LOL！ Propaganda articles from RFA (Radia Free Asia) , which is a CIA operation. Breaking up China is their evil motive, nothing else.
Radio Free Asia
The CIA launched Radio Free Asia (RFA) in 1951 as an extension of its global anti-Communist propaganda radio network. RFA beamed its signal into mainland China from a transmitter in Manila, and its operations were based on the earlier Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberation From Bolshevism model.
The CIA quickly discovered that their plan to foment political unrest in China had one major flaw: the Chinese were too poor to own radios.
Here’s a bit from
a fantastic three-page spread published by The New York Times in 1977, investigating the CIA’s role in global propaganda efforts, including Radio Free Asia: Radio Free Asia began broadcasting to mainland China in 1951 from an elaborate set of transmitters in Manila. It was an arm of the Committee for Free Asia [later changed to "The Asia Foundation"], and the C.I.A. thought of it as the beginning of an operation in the Far East that would rival Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty….
The Asia Foundation was headed for years by the late Robert Blum, who, several sources said, resigned from the C.I.A. to take it over. The foundation provided cover for at least one C.I.A. operative and carried out a variety of media-related ventures, including a program, begun in 1955, of selecting and paying the expenses of Asian journalists for a year of study in Harvard's prestigious Neiman Fellowship program….
It was only after Radio Free Asia's transmitters were operating, according to sources familiar with the case, that the C.I.A. realized that there were almost no radio receivers in private hands in mainland China. An emergency plan was drawn up.
Balloons, holding small radios tuned to Radio Free Asia's frequency, were lofted toward the mainland from the island of Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalists had fled after the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. The plan was abandoned when the balloons were blown back to Taiwan across the Formosa Strait. The CIA supposedly shuttered Radio Free Asia in the mid-1950s, but another Radio Free Asia reappeared a decade later, this time funded through a CIA-Moonie outfit called the Korean Culture and Freedom Foundation (KCFF) — a group based in Washington, D.C. that was run by a top figure in South Korea's state intelligence agency, Colonel Bo Hi Pak, who also served as the “principle evangelist” of cult leader Rev. Sun-Myung Moon of the Unification Church.
This new Moonie iteration of Radio Free Asia was controlled by the South Korean government, including the country’s own CIA, the "KCIA." It enjoyed high-level support from within the first Nixon Administration and even featured then-Congressman Gerald Ford on its board. According to
an FBI file on Rev. Moon, Radio Free Asia “at the height of the Vietnam war produced anti-communist programs in Washington and beamed them into China, North Korea and North Vietnam.”
Radio Free Asia got busted in a widespread corruption scandal in the late 1970s, when the South Korean government was
investigated for using the Moonie cult to influence US public opinion in order to keep the US military engaged against North Korea. Back in the 1970s, the
Moonies were the most
notorious cult in the United States, accused of
abducting and
"brainwashing" countless American youths. How it was that the CIA's Radio Free Asia was handed off to the Moonies was never quite explained, but given laws banning the CIA (or the KCIA) from engaging in psychological warfare in the US, the obvious thing to do was to bury Radio Free Asia long enough for everyone to forget about it.
No sooner had Radio Free Asia vanished amid scandal than it reappeared again, Terminator-like, in the 1990s — this time as a legit “independent” nonprofit wholly controlled by the BBG and funded by Congress.
Although this latest version of Radio Free Asia was supposed to be a completely new organization and was no longer as covert and B-movie spooky, its objectives and tactics remained exactly the same:
To this day it beams propaganda into the same Communist countries, including North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, China, and Burma, and fiddles around in the same sorts of spooky adventures.
For instance: In 2011, The New York Times revealed that Radio Free Asia, along with the State Department,
was involved in burying cellphones inside North Korea on its border with China, so that North Koreans could use the RFA cellphones to report to the West on conditions inside their country. That same year, following the death of Kim Jong Il, Radio Free Asia “
kicked into 24/7 emergency mode” to beam non-stop coverage of the death into North Korea in the hopes of triggering a mass uprising. BBG officials clung to the hope that, bit by bit, Radio Free Asia’s stream of anti-Communist propaganda would bring democracy and freedom to North Korea. They like to cite a
study showing that “elite” defectors from North Korea were increasingly listening to Radio Free Asia, as proof that their efforts are working.
Radio Free Asia and Anti-government Hacktivists
Which brings us up to the present, when the Broadcasting Board of Governors, Radio Free Asia and its offshoot, the Open Technology Fund, find themselves in bed with many of the very same privacy activist figures whom the public regards as the primary adversaries of outfits like Radio Free Asia and the BBG. And it's technology that brings together these supposed adversaries — the US National Security State on the one hand, and "hacktivist", "anti-government" libertarian privacy activists on the other:
“I’m proud to be a volunteer OTF advisor,” declared Cory Doctorow, editor of BoingBoing and a well-known libertarian anti-surveillance activist/author.
"Happy to have joined the Open Technology Fund's new advisory council,”
tweeted Jillian York, the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (York
recently admitted that the OTF's "Internet freedom" agenda is, at its core, about regime change, but bizarrely argued that it didn't matter.)
