This is Globalization
There are no longer boundaries between the United States administrative state and the Chinese Communist Party, and this is evidence.
It’s no secret to most Americans that the political “right” has made China its boogeyman, and with much success, to be sure. It’s also no secret that the political “left” whole-heartedly believes in the effectiveness of government intervention to curtail and remedy societal challenges, writ large.
Another universally accepted truth is the concept of the wholesale collection of personal electronic data. TikTok may be the most popular contemporary example.
Americans were alerted nearly a decade ago to the sprawling American surveillance state’s data collection and spying programs by former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden.
What many overlook is the research that built those programs, or the researchers themselves, that actually made these leaps in technology and pioneered the systems into being.
It turns out that these two worlds — state surveillance and geopolitics — collided head-on through none other than a Michigan-based company called Konnech — a Chinese Communist Party-influenced, -leveraged, -funded, and American-owned, American-based election company. Konnech and its subsidiaries also facilitate elections in Mainland China and Australia.
The currently circulating allegations of private citizens’ personal data being exported to China to reside on Chinese databases are only a symptom of the academic and government structures that worked in tandem (whether spoken or unspoken) to achieve it.
In the span of at least a decade, the United States and the People’s Republic of China exchanged academics, intellectual property, research, and co-mingled businesses across moral, regulatory and jurisdictional lines — whether they admit it or not.
They have proactively moved in conjunction to corral and centralize every citizen on the planet’s personal data for at least a decade.
These are the receipts.
The Wayyy Beginning
In 1992, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) launched a company called China Aerospace Sanjiang Group Co., Ltd. (中国航天三江集团有限公司), located at No. 9 Jinshan Avenue, Dongxihu District, Wuhan City, Hubei Province. It is still fully operational today.
The company was established by the PRC government to research, develop, and implement aircraft and missile design, guidance control, rocket engines and other related specialties, including spaceflight and other “interstellar” missions.
In 1995, The (American) National Science Foundation employed naturalized American citizen (1990), Lionel Ni, as Program Director of one of their cutting-edge technology projects — the Microelectronic Systems Architecture Program, based out of Arlington, Virginia.
Ni moved swiftly from his accomplishments with the program and into his own American VoIP companies. One of these were CC&T Technologies, Inc., in Okemos, Michigan.
Upon establishing the company in 1998, The CCP-held China Aerospace Sanjiang Group Co. co-founded a Mainland company with CC&T Technologies called, Zhuhai Siruijie Network Engineering Service Co., Ltd (珠海斯瑞捷网络工程服务有限公司), known in English at the time as, 3Jet E&S Co., Ltd.
The company manufactured and marketed CC&T and Lionel Ni’s EMIP-1 Internet Emulator. CC&T bragged openly of its product’s testing and use by the PRC.
Zhuhai Siruijie Network Engineering Service Co., Ltd. was owned by the PRC — or the Chinese Communist Party — and Konnech’s co-founder, themselves.
CC&T Technologies and Konnech were never just a tiny tech company in a sleepy Michigan town, nor were they intended to be.
The joint-venture employed the use of Lionel Ni’s revolutionary intellectual property, and assimilated it into the Chinese state-owned avionics program. The China Aerospace Sanjiang Group immediately rebranded (and expanded) into China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation Limited (中国航天科工集团有限公司), or CASIC in 1999.
That company was also entirely owned by the communist Chinese government, like its 1992 predecessor. When searching subsidiaries, sometimes listings return as “AVIC,” or Aviation Industry Corporation. There are a seemingly equal amount of “AVIC”-named enterprises as there are “privatized” listings.
The EMIP-1 enabled the development of what are now the most basic types of “servers,” relied upon on every day to complete the most simple of modern tasks. The EMIP-1 device (intellectual property) was passed along to Konnech and Eugene Yu as Lionel Ni was in the process of returning to Mainland China. There were many CCP talent programs at the time, any combination of which coincided neatly with Ni’s direct involvement with the PRC government.
Lionel Ni claims to be among the first batch of the Thousand Talents in his 2019 University of Macau “Complete Vitae.” To reward Lionel Ni for his 1999 technology, he was awarded a company called Interstellar Network in 2000. It remains listed in many places on the Chinese internet as a “wholly US-owned enterprise.”
Lionel Ni and Eugene Yu were in business together in the U.S. between 2003 and 2005 while BestBrief was developed through Engino Technologies. After BestBrief’s completion just ahead of its implementation, Eugene Yu was given exclusive ownership of a new company called Jinhua Yulian Network Technology, based in his hometown of Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China. Konnech used Lionel Ni and the PRC’s specific servers as the bedrock of their BestBrief platform.
The Mainland-based Sun Wah Group began funneling money to Michigan State in 2004 for pro-CCP programs. It was meant to bridge language barriers and allow for Chinese cultivation of overseas talent to import to Mainland China. The initial funding went in part to the 2006 ChineseBrief that was developed with Lionel Ni in tow.
It has never been secret the intent or methodology of the Chinese Communist Party, as it pertains to international talent and their aspiration to ideologically colonize the world.
