Even more interesting is that a Chinese company owns most of Grindr. Think of all the possible blackmail opportunities if they could cross reference those. At some point there were security and privacy "concerns" and US, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Foreign_Investmen... ruled that the Chinese company had to sell Grindr by 2020.
There is a large amount of stigma associated with homosexuality. You are incorrectly assuming that the rest of the population has the same world view as you do. For example, being outwardly homosexual is a great way to lose the muslim vote - a sizeable portion of the Canadian population.
There are some places in the U.S. where it's still a big deal, parts of Utah come to mind as places where I know people have been mistreated routinely, and in some cases, been in serious danger.
And of course there are individuals who would rather not make that preference public because they have business elsewhere.
If you had intended to do business in the middle east, it is a real material loss to be outed, or to be selectively/privately outed with just the right people to make your life difficult.
Of course, activists tend to choose the most useless and counterproductive ways to promote safety and tolerance for homosexuals, so something tells me things will tend to get worse when they could've gotten better. You could expect things to get worse, especially as the zoomers are exposed to these activists rather than to the truth.
Seems like a big scandal happens every few years. This is career-ruining if you’ve built your career on hypocrisy and self-hate, as at least a handful of politicians have.
Any information that someone is afraid of becoming exposed about them to someone else - the public, their religious organization, their employer, their family is good for blackmail.
This article is not a hot news story. It is meant to get the word out to politically connected folks, possibly with emphasis on those on the West Coast, and possibly low-key focused on the relatively large contingent of Democratic policy folks sitting in non-governmental jobs right now (it is the New York Times after all).
I suspect the government sources in the article would appreciate it if the politicos above keep themselves relatively clean of unnecessary foreign contacts for the next year as the remaining few folks still in government are probably giving at least 50% odds that the Democrats win again in 2020, and are thus anticipating the possibility of large backlog of background investigations checking in about 1 nano-second after the election.
There’s a difference between “contacts” and being a witting or unwitting spy.
Having foreign contacts, despite current furore, is not a crime, or improper. Now if you’re doing bad things, that’s obviously a crime and will result in disqualification, but simply “contacts”? No, that’s no reason for DQ.
I was using LinkedIn to get leads for a sales campaign years ago and wound up talking to all sorts of people who told us things that they probably shouldn't have.
At the time I thought it would be the bee's knees for espionage.
I live overseas, I have tons of foreign contacts. Of course it's not illegal (that would be terrible), but they definitely create more work when it comes to listing them on SF86 background checks.
I figured they already knew since they're watching all social media and communications anyways. In addition, foreign adversaries also hide messages in seemingly random but innocuous comments on forums and blogs made to look like real user communication but makes no sense to anyone but their intended target.
We had an intrusion on some dev boxes. The vector was an open management service on some public facing Tomcats, deployed open by accident. The intruder installed a custom Tomcat container that apparently sent some 443 traffic to a .cn domain. We figured they got some class files, not much use to anyone without the rest of our products. We never got to see their actual payload. So we killed the instances and that was that.
A week or two later, a few of us at $work got recruit pings on LI from a Chinese company to work abroad. None before or since. We figured either it was a coincidence, or whoever got our class files wanted some help learning how our product worked.
> In addition, foreign adversaries also hide messages in seemingly random but innocuous comments on forums and blogs made to look like real user communication but makes no sense to anyone but their intended target.
Maybe, but when people working in sensitive positions post their entire history, clearances, and build their own network and all you need to do is pay a nominal fee to become a LinkedIn "Pro" to get access, it makes fishing for the right targets quite a bit easier than classifieds.
Recruiting agents abroad is one thing - I'd think this would also be useful / more useful for social engineering attacks and other deeper attacks on sensitive networks. "Hey I was with you at university - want to grab coffee? Friend me!" > Now has access to the entire network of cleared professionals working at [place X]
It's naive thinking that organizations like CIA and their analogies in other countries do not track as much people as possible. And there are not so many, right? Population of the Earth is close to 8 billion, so at least a detailed global social connections graph is what they already have.
B) It might be better spycraft to use this obvious entry to Chinese intelligence in the other direction. Of course TFA may just be cover for that... are there any details that seem plausible but perhaps misleading?
C) These people ain't playin'. No one wants to end up like Shane Todd.
Chinese should be aware of self styled thought leaders and experts pop-up based on current demand on linkedin. I am sure someone would be updating CVs claiming a 10 years of deep experience in suppressing protests worldwide.
The one that particularly stuck with me is phonecalls from embassy numbers to people I know in Canada, claiming that I'm trying to enter China and that they would need to confirm details for me to gain entry. AFAIK this is an actual thing that they do for some entrants.
Since most people don't record phonecalls, it's easy to deny this sort of thing; and since it's similar to an official activity of the government there, I suspect for a lot of people it goes unnoticed, if it is more common.
I've never visited the PRC, and I have no intention of ever visiting it as long as it is run by the party.
Chinese students here are under watch as well, and it's not all that subtle. You should read some of the things that go on in North American schools.
I've received the "DHL" one before, where they read you off a tracking code in Mandarin hoping you'll call back and tell them you don't speak it, this is not that.
You can think what you want, but this is not that.
"LinkedIn is also the only major American social media platform not blocked in China because the company has agreed to censor posts containing delicate material."
Even more interesting is that a Chinese company owns most of Grindr. Think of all the possible blackmail opportunities if they could cross reference those. At some point there were security and privacy "concerns" and US, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Foreign_Investmen... ruled that the Chinese company had to sell Grindr by 2020.