Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.
Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.
During the past decade, China has rapidly expanded its global footprint, forging military pacts, trade deals, and business partnerships with developing nations.
Although the U.S. officials declined to provide specific details of these operations, they said the disparaging narratives were based in fact despite being secretly released by intelligence operatives under false cover. The efforts within China were intended to foment paranoia among top leaders there, forcing its government to expend resources chasing intrusions into Beijing’s tightly controlled internet, two former officials said. “We wanted them chasing ghosts,” one of these former officials said.
<whispers> meshtastic
Yes sir. Mesh networks are currently a hobbyist privilege but once networks start getting more censored they’ll be a necessity, like privacy coins. We either obtain world peace, or things freedom of information keeps devolving into a dystopian future where meshnet communication systems are distributed locally and through the mail printed on paper.
People like to call me a conspiracy theorist but I’ve got a record better than a coin flip… Nobody made any jabs for a few years after the Snowden leaks so at least I have that going for me.