With the successful launch of the BestBrief platform for the Michigan State Confucius Institute, Konnech and Eugene Yu immediately began developing in 2006, PollChief — an election management solution and the next addition to their proprietary software line.
Thousands and Thousands of Talents
The PRC government launched in December 2008 a series of “Thousand Talent Plan” initiatives. Much of these particular iterations of PRC talent-recruiting programs focused on foreign academicians, returning Chinese nationals to the Mainland, as well as exporting its young talent abroad into high technology, highly sensitive fields and specific industries.
These programs were focused on industries and fields that were vital and critical to Chinese national security and cultural development. As logic proves, those industries are also critical to American national security and cultural development.
Simultaneous to implementing the latest CCP talent program, American intelligence and surveillance-oriented agencies began dumping obscene amounts of cash into surveillance-related research programs at universities. Not the least of these were Michigan State University.
Among the greatest beneficiaries of DOJ, FBI, Army, Navy, Air Force, NIH and National Science Foundation research grants nationwide were the MSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering. More specifically, professors Arun Ross, Anil Jain, Alex Liu, and Rong Jin, who led the department’s advanced research projects whose stated goal was to be utilized by American intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Arun Ross
Said of Arun Ross:
“expertise is in the area of biometrics, computer vision and machine learning. He has advocated for the responsible use of biometrics in multiple forums including the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on Identity and Security in Switzerland in 2018. He testified as an expert panelist in an event organized by the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee at the UN Headquarters in 2013.”
Alex X. Liu
Alex Liu is Michigan State’s security savant. He was at the top of his field so much so that Microsoft gifted research funds following preliminary work that was already set to be included in a full research paper. It was titled, “Secure Unlocking of Mobile Touch Screen Devices by Simple Gestures,” and was announced by the MSU department in September, 2013.
Rong Jin
Rong Jin is a 1998 graduate of Peking University. Peking University has a history of sending Chinese intelligence-gathering operatives to America through their educational incentives. There was a series of PRC talent programs like that of the Thousand Talents circulating at the time.
Education-veneered and incentivized PRC programs have never been a stranger to the U.S. intelligence community nor the FBI.
Anil Jain
Anil Jain began receiving Army research grants at the same time that Konnech’s interfaces became inextricably linked with Michigan State University. From there, Michigan State’s biometrics program not only expanded, but eventually became a premiere biometrics research facility for United States agencies, themselves.
In 2010, the MSU Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Anil Jain, was awarded grants for projects from several government agencies.
“These projects deal with several aspects of cutting edge research in biometrics recognition. In collaboration with West Virginia University (WVU), he has received awards for a fingerprint ridge project, altered fingerprints project, and latent enhancement project. These projects have the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) as the prime contractor. Another project in collaboration with WVU on the topic of face marks comes from the Department of Justice (DoJ).”
-”HIGHLIGHT” 10-05-2010: cse.msu.edu
This was supremely interesting that Cogent Systems was involved in such a major set of projects with government clients, and immediately after selling to 3M. In 2010, Cogent was the target of much ire for their eagerness to sell to 3M at a lower price than expected.
Cogent was purchased by 3M in 2010. It was purchased largely for its massive success in biometric technology. Cogent’s former owner, naturalized American citizen, Ming Hsieh, now owns Fulgent Genetics. 3M Cogent was at one time one of China’s leading communications companies.
Fulgent Genetics was ironically enough also recently embroiled in their own data-siphoning scandal in L.A. County, being accused of sharing personal genetic data from Covid-19 tests with the Chinese Mainland.
An LA Times article on the dispute highlighted Sheriff Alex Villanueva
However, a Town Hall article states that the FBI went so far as to explicitly warm L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva:
DoD and “Trusted Third-Parties”
Congress passed the MOVE (Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment) Act in 2009. This spawned an initiative to enable mobile voting and other novel methods to provide access to voting from overseas.
Janet Carlson with the DoD Business Transformation Agency sent Konnech an offer to use their Abvote platform for overseas voters. She suggested to clear up any state-level compliance at a later time, and for it to be cheap and “technically acceptable”:
Konnech had access to ballots and/or “ballot information” as specified in this 2010 FVAP DoD initiative which gave Konnech a contract to handle Montana’s overseas military voting program.
Loopholes
In a 2011 proposal titled, “Concept Plan and Technical Proposal for Electronic Absentee Systems for Elections (EASE): Research and Modernization of Electronic Voting for Absent Uniformed Services Voters and Overseas Citizens,” Konnech says:
“…we guard against the *accidental disclosure* of a shared key…” and “…restrict the forwarding of configurations to…*un-trusted* third parties.”
When written into contracts, this is the way legal loopholes read to allow for dodging liability. It appears as if critical configuration data could have been agreed to be shared with “trusted” partners— companies on the same “trusted” partnership tree who routinely outsource to each other — if this language was used in other state contracts with any election company.
