Free Republic

Alice Su Thu, June 24, 2021, 3:00 AM·14 min read He stood in Tiananmen Square, wearing sneakers, track pants and a black T-shirt printed with the date of a massacre. It was June 4, 2019, the 30th anniversary of the killing of hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. Dong Zehua, then 28, hadn't even been born when tanks clattered over the square and the world watched. The events on that bloody day in 1989 weren't taught in school or ever mentioned in Chinese media. But Dong knew what had happened. Tech-savvy and good at English, Dong had mastered circumventing the...

Few Americans could fathom the notion that the United States is so indebted to China that one of Beijing’s spies could get away with espionage – especially with an White House in love with espionage prosecutions. But that might be the only reasonable explanation for the Obama administration’s decision to pass on prosecuting a State Department contractor who was allegedly paid thousands of dollars to someone believed to be a Chinese agent seeking information on Americans. According to Fox News, a November 2014 FBI affidavit that was filed in U.S. district court in Maryland indicates that the FBI launched a...

CIA China Ops Wiped Out By 'Botched; Spy Contact System: Investigation results show indicted spy Jerry Chun Shing Lee was not the CIA's only security breach. Sloppy coding led to a back door hole in the messaging system, used by the Chinese to 'wipe out' our entire spy network. Suddenly, in late 2010, undercover agents in China were being rounded up and hauled off for interrogation. Under Barack Obama's administration, the Central Intelligence Agency suffered what intelligence officers are calling one of the worst disasters in decades. Suddenly, in late 2010, undercover agents in China were being rounded up and...

China has issued regulations banning its 2.3 million soldiers from creating web sites or writing web blogs, adding to the nation's existing Internet curbs, state press said Saturday. "Soldiers cannot open blogs on the Internet no matter (whether) he or she does it in the capacity of a soldier or not," Xinhua news agency quoted Wan Long, a political commissar of the People's Liberation Army, as saying. "The Internet is complicated and we should guard against online traps," it said, citing concerns about military "confidentiality". The new rules are laid out in revised PLA Internal Administration Regulations and went into...

BEIJING—The confusion over a major outage in China of Google Inc.'s search sites on Tuesday spotlights one of the most remarkable aspects of the Chinese government's Internet censorship apparatus: It is designed to be obscure. By Wednesday, access to the sites appeared to have returned to normal—searches for some terms, but not all, were blocked. Government officials declined to comment when asked if they were the source of Tuesday's outage, leaving the situation and Google's future in China a mystery for users. China operates one of the most extensive and sophisticated Internet-filtering systems in the world, according to analysts who...

When Russian prosecutors opened a criminal case against journalist Vladimir Rakhmanov for writing a satirical Internet article calling President Vladimir Putin the nation's "phallic symbol," it raised eyebrows. But a case that began as an odd curiosity in Russia's Ivanovo Oblast is quickly becoming an international cause. Reporters Without Borders has taken up Rakhmankov's case as part of what it calls a campaign to preserve Internet press freedom in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. With print and broadcast journalism already subject to heavy-handed state control, free-press advocates are increasingly looking to save the Internet as the region's...

China in drive to register all Internet sites, portal says 50 minutes ago BEIJING (AFP) - Chinese-run websites have until the end of May to register their sites or face being shut down as part of a new government campaign to police the Internet, a leading portal announced. The registration drive is an effort by the Ministry of Information Industry to clamp down on fraud and other "unhealthy" activity on the Internet, the portal Sohu.com said. "If you have not registered by June, then your website could be ordered shut down," the portal quoted an official from the Beijing communications...

>         ......HE HOPES TO do it by developing a program—he calls it Peek-a-Booty—that will enable Chinese Internet users to browse the Web without fear of detection. “It’s a very slow process,” says Baranowski, who works on the program with a roommate “whenever we have time.” The two have no outside financial support, says the computer engineer, who quit his job last year to devote himself to the project. “It’s purely about Internet freedom.”         But Baranowski and other hacker activists, or hacktivists, opposed to government control of the Internet may just be banging...

During the Cold War years, there were those who argued that the best way to undermine Communist regimes was to soften them up by encouraging the free flow of trade, which usually meant increasing imports from them more from them, but in some cases, such as Cuba, removing bans on U.S. exports. Arrayed against them were those who believed that such measures would only strengthen the grip of the Communists. They favored promoting the free flow of information and pressuring the Communists to relax their restrictions on emigration and travel by their subjects. The collapse of communism in the U.S.S.R....