In 2012, just a few months after Radio Free Asia's 24/7 propaganda blitz into North Korea failed to trigger regime change, RFA sent folks from the Tor Project — including core developer Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above) — into Burma, just as the military dictatorship was finally agreeing to hand political power over to
US-backed pro-democracy politicians. The stated purpose of Appelbaum's RFA-funded expedition was to probe Burma’s Internet system from within and
collect information on its telecommunications infrastructure — which was then used to compile a report for Western politicians and “international investors” interested in penetrating Burma’s recently opened markets. Here
you can see Appelbaum’s visa — published in the report as evidence of what you needed to do to buy a SIM card in Burma.
Burma is a curious place for American anti-surveillance activists funded by Radio Free Asia to travel to, considering that it has long been a target of US regime-change campaigns. In fact,
the guru of pro-Western "color revolutions," Gene Sharp, wrote his famous guide to non-violent revolutions, “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, initially as a
guide for Burma’s opposition movement, in order to help it overthrow the military junta in the late 1980s. Sharp had crossed into Burma illegally to train opposition activists there — all
under the protection and sponsorship of the US government and one
Col. Robert Helvey, a military intelligence officer.
Jacob Appelbaum's willingness to work directly for
an old CIA cutout like Radio Free Asia in a nation long targeted for regime-change is certainly odd, to say the least. Particularly since Appelbaum made a big public show recently claiming that, though it pains him that Tor takes so much money from the US military, he would
never take money from something as evil as the CIA.
Ignorance is bliss.
Appelbaum's financial relationships with various CIA spinoffs like Radio Free Asia and the BBG go further. From 2012 through 2013, Radio Free Asia
transferred about $1.1 million to Tor in the form of grants and contracts. This million dollars comes on top of another $3.4 million Tor
received from Radio Free Asia's parent agency, the BBG, starting from 2007.
But Tor and Appelbaum are not the only ones happy to take money from the BBG/RFA.
Take computer researcher/privacy activist Harry Halpin, for example. Back in November of 2014, Halpin
smeared me as a conspiracy theorist, and then falsely accused me and Pando of being funded by the CIA — simply because I reported on Tor’s government funding. Turns out that Halpin's next-generation secure communications outfit, called LEAP, took
more than $1 million from Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund. Somewhat ironically, LEAP's
technology powers the VPN services of RiseUp.Net, the radical anarchist tech collective that provides activists with email and secure communications tools (and forces you to
sign a thinly veiled anti-Communist pledge before giving you an account).
Then there's the ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian. A few months ago, he had viciously attacked me and Pando for reporting on Tor's US government funding. But just the other day, Soghoian went on Democracy Now, and in the middle of a segment criticizing the U.S. government's runaway hacking and surveillance programs, recommended that people use a suite of encrypted text and voice apps funded by the very same intelligence-connected U.S. government apparatus he was denouncing. Specifically, Soghoian recommended apps made by Open Whisper Systems, which got $1.35 million from Radio Free Asia's Open Technology Fund from 2013 through 2014.
He told Amy Goodman: "These are best-of-breed free applications made by top security researchers, and actually subsidized by the State Department and by the U.S. taxpayer. You can download these tools today. You can make encrypted telephone calls. You can send encrypted text messages. You can really up your game and protect your communications.”When Goodman wondered why the U.S. government would fund privacy apps, he acknowledged that this technology is a soft-power weapon of U.S. empire but then gave a very muddled and naive answer:
CHRISTOPHER SOGHOIAN: Because they’re tools of foreign policy. You know, the U.S. government isn’t this one machine with one person, you know, dictating all of its policies. You have these different agencies squabbling, sometimes doing contradictory things. The U.S. government, the State Department has spent millions of dollars over the last 10 years to fund the creation and the deployment and improvement to secure communications and secure computing tools that were intended to allow activists in China and Iran to communicate, that are intended to allow journalists to do their thing and spread news about democracy without fear of interception and surveillance by the Chinese and other governments.
AMY GOODMAN: But maybe the U.S. government has a way to break in.
CHRISTOPHER SOGHOIAN: Well, you know, it’s possible that they’ve discovered flaws, but, you know, they have—the U.S. government hasn’t been writing the software. They’ve been giving grants to highly respected research teams, security researchers and academics, and these tools are about the best that we have. You know, I agree. I think it’s a little bit odd that, you know, the State Department’s funding this, but these tools aren’t getting a lot of funding from other places. And so, as long as the State Department is willing to write them checks, I’m happy that the Tor Project and Whisper Systems and these other organizations are cashing them. They are creating great tools and great technology that can really improve our security. And I hope that they’ll get more money in the future. It's convenient and nice to believe that one hand of the U.S. National Security State doesn't know what the other hand is doing — especially when the livelihoods of you and your colleagues depends on it. But as the long and dark covert intelligence history of the Broadcasters Board of Governors and Radio Free Asia so clearly shows, this thinking is naive and wrong. It also shows just how effectively the U.S. National Security State brought its opposition into the fold.
You'd think that anti-surveillance activists like Chris Soghoian, Jacob Appelbaum, Cory Doctorow and Jillian York would be staunchly against outfits like BBG and Radio Free Asia, and the role they have played — and continue to play — in working with defense and corporate interests to project and impose U.S. power abroad. Instead, these radical activists have knowingly joined the club, and in doing so, have become willing pitchmen for a wing of the very same U.S. National Security State they so adamantly oppose.
Just like last time, Chinese government cann't do such things