There is also this now all-too-relevant 2020 PollChief contract with L.A. County. The contract is signed by Dean Logan, who is astonishingly also caught in the alleged Fulgent Genetics data breach.
Being embroiled in now two scandals involving data improprieties with personally identifying information and Mainland China brings its own concerns to national security. Are there CCP interests lurking beneath the surface in Los Angeles County, too?
If some of Konnech’s critical functions of the software were pulled from a cloud of a “trusted partner” in Mainland China, it could also be argued as contractual for poll-worker data to be stored with the partner, and be critical to system functions as designed. This is by nature how distributed databases work — storing data in multiple places, ie. “cloud computing”.
Even in the event of any security issues, Konnech employees may subsequently feel legally forced into silence under NDAs.
Engineering Social Compliance
Just around 2014-2015, the Sino-U.S. technological establishment also ramped up to war-time levels, investing feverishly into big data, artificial intelligence, biometrics, autonomous data collection and processing, human-robotics integration, nanotechnology, and biomolecular and genomic research programs.
Several of the projects at MSU were specifically geared to exploring and implementing social engineering and AI-based censorship algorithms and policies…Even studies on the psychological effects of these were funded elsewhere during this period.
That AI and social engineering research inevitably swayed three elections, as we are now learning from Elon Musk and “The Twitter Files.”
This was abundantly evident through looking at only a laundry list of Michigan State University Department of Computer Science and Engineering research grants over this period. Chinese operatives also had clear cut-outs for access to all of these programs as well — they were carrying it out.
The Big “Secret”
Wrapping up, the People’s Republic of China has long been on an openly stated mission to harvest the world’s best talent and to profit from it for their own development. There is no shame or guilt to be found in such.
From the mid-90’s and into the 2000’s the PRC built new technology, employed by the entire world billions of times over daily. Through an intricate system of business incentives, study abroad programs, and strategically and resourcefully placed academic scholars and researchers, the CCP and People’s Liberation Army integrated these developments with their military and scripted new aspirations for their military and society as a whole.
Along this 25-plus year timeline, Konnech, Michigan State, and the United States government — specifically the Department of Justice, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation — all in tandem with the PRC government, funded each other’s research, performed each other’s research, and shared each other’s research. There remains no doubt of that.
It has never been a secret. It has always been swept under the rug and its dangers overlooked, however.
If Chinese servers housed American PII through Konnech and Fulgent Genetics, then it is far more than likely that those servers house the FBI’s data too…and the DOJ…and DHS…and the NSF who started and perpetuated the entire ordeal through Chinese researchers, funneling intel and intellectual property back to the PLA and PRC.
The following pages are from Konnech’s “step-brothers” (through Lionel Ni), CASIC, themselves.
Here’s state-owned CASIC directly assisting the PRC in the liquefied natural gas industry. CASIC also has vested interests with Sinopec, as is to be expected of all state-sponsored companies in China.
Is it coincidence that the Bidens benefitted from what appears to be a breach of a Wuhan viral accident, and also social engineering research that was (is) performed at Michigan State, and also benefitted through LNG from the same groups of companies with their fingerprints on election software companies, albeit years and acquisitions between them?
Sun Wah Group’s Dr. Cai Guanshen is also the Chairman of the Bohai Entrepreneurs Union. Hunter Biden is widely thought to continue owning stake in the Bohai Harvest slush fund, established to inject American capital into Sinopec.
Don’t forget also that Wuhan recently completed their “One Cloud” initiative, where Lionel Ni’s Interstellar Network runs a cloud hub. That one cloud network is also physically connected to Beijing and Shangxii.
Finally, notice the “Frankfurt, Germany” node on the CASIC network, used for “intelligent manufacturing.” This is a Chinese cloud in Frankfurt, Germany, controlling their automated manufacturing industries.
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Please let that sink in.
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Lionel Ni breathed life into the Chinese space program. He was awarded an entire Mainland university.
Eugene Yu breathed life into the Chinese espionage program. He was awarded with an American university partnership and a Mainland China election company and intellectual property rights.
It’s odd that China always moved to expand their programs in American presidential election years in which a change of hands in executive power was imminent. China also consistently moves to fortify those investments in American election years in which an incumbent was running for reelection.
Was it worth it for the Chinese to take these mortal gambles?
Were there ever really even two teams?
My God this is so deep. This article turns National Security into an oxymoron.
Gus, I want you to do research on another University. It may not be about infiltration of China on voting but there is so much here it needs looking into regarding the Biden compact with Penn U. When Taibbi dump the Russia bot stuff recently names came up. Clint Watts and his German Marshall Fund’s website Hamilton 68, which tracks Russian influence campaigns. He did at least 3 hit article regarding Russia/US elections the last 3 months of 2016. His res is deep with ties to Foreign Policy Research Institute which I believe is located in PA. It just received a renewable charitable certificate of registration from PA good for one year. It has dozens of associates and the ones I've looked at so far are associated it Penn U. I believe this is the same Penn U the refuses to let anyone see Biden records when VP and also where Biden left his classified doc. What say you Gus? Willing to bust this open?