Good day all. It’s long been known that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care much for people’s privacy or rights, especially if it interferes with his goal of making money. His main creation, Facebook, has become globally successful, however, it is also a security nightmare. Add to that Zuckerberg and the people running Facebook and it’s parent company, Meta, aren’t big fans of free speech.
Zuckerberg has been hauled up in front of Congress several times for a number of issues. He’s manages to slide his way out of contempt charges, primarily due to the protection of the Democrat Party. Recently, the latest problem for him was how the “Fact Checkers” he had were caught, repeatedly, flat out censoring and banning people for political reasons. This was something else that Congress was looking into.
Recently, Zuckerberg announced, after a meeting with President Trump that he was going to close down the fact checkers and move to a system similar to the one Elon Musk put into place for TwitterX, Community Notes.
However, something else is now about to detonate in Zuckerberg’s face and this one could actually get him arrested and criminally charged. One of the things that has worried many in congress and the Trump administration is how much the Chinese Communist government has been infiltrating the United States, especially it’s computer systems.
Since Meta and Facebook have access to way to much personal information on people, Congress has asked Zuckerberg and the Meta management about their connections with the Chinese government and security services. (The Ministry of State Security) Zuckerberg and the others all assured Congress and the Administration that everything was fine and that American’s Personally Identifiable Information, (PII), was perfectly safe. However, someone testified to Congress that Zuckerberg and the others flat out lied. Here some of those details from The Hill:
Sarah Wynn-Williams, the former director of global public policy at Facebook, which is now called Meta, testified at a Senate hearing Wednesday that she saw Meta executives “repeatedly undermine U.S. national security and betray American values” during her seven-year stint in that job.
In remarks to a hearing convened by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Wynn-Williams alleged Meta executives worked vigorously to “win favor” with leaders in Beijing to build an $18 billion business in China.
One of the problems the United States has is major corporations, desperate to gain access to the billion+ potential customers in China, have been willing to do pretty much whatever the ChiCom government demanded of them. Disney’s Bob Iger is a case in point.
He’s poured billions of dollars into Disney parks in China. The problem is that the Chinese Government can just take those parks and all the IP any time they want. The Disney movies are also not doing well over there either. (That most of the movies suck dead donkey dicks doesn’t help matters)
Facebook’s parent company, Meta also wants to get into China in a big way. One of the ways they could do this is to build large data-centers inside China. The issue here is that the Chinese MSS will have access to everything on those servers, and any other servers outside of China. Apparently, Zuckerberg and the Meta Execs were just fine with this.
Wynn-Williams told Hawley’s panel that during her time at Meta, “Company executives lied about what they were doing with the Chinese Communist Party to employees, shareholders, Congress and the American public,” according to a copy of her remarks.
Her most explosive claim is that she witnessed Meta executives decide to provide the Chinese Communist Party with access to user data, including the data of Americans. And she says she has the “documents” to back up her accusations.
I’m going to say that if this is true, (And frankly, knowing Zuckerberg and Meta’s history, I think it is), then this is going to be very bad for Meta, Facebook and Zuckerberg. I hope that Ms. Wynn-Williams does have the documents to back up her story. I suspect that she does.
Meta has pushed back on Wynn-Williams’s testimony, calling it “divorced from reality” and “riddled with false claims.”
“While Mark Zuckerberg himself was public about our interest in offering our services in China and details were widely reported beginning over a decade ago, the fact is this: we do not operate our services in China today,” Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels said.
I have some questions of course. Meta’s PR people went on the attack, I don’t see them providing anything to refute Ms. Wynn-Williams assertions.
Meta says it regularly discloses the fact that it generates advertising revenue from advertisers based in China but says that doesn’t mean it operates services in China. It says its services are banned in China.
I have a question. Just what services are banned? Are we talking about the Facebook and Instagram platforms? WhatsApp? Could you be a bit more specific? As an aside, I used to use WhatsApp before Meta bought it. It was considered a secure communications system. When Meta/Facebook took it over, they promptly blew huge holes in the security features. I promptly dropped them and told others they should as well.
In any case, I would think that Meta wouldn’t have an issue talking to Congress and refuting Ms. Wynn-Williams assertions. I would think they would jump at the chance to blow her credibility all over the map. However, they went a different route, one that makes me go “Hmmm, I wonder.”
Hawley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Crime and Counterterrorism Subcommittee, said Meta tried “desperately to prevent” him from holding the hearing.
“They have stopped at absolutely nothing to prevent today’s testimony. They have absolutely gone to war to try to prevent it,” he said. “They have gone scorched earth to prevent her from telling what she knows.”
