global
Engagement Center in the State Department, said in late March,
referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
Some analysts say it is core to China s new, aggressive Wolf
Warrior diplomacy, a term that refers to a patriotic Chinese
military action film series.
But Chinese diplomats and operators of official media accounts
recently began moving away from overt disinformation, Ms. Gabrielle
said. That dovetailed with a tentative truce Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi
reached over publicly sniping about the virus.
American officials said Chinese agencies are most likely embracing
covert propagation of disinformation in its place. Current and
former American officials have said they are seeing Chinese
operatives adopt online strategies long used by Russian agents a
phenomenon that also occurred during the Hong Kong protests last
year. Some Chinese operatives have promoted disinformation that
originated on Russia-aligned websites, they said.
And the apparent aim of spreading the fake lockdown messages last
month is consistent with a type of disinformation favored by Russian
actors namely sowing chaos and undermining confidence among
Americans in the U.S. government, the officials said.
As Beijing and Moscow move to shape the global information
environment both independently and jointly through a wide range of
digital tools, they have established several diplomatic channels and
forums through which they can exchange best practices, said
Kristine Lee, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security who
researches disinformation from China and Russia.
I d anticipate, as we have seen in recent months, that their mutual
learning around these tools will migrate to increasingly cutting-
edge capabilities that are difficult to detect but yield maximal
payoff in eroding American influence and democratic institutions
globally, she added.
There Is No National Lockdown
The amplification of the fake lockdown messages was a notable
instance of China s use of covert disinformation messaging, American
officials said.
A couple of versions of the message circulated widely, according to
The Times analysis. The first instance tracked by The Times appeared
on March 13, as many state officials were enacting social distancing
policies. This version said Mr. Trump was about to invoke the
Stafford Act to shut down the country.
The messages generally attributed their contents to a friend in a
federal agency the Pentagon, the State Department, the Department
of Homeland Security, the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and so on. Over days,
hundreds of identical posts appeared on Facebook and the online
message board 4chan, among other places, and spread through texts.
Another version appeared on March 15, The Times found. This one said
Mr. Trump was about to deploy the National Guard, military units and
emergency responders across the United States while imposing a one-
week nationwide quarantine.
That same day, the National Security Council announced on Twitter
that the messages were fake.
There is no national lockdown, it said, adding that the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention has and will continue to post
the latest guidance.
Samantha Vinograd, who was a staff employee at the National Security
Council during the Obama administration, replied to the council s
tweet, recounting her experience with the disinformation.
I received several texts from loved ones about content they
received containing various rumors they were explicitly asked to
share it with their networks, she wrote. I advised them to do the
opposite. Misinfo is not what we need right now from any source
foreign or domestic.
Since January, Americans have shared many other messages that
included disinformation: that the virus originated in a U.S. Army
laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland, that it can be killed with
garlic water, vitamin C or colloidal silver, that it thrives on
ibuprofen. Often the posts are attributed to an unnamed source in
the U.S. government or an institution such as Johns Hopkins
University or Stanford University.
As the messages have sown confusion, it has been difficult to trace
their true origins or pin down all the ways in which they have been
amplified.
Ben Decker contributed reporting from Boston. Claire Fu contributed
research.
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