A new report provides some answers to the nagging questions that linger from early February, but it raises others.
According to the “two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official” with whom NBC News reporters Courtney Kube and Carol Lee spoke, the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the continental United States in February was, in fact, “able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites”:
The interim commissioner of the RCMP says he would support additional laws that allow police to further crack down on foreign interference in Canada, as well as ways to further collaborate with intelligence officials on the issue.
But Mike Duheme adds multiple investigations remain underway that he’s confident will lead to criminal charges, though he did not give specifics.
Adi Robertson, The Verge’s senior tech and policy editor, makes an impassioned plea to not ban TikTok, China’s popular video-sharing app, on free speech grounds. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), speaking on the floor of the Senate on March 29, also raised First Amendment objections to a proposed TikTok prohibition.
Nonetheless, it is time to either ban TikTok or force the sale of all its shares to American parties. The American owners must also control all the app’s algorithms, in particular, the algorithms curating content. If Beijing does not permit such a sale, the federal government should expropriate TikTok.
Reports out of China continue to confirm that scientists there are still seeking to push through barriers with Frankenstein-like experimentation on genes with an eye toward the manipulation of human DNA – any and all ethical considerations be damned. What could go wrong?
The Hong-based South China Morning Post has a doozy of a headline out this week based on a breakthrough announcement by a team of scientists linked to the Chinese military, working in Beijing: “Chinese team behind extreme animal gene experiment says it may lead to super soldiers who survive nuclear fallout.”
As questions continue to swirl around the issue of other countries’ meddling in Canadian affairs, interim RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme says he’s “very, very concerned” about foreign interference, and would like to see the national force be able to use intelligence as evidence in its investigations.
In an interview on CTV’s Question Period with Vassy Kapelos airing on Sunday, Duheme was asked if, given all that has recently been alleged regarding China interfering in federal elections and the years of warnings from various national security agencies, he thinks a public inquiry is warranted.
A lawyer for Han Dong has served Global News and its parent company Corus Entertainment with a libel notice after the media outlet published an allegation the Toronto MP spoke to a Chinese diplomat about delaying the release of two Canadians.
Lawyer Mark Polley says he is demanding that Global News make a “full apology and retraction” for publishing what he describes as “false, malicious, irresponsible and defamatory statements” about Dong, now an Independent MP for Don Valley North.
Former CSIS officials say the intelligence agency has been warning successive governments about foreign election interference for decades but all failed to act — and measures outlined in this week’s budget are not enough to address the problem.
“Thirty-two years in national security work, every time we’ve had a crisis, every time we’ve had an incident, that’s what the government’s done. We’ll throw money at the RCMP, we’ll say you folks have got to sort that out. And I don’t think that’s really an appropriate response,” Dan Stanton, former executive manager at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), told a committee of MPs on Friday.
Liberal MP Parm Bains said he won his B.C. riding in the last election “fair and square” after his former opponent told a parliamentary committee foreign interference by Beijing played a role in his victory.
Bains sits on the Commons ethics committee and was sitting across the table when former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu told MPs on the committee Friday he believed Bains was the “beneficiary” of a disinformation campaign he suspects was tied to the Chinese Communist Party during the 2021 election campaign.
The threat from foreign interference, with Beijing as the main culprit, has evolved to become more dangerous to the state than traditional espionage, a former executive with Canada’s spy agency told MPs.
“What we’ve seen, in the last 30 years, is that foreign interference has eclipsed classic espionage as a national security threat, both in terms of its scope and its speed,” said Dan Stanton, a 32-year veteran of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Among the various types of outlandish and sinister responses to the recent revelations about Beijing’s emissaries interfering in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the purpose of re-electing a Liberal government, the conjuring of bogeymen has been especially destructive to any clear public consensus about what’s at stake here, and what’s really going on.
Two former intelligence officials called for a complete transformation of Canada’s security apparatus to counter expanding foreign interference operations that they say have been essentially ignored by Ottawa since the 1990s.
On Friday the House of Commons standing committee on access to information, privacy and ethics heard recommendations for a new national and independent office with powers to investigate and prosecute acts of foreign interference, and also rapid adoption of counter-interference laws that have already been implemented by Canadian allies such as Australia.
Chinese state media outlets should not be granted broadcasting licences in Canada because their content is meant to feed “misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda” to overseas Chinese, an expert witness told a House committee on March 30.
The Chinese regime has made it clear it wishes to use overseas Chinese to exert influence abroad, and “this becomes interference instead of simple influence,” said Katherine Leung, policy advisor for the non-governmental organization Hong Kong Watch.
Detractors wrongly implicated in fake terror scares as regime accused of trying to ‘harass and target’ those who dare to speak out
False bomb threats at luxury hotels and embassies in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Asia appear to be part of a harassment campaign against critics of the Chinese government, according to a new investigation.
More than a dozen threats have falsely implicated Germany-based Chinese journalist Su Yutong, as well as activists Bob Fu, who lives in the US, and Wang Jingyu in the Netherlands, reported the Axios news outlet.
“So today, I applaud China for stepping out,” said Joe Biden on Friday before the Canadian Parliament. The members immediately burst out in laughter. “Excuse me,” Biden said, “I applaud Canada.” The Delaware Democrat might have been right the first time.
Under Justin Trudeau, it’s becoming ever harder to distinguish Canada from China, and Trudeau is a big fan of the Middle Kingdom. He made that clear back in 2013, when asked which nation he admired the most.
World War II was already a year old when Germany, Japan and Italy formally signed the Tripartite Pact in 1940, creating a military alliance among three nations intent on world domination. History would subsequently call them the Axis powers. It would be another year before America entered the conflict, but this Axis alliance of power sent a sharp and chilling message to Washington. There was no mistaking now that our nation, and our very civilization, was now in serious jeopardy.
In its wake, America accelerated its defense planning and just prior to the Axis pact being signed, the United States reintroduced the draft in recognition that, pact or no pact, democracy was at risk.