“They have threatened her with $50,000 in punitive damages every time she mentions Facebook in public … even if the statements she is making are true,” he said. “Facebook is attempting her total and complete financial ruin. They’re attempting to destroy her personally, they’re attempting to destroy her reputation, and I think the question is, ‘Why?’”
“What is it they are so afraid of?” Hawley asked. “I think that we’ve already got a sense of it. Sarah Wynn-Williams knows the truth about Facebook. That’s what they fear.”
This is not what an innocent company would do. An innocent company would provide data showing that their accuser was wrong, mistake or lying. A guilty party is the one that goes on the attack. They are the ones trying to hide something.
Wynn-Willias told senators that Meta built a “physical pipeline connecting the United States and China” and executives “ignored warnings that this would provide backdoor access to the Chinese Communist Party, allowing them to intercept the personal data and private messages of American citizens.”
She said China does not currently have access to U.S. user data only because Congress “stepped in.”
One of the problems with Facebook is that it’s a giant security hole. They have had problems in the past. They’ve claimed to have fixed holes as they found them, and I suspect they have when it came to actual criminals. As for state agents? I’m not so sure.
Meta disputes that claim as false.
Of course they do. If they said “Oh yeah, we did do that.” it would make an alien anal probe some pleasant.
The pipeline to China mentioned by the whistleblower, the Pacific Light Cable, was never completed.
The cable, which was first announced in 2016 with support from Facebook, Google and other companies, was envisioned as a high-capacity fiberoptic undersea cable running thousands of miles under the Pacific Ocean, connecting Los Angeles and Hong Kong.
I would love to know what they were thinking when Meta cooked up this idea. Oh wait, they weren’t. All they saw was a billion Chinese users they could show ads to. Setting up an end point in China is the height of stupidity.
Bloomberg reported in 2020 that Facebook, Google and other companies abandoned their plans to link the U.S. to Hong Kong. They revised their proposal to build the link only as far as Taiwan and the Philippines, according to Bloomberg.
So the MSS does have access to the data line after all. They just needed to be a bit more subtle about how they connected to it. I seem to recall that the United States did something like this back during the Cold War. There is actually a book about it called Blind Man’s Bluff on the whole story. Somehow, I don’t think that China used a sub and divers to hack into the data line.
Wynn-Williams also told lawmakers that while Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to champion free speech, she witnessed the company work closely with the Chinese Communist Party “to construct and test custom-built censorship tools that silenced and censored critics of the Chinese Communist Party.”
She said the company agreed to Beijing’s demand that it delete the Facebook account of a prominent Chinese dissident living on American soil and then “lied to Congress” about the incident at a Senate hearing.
A person familiar with the matter said Wynn-Williams’s testimony was referring to Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui.
I did a quick search on Guo Wengui. The first thing to pop up was the ever so accurate Wikipedia. If you read between the lines, it looks like he may have pissed off the wrong people in the Chinese Government and made tracks out of China. (He is, or was, a Chinese national) According to the article a Facebook page affiliated with him was taken down. Facebook used their famous “Violated community standards” nonsense. Funny how often that has happened over the last few years, isn’t it?
However, there has always been issues with the accuracy of Zuckerberg’s testimony to various house and senate committees. He’s managed to avoid charges of contempt of congress and perjury in the past, however, if Ms. Wynn-Williams testimony holds up and she “Has the goods” so to speak, Mark Zuckerberg, potentially, is in serious trouble. Here are some of those details from WokeSpy:
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is facing a potential criminal referral following revelations that Facebook was willing to grant the Chinese Communist Party access to the data of Americans.
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said the revelations could lead to a criminal referral against Zuckerberg.
Hawley posted on X:
“And here you have it, straight from a former Facebook employee … Meta was willing to store data in China & give the Chinese government access to it … To hell with Americans’ user data and personal information.
It’s always been profit & power for Meta.”
There is more in the WokeSpy article from Senator Hawley. What is surprising is that it isn’t just the Republicans that are a bit peeved at Zuckerberg.
Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut also weighed in, saying that “American people are going to be pretty outraged that Mark Zuckerberg sold out America with China and that he imperiled our national security.”
Normally, I have absolutely nothing good to say about Blumenthal, however, it does appear that this might just be crossing party lines. One of the problems for Mark Zuckerberg is that he’s managed to piss off both sides. Normally, you will see one political party protecting someone from the other.
Almost all of this, when it happens is due to one party thinking that it’s wrong or unfair or politically motivated by the other party. (Usually its one side doing the job they were bribed to do. What? You think that big money donors throw millions at candidates because they agree with them?) In this case, Facebook, Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s arrogance, with a dash of humility if it means not being indicted, has finally caught up with him. We shall see if anything comes of it.
Thatisall
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