IRS Software Developer Stole Identities Of Three Taxpayers To Open Credit Cards In Their Names And Spend $70,000 Was Apprehended After Using IRS Email And Home Addresses
Quartz, An IRS Employee Stole Identities and Went on a 2-Year Spending Spree:
The complaint accuses the 35-year-old federal worker of racking up almost $70,000 in charges over the course of two years, illegally using “the true names, addresses, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers” of at least three people. ...
Lenin invented totalitarianism and the ideas of a one-party state and a terrorist state. He also invented a style of thinking that endurances
“Having just been in Hong Kong – on the streets & with the protestors – this kind of garbage is hard to take. LeBron, are YOU educated on ‘the situation’? Why don’t you go to Hong Kong? Why don’t you meet the people there risking their lives for their most basic liberties.”
“This statement is unbelievable. ‘So many people could have been harmed’? By Daryl Morey daring to express sympathy for democracy? News flash: people ARE being harmed – shot, beaten, gassed – right now in Hong Kong. By China. By the Communist Party the NBA is so eager to appease.”
JUST LOOKING OUT FOR NUMBER ONE: LeBron Sticks His Nike in His Mouth.Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.
Adlai Stevenson I
The revelations come as UQ faces calls to review its lucrative deals with the Chinese ... The university's vice-chancellor, Professor Peter Hoj, was until recently a senior consultant to and ...
Universities linked to Chinese surveillance
Imagine an app used by the police and security services that contains information on everything from the apps on your phone to your electricity usage and bank account transactions.
This app is not something from an episode of Black Mirror — it's being used right now to monitor millions living in China's Xinjiang region.
This is the same region where over a million Uyghur Muslims are believed to be detained in secret camps for "re-education". But it's not just Xinjiang's Muslims who are being tracked – everyone in the region is being watched by an elaborate surveillance system called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP).
Human Rights Watch revealed on Thursday how the app works, and the extreme level of surveillance which it enables. This should raise some questions for Australian organisations partnered with the company responsible for the system, China Electronics Technology Corporation (CETC).
Are Australian universities putting our national security at risk by working with China?
Updated
Australia's top universities could be aiding the Chinese Communist Party's mission to develop mass surveillance and military technologies, amid rising concerns from Australian intelligence agencies that they are putting national security at risk.
Key points
- Leading Australian universities have research collaborations with Chinese companies that have been blacklisted by the US
- Australian security officials warn the joint research could compromise national security
- Global data-mining company GTCOM is majority owned by the Chinese Government and spruiks links to Australian universities
A joint Four Corners-Background Briefing investigation has uncovered extensivecollaborations between Australian universities and Chinese entities involved in Beijing's increasingly global surveillance apparatus.
At least two of those companies and organisations have been blacklisted in the past week by the US Government, which concluded they were implicated in human rights abuses against China's Muslim minorities.
A major player that has secured a foothold in Australia is Global Tone Communication (GTCOM), a global data-mining company that is majority owned by the Chinese Government.
Four Corners and Background Briefing can reveal GTCOM has signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of New South Wales (UNSW) to test its technology.
GTCOM has boasted of being able to mine data in 65 languages at a rate of 16,000 words per second from websites and social media, and spruiked its connections with multiple Australian universities.
Senior Australian security officials have told Four Corners the company's activities are evidence that Beijing is running a global espionage operation through technology companies.
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) analyst Samantha Hoffman has spent months uncovering GTCOM's global and Australian connections.
She said the company's intent was to support the Chinese Communist Party's security interests.
"Whether it contributes to a state security product or propaganda or military intelligence, all of the data they're collecting can then be turned into information that supports those objectives," said Dr Hoffman, who has released a major report on GTCOM.
Professor John Fitzgerald, who served as a chair on DFAT's Australia-China Council, said Chinese companies were capitalising on Australia's science and technology expertise.
"Australia's science and technology priorities are being set by the Chinese Government because we enter into collaborations that have really been designed to support China's goals, not ours," he said.
