George,

Can you verify if the security clearance level of the recently arrested and accused Chinese-American Navy spies Wenheng Zhao and Jinchao Wei?   

Did they have TS/SCI clearance and if so did they pass polygraphs?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/08/03/navy-sailors-charged-espio...

I appreciate this.  By the way, I do not work for USA Today.  I am a writer (maybe a famous news journalist, or maybe just a random blogger) on another platform, however.   

I oppose the polygraph because I know it is just an interrogation tool to extract confessions from people.  Unfortunately, in my circle, everyone has been brainwashed by the media to believing that the polygraph works and when I share my opinion about it I get backlash.  I have been lurking on Antipolygraph.org and other internet sites about the polygraph for a while.  To no surprise, I have been banned from Reddit, the late Federalsoup forum (now defunct), and others for speaking about about the polygraph.

Whenever someone has a job that required them to pass a thorough background check or a polygraph as terms of their employment, which is usually someone with a security clearance or in law enforcement, I dig into the story a bit.

Since this story has nothing to do with someone beating the polygraph while concealing criminal activity, I guess I will move on.  LOL.

Does anyone know exactly how Wenheng Zhao and Jinchao Wei were caught?  I mean did the feds catch them taking pictures and/or in the act of receiving money?  How did they receive the money?

George W. Maschke wrote on Jan 11^th, 2024 at 4:55am:


Do you think that U.S. federal agents conducted electronic surveillance by monitoring Wei's emails, SMSs, and/or messaging apps?  I know U.S. email services like Gmail can be easily monitored by the government.  I would think that apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram's secret chat feature are all encrypted so the U.S. government could not