Volume 7 Issue 17a_Sun Bay Paper

In April 2019 the Houston Chronicle, in collaboration with Science magazine, published an article documenting an extensive FBI investigation into communist China's infiltration of major U.S. medical research institutions. One target was the MD Anderson Cancer Center, located in Houston, Texas. Emory University's medical research institute (Atlanta, Georgia) was also a Chinese bullseye. In June 2019 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told U.S. Senate investigators that employees at 61 research institutions may have withheld information about undisclosed relations with foreign governments -- meaning undisclosed financial and personal relations that violated strict NIH funding policies. The admission belatedly confirmed a 2018 letter by then-NIH Director Francis Collins warning research institutions that NIH suspected "foreign entities have mounted systematic programs to influence NIH researchers and peer reviewers." Influence is certainly one of Beijing's objectives. Several notches above mere influence is acquisition of medical data, and in the case of MD Anderson and Emory, theft of valuable data supporting a Nobel Prize-worthy medical breakthrough. Theft isn't theory. MD Anderson fired three scientists identified as trying to help China steal "U.S. scientific research." Infiltration to steal data is spying. As the COVID-19/Wuhan pandemic illustrates, medical knowledge has strategic defense value. Vaccines, antibiotics and antivirals save human life. The monsters on our planet, however, could use medical knowledge to create an offensive weapon like a deadly virus. China's influence, infiltration and espionage operations aren't limited to medical or military data. China knows how to curry belowthe-radar favor with international politicians, bureaucrats and opinion leaders, and when a problem develops threatening Chinese Communist Party interests, use covert influence to stifle criticism. Media --newspapers, TV talking heads, social media, entertainers, reporters, internet trolls, TikTok exhibitionists -- Beijing's influence, infiltration co-optation and blackmail operations target media large, minute and in-between. As for targeting Media With Impeccable Credentials: in October 2020, The Washington Free Beacon detailed The Economist magazine's years of "sympathetic" coverage of China's Huawei Technologies company. The report connected and documented the magazine's profitable business relationship with the notorious corporate giant. The Free Beacon noted The Economist did not acknowledge that economic relationship for nearly a decade. In a column I wrote in 2020, I noted "Huawei's deep financial and operational connections to the Chinese Communist Party are no secret. The CCP has final say over Huawei's international operations. That indicates the CCP was a silent partner in the Huawei-Economist arrangement." From then to now: On Jan. 25 StrategyPage.com published an analysis written by the editor, Jim Dunnigan. (Disclosure: I'm a StrategyPage associate editor and own a small percentage of the site.) The intro: "The most successful Chinese diplomatic and foreign trade efforts are the ones they want to keep out of the media spotlight. To do that China is using a lot of cash and ingenuity to make it happen. For example, in the last two decades the number of jobs in the West for journalists in the traditional print media (newspapers and magazines) declined by about half. The news business, including most of its advertising revenue, moved to the Internet, where there were fewer traditional journalism jobs and the pay was much lower. Chinese propagandists, media experts and intelligence officials are skilled and well paid, and quick to take advantage of this major change in Western news media." More: "As the Russians discovered during the Cold War 'cash for compliance' can be very effective. For example, the most important skill for Western journalists reporting Chinese activities inside China and overseas is to do it convincingly. Keep it legal but as convincing as possible." Beijing's payoff: "...foreign media users don't notice the disconnect between what China wants to be reported and what is actually happening." Dunnigan, a military historian, goes on to point out that 90 years ago Nazi Germany, "an economically powerful country ... was able to use similar coercions against foreign media." That is a historical fact. Austin Bay The Sun Bay Paper Page 26 February 4, 2022 - February 10, 2022 International News The Best Media China Can Buy Cont from pg 17 A Bias for Liberty order to spy on Americans. The government told the Times reporters that it needs to know about spy tools so it can "combat crime and ... protect both the American people and our civil liberties." This is an absurd defense for the acquisition of tools that on their face present no lawful purpose. It is also absurd to think that the government even remotely cares about civil liberties. The history of human freedom is the history of government assaulting civil liberties. There is no lawful purpose to this spyware because the Fourth Amendment requires a search warrant for all surveillance, and it requires that the warrant specifically describe the place to be searched and the person or thing to be seized. Because Phantom does not focus on narrow data, but gives its users full access to the contents of one's mobile device, it is a per se violation of the Fourth Amendment. Notwithstanding the facial unconstitutionality of this software, government lawyers took two years to advise the FBI to stop using it. We know from the Times' reporters that the FBI conducted experiments and tests before the DOJ told it to cease doing so, but we do not know on whom the tests and experiments were conducted. The reason the feds gave for telling the FBI to cease using Phantom is the need to balance civil liberties with public safety. It was apparently the consensus of DOJ and White House lawyers that balance favored civil liberties. Whenever a government official or politician suggests the need to balance civil liberties against public safety, get ready for a red herring, and note that he is either a deceiver or a fool. There is no such thing as a balance between liberty and safety. The relationship between the two is not balance; it is bias -- a bias for liberty. Because our rights come from our humanity, and our humanity is a gift from God, our rights are natural to us. For those who do not recognize the existence of a Supreme Being, you know that humans are the most intelligent beings on earth, and we can reason and act freely upon our reasoning. Those human characteristics -- reason and freedom -- come from within us. Hence, whether divinely given or humanly crafted, freedom comes from within us, and not from the government. Because it is natural to us -- like our hair and feet and faces -- it is not subject to the whims of our neighbors or the caprice of government. Thus, since freedom is the default position, we can see the natural bias in favor of it. Government is the opposite. It is, as Ludwig von Mises famously said, the negation of freedom. This is not theoretical hairsplitting. It goes to the core of the relationship of all persons to the state, whether the issue is masks on the face, chemicals in the veins, travel in times of fear, or work in times of tumult, the government must recognize that our freedoms are natural and its incursions upon them are no more than the arbitrary use of force to gain political favor or power. All government domestic spying is a violation of personal freedom; and that conclusion should not have taken lawyers two years and $5 million to reach. Then again, those lawyers work for the government. Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

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