"Many universities are very happy to proceed with whatever it is … because of the money and prestige involved.
A spokesman for UNSW said GTCOM had "no influence on any of UNSW's programs".
"The university … is keen to pursue greater transparency as well as increased [Australian] Government collaboration … to ensure its operations are always in line with the national interest," he said.
GTCOM also shares technology and data with Chinese tech giant Huawei, which is blacklisted by the US and banned in Australia from the 5G network due to security and espionage concerns.
It also has a strategic partnership with Chinese company Haiyun Data, which provides technology for the surveillance of minority ethnic Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.
GTCOM partner working with UTS
In January, Chinese media reported on Haiyun Data's announcement of a new joint artificial intelligence laboratory with the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS).
UTS associate dean and director of its Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Professor Jie Lu, was pictured holding a signed agreement with Haiyun.
Professor Lu was last month awarded a $3.2 million fellowship from the Australian Research Council for a project to enable artificial intelligence to learn autonomously from data.
UTS has told Four Corners there is no joint laboratory and the Chinese media reporting is "a complete misrepresentation".
The university has confirmed it has a research project with Haiyun Data to develop technology for handwriting recognition.
Haiyun Data did not respond to questions from Four Corners.
Former head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre at the Australian Signals Directorate Alastair MacGibbon said universities needed to understand the implications of their international research deals.
Dr Hoffman said it seemed as if Haiyun Data had built a relationship with scholars at the university.
"But we also know that UTS Sydney seems to have signed other agreements that raise major red flags," Dr Hoffman said.
In July, UTS launched a review into a separate $10 million deal for a high-tech research centre funded by state-owned military company China Electronics Technology Corporation (CETC).
CETC has also been implicated in the mass monitoring of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, but UTS denies its research contributed to their surveillance.
Under the 2017 deal, CETC funded several projects, including one focused on public security video analysis.
Four Corners has been told the university is abandoning that project and two others with CETC because of concerns raised by Australia's Defence Department.
The university's review of the CETC deal recommended a number of areas where UTS should improve its risk management practices and scrutiny, including "more detailed analysis and documentation of subsidiaries of organisations involved in collaborative research".
Chinese companies blacklisted by the US
Four Corners and Background Briefing have identified other research collaborations between Australian universities and Chinese companies that have been recently blacklisted by the US Government.
Researchers from the University of Adelaide have worked with a senior figure at high-tech Chinese start-up Megvii on technology to track vehicles in videos.
The company is a leader in facial recognition technology and was last week added to the US trade blacklist after being implicated in human rights abuses.
Megvii told the ABC "we try to ensure that our technology is not used for damaging purposes".
A spokesperson from the University of Adelaide said while one of its professors was involved in the Megvii project, it was not a formal collaboration.
At the University of Sydney, scientists have collaborated with Chinese video surveillance giant SenseTime to help it track moving objects through multiple camera frames.
SenseTime was also blacklisted by the US Government last week over human rights concerns.
The university said the SenseTime partnership was subject to ongoing review.
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UNSW Professor of Artificial Intelligence Toby Walsh said Australian universities were walking down a dangerous road and should consider carefully who they collaborate with.
Australian universities have also collaborated with Chinese defence universities.
Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) have worked on dozens of such studies, including a 2019 study on covert communications with the China's National University of Defense Technology, which was blacklisted by the US four years ago.
The study authors said it could have military applications, including "for a stealth fighter … to be able to hide itself from enemies while communicating with its military bases."
ANU vice-chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt told Four Corners he was not aware of the study but "if there are specific areas of research that are detrimental to the national interest, we need to look at them".
Deepening political rift between Australia and Beijing
In August, Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan announced a universities taskforce into foreign interference, which he said was at unprecedented levels.
"We want to make sure it's very clear what the responsibilities of universities are when it comes to collaborating with any foreign government, because it's incredibly important … that collaboration is in Australia's interests," he told Four Corners.
Chinese academic Professor Chen Hong, who was provided to Four Corners by the Chinese embassy for interview, denied that China posed a threat.
