Thank you everyone. The circular pipeline basically goes like this:
CIA does the actual heavy lifting and finds the documents, maps, testimonies, etc. -> they are sent to journalists or NGOs to base a story on -> the state department uses the resulting articles to make policy -> the journalists receive an award from a state dept. NGO to deflect criticism of the “investigation”.
OSINT is a lie, it’s the CIA all the way down, philanthropy isn’t real.
One more thing because I know a lot of people use proton. In 1970 a longstanding company based in Switzerland, Crypto AG, was found to have been owned by the CIA. An investigation found that the swiss intelligence services benefited from this relationship for years. Today, Proton Mail is based in switzerland despite not being owned or founded by swiss nationals. in 2024, they ran a raffle fundraiser and the first beneficiary of the raised money they listed was fucking freedom house. There is now a clear link between proton and the state department through freedom house.
There is now a clear link between proton and the state department through freedom house
fuck
still better than google at least
And yet it took until 2020 for any MSM to report that all of Crypto AG’s equipment was backdoored and that it was indeed a CIA cutout the whole time. That information was available since at least 1993 when the West German intelligence sold its share to the CIA and the Swiss government as well as some reporters caught wind of it.
Do you have any email services you would suggest instead if proton?
Some people use totanota but imo it’s kind of all the same. Email is not designed for privacy because of the protocols it’s based on which are super old. Assume all email can be backdoored.
Lol i chuckled at the “My chinese isn’t as good as it used to be.” (literally never spoken a word of chinese in her life)
Great read.
She’s now at CHRD and learned her lesson because CHRD doesn’t divulge any information about itself. All they have is a collection of articles they get from other places.
Yet just a few days ago the Guardian wrote:
According to data gathered by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a US-based NGO, between 2017 and 2019, there were 29 cases of law firms or lawyers having their licences revoked or suspended, compared with nine cases between 2014 and 2016.
Which means this no-name, opaque NGO is able to investigate this kind of stuff. Who pays for it? Like I get doing a labor of love but I also doubt people like Sophie Richardson don’t have a source of income.
In a way it makes them glow even more because you have to wonder how exactly that no-name NGO with a website made in 2008 counts as a job. This is the only job she has listed on her linkedin, along with her previous title at HRW and a one-year stint as a ‘visiting scholar’ at Stanford in-between the two.
CHRD on linkedin itself has only 2-10 employees; this is filled in by how many people list them as their employer. They have a “Team associate” living in Hong Kong… unfortunately, their profile is private. CHRD is based in Washington ostensibly as it lists two employees in washington, one of them being Sophie.
OSINT is a joke but sometimes we can still use a bit of it lol
An outstanding piece! This really is the perfect case study to illustrate how the mainstream media function as an imperialist disnformation laundering network on a systemic level.
Thank you for writing this piece!
