News of the World

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Chinese Spy Balloon Carried Technology to Monitor Communication Signals

“High resolution imagery from U-2 flybys revealed that the high-altitude balloon was capable of conducting signals intelligence collection operations,” an official with the State Department, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Epoch Times.

“The high altitude balloon’s equipment was clearly for intelligence surveillance and inconsistent with the equipment onboard weather balloons. It had multiple antennas to include an array likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications. It was equipped with solar panels large enough to produce the requisite power to operate multiple active intelligence collection sensors,” the official added.

Frank Gaffney, executive chairman at the Center for Security Policy, told NTD that China would likely have an interest in monitoring communications between intercontinental ballistic missile silos.
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“The United States sent a clear message to the PRC that its violation of our sovereignty was unacceptable by shooting down the balloon, protecting our own sensitive intelligence, and maximizing our ability to track the balloon and recover the payload to get more information on the PRC’s program,” the State Department official said, adding that the United States would explore taking action against Chinese entities that supported the incursion of U.S. airspace.
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The balloon is believed to be part of communist China’s fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations, which are typically undertaken at the direction of the People’s Liberation Army. The program has been in operation “for several years,” a Pentagon spokesman said Wednesday. U.S. officials have since learned that China has flown the surveillance balloons over more than 40 countries across 5 continents, the State Department official said.

The United States is contacting other countries to learn about the scope of the program and other details.

Mao Ning, with China’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters in Beijing that the accusations “may be part of the U.S. side’s information warfare against China” and claimed that the United States was “overreacting” when it shot the balloon down.
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An assessment of the risk of intelligence collection was deemed to be low to moderate while the risk to U.S. personnel on the ground if the balloon was shot down was determined to be moderate to significant, prompting officials to advise Biden to wait to bring down the balloon until it was over water, Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

"You are overreacting",  they said.  Seriously, China?
Would you allow the US to send spy balloons to Shanghai or Macao or even Hong Kong?
Would you ever admit what happened at Tiananmen Square?

FBI Disavows Internal Memo Warning Against ‘Radical Traditionalist Catholic Ideology’

The FBI’s national office on Thursday repudiated a reported internal memo that warned about a connection between so-called “radical-traditionalist Catholics” and “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.”

The bureau told The Epoch Times that the internally distributed “field office product” about “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI.”

“Upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters quickly began taking action to remove the document from FBI systems and conduct a review of the basis for the document,” the FBI National Press Office continued. “The FBI is committed to sound analytic tradecraft and to investigating and preventing acts of violence and other crimes while upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and will never conduct investigative activities or open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity.”

The statement said that “our standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products” but said that “this particular field office product” was “disseminated only within the FBI.” That document “does not meet the exacting standards of the FBI,” it said.

That response came in response to a question about a report from a former FBI special agent, Kyle Seraphin, who published the internal FBI memo on Wednesday via the UncoverDC website. Seraphin, himself a whistleblower who was suspended by the bureau in June 2022, stated that he obtained the document from an FBI whistleblower.

“The FBI’s Richmond Division would like to protect Virginians from the threat of ‘white supremacy,’ which it believes has found a home within Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass,” Seraphin wrote for UncoverDC. “An intelligence analyst within the Richmond Field Office of the FBI released in a new finished intelligence product dated January 23, 2023, on Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists (RMVE) and their interests in ‘Radical-Traditionalist Catholics’ or RTCs.”

His report included screenshots of the purported document, dated Jan. 23, which cites the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that identified several RTC “hate groups” within the United States.

‘The FBI Is Rotted at Its Core’: Republicans Hold First Weaponization of the Federal Government Hearing

Yeah, nowadays the FBI can make feel very sick  indeed.

During the last Congress, Jordan and other Republicans sent “over a hundred letters” to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI which were “either inadequately answered or ignored entirely.”

The panel heard from prominent figures like former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, who contended for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, as well as Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

The first hearing comes after Republicans in December unveiled a huge 1,050 page whistleblower report detailing the “weaponization” of the federal government.
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Jordan emphasized that Republicans’ findings came from the testimony of FBI agents, many of whom were later suspended from the agency.
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For instance, on Nov. 18, 2021, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee were told that the FBI had created a “threat tag” for parents voicing their concerns at school board meetings. In May 2022, another whistleblower revealed that dozens of parents designated with a “threat tag” were being investigated by the agency.
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In April 2022, another whistleblower told Republicans that FBI agents “were being run out of the bureau” for attending conservative political events while off duty.
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Additional testimony in September 2022 revealed that Jan. 6 case files had been altered to make it appear that DVEs were on the rise, as Democrats and President Joe Biden have long claimed. The agent was later suspended.

In September 2022, yet another whistleblower revealed to Republicans that the FBI views the Betsy Ross flag, the original design of the American flag with 13 stars, “as a terrorist symbol.”

Additional testimony found that the FBI accepts personal data on users from Facebook “without the user’s consent.”