"We've noticed actually the ASIO and other intelligence units in Australia making allegations direct or indirect, against China," he said.
"We think actually these allegations are unfounded and without substantial evidence."
Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson, a member of the Federal Government's taskforce, said universities already abided by rules on research collaborations.
"The Defence Trade Controls list is a very long list and it's reviewed every single year to keep it really up to date, and universities aren't just diligent, they're incredibly diligent about making sure that their research collaborations are absolutely inside the letter of the law," she said.
Professor Clive Hamilton, who has spent years researching Chinese Communist Party interference at universities, described the research situation as "astonishing".
"Perhaps three or four years ago university vice-chancellors could have said, 'Oh well, we didn't know'.
"That is no longer an excuse."
Watch Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop's report on Four Corners Monday 14 October 2019 on ABC TV.
The partnership between China and Western governments & corporations has hit a rough patch recently, namely the Hong Kong protests and how the NBA, Apple, and gaming company Blizzard have handled various responses to them on their platforms. I don’t have a lot to add on the matter, but I have read some interesting takes in the past few days that you might also want to take a look at.
Ben Thompson, The Chinese Cultural Clash:
I am not particularly excited to write this article. My instinct is towards free trade, my affinity for Asia generally and Greater China specifically, my welfare enhanced by staying off China’s radar. And yet, for all that the idea of being a global citizen is an alluring concept and largely my lived experience, I find in situations like this that I am undoubtedly a child of the West. I do believe in the individual, in free speech, and in democracy, no matter how poorly practiced in the United States or elsewhere. And, in situations like this weekend, when values meet money, I worry just how many companies are capable of choosing the former?
John Gruber riffing on Thompson’s piece:
The gist of it is that 25 years ago, when the West opened trade relations with China, we expected our foundational values like freedom of speech, personal liberty, and democracy to spread to China.Instead, the opposite is happening. China maintains strict control over what its people see on the Internet — the Great Firewall works. They ban our social networks where free speech reigns, but we accept and use their social networks, like TikTok, where content contrary to the Chinese Community Party line is suppressed.
Farhad Manjoo, Dealing With China Isn’t Worth the Moral Cost:
The People’s Republic of China is the largest, most powerful and arguably most brutal totalitarian state in the world. It denies basic human rights to all of its nearly 1.4 billion citizens. There is no freedom of speech, thought, assembly, religion, movement or any semblance of political liberty in China. Under Xi Jinping, “president for life,” the Communist Party of China has built the most technologically sophisticated repression machine the world has ever seen. In Xinjiang, in Western China, the government is using technology to mount a cultural genocide against the Muslim Uighur minority that is even more total than the one it carried out in Tibet. Human rights experts say that more than a million people are being held in detention camps in Xinjiang, two million more are in forced “re-education,” and everyone else is invasively surveilled via ubiquitous cameras, artificial intelligence and other high-tech means.None of this is a secret.
Om Malik, Our Collective Chinese Conundrum:
We in the West should very well know what and who we are dealing with — China might be decked out in Louis Vuitton, but underneath, it is still a single-party, quasi-communist nation. Knowing the Western desperation for growth and the insatiable needs of the stock markets, China also knows it can yank anyone’s chain.Huawei isn’t a recent problem. It was a problem a decade ago. The dynamic in this spat between the NBA and China isn’t new — China gets what China wants, not the other way around. Why are we being outraged now? The West signed up for this.
Malik quotes from Ian Bremmer’s newsletter:
in the west, the past decades have been marked by a view that china would eventually adapt to western norms, institutions, political and economic systems. but from an asian perspective, the opposite appears more likely. after all, of the last 2,000 years, china and india have led the global economy for the first 1800; europe and the united states only flipped the script for the last 200. now that’s about to change. and when it does, it’s going to happen quickly, powered by 1.4 billion increasingly urban, educated and technologically-connected chinese citizens. take the long view (and an asian perspective) and it’s a better bet that the west will adapt to the realities of chinese economic power, not the other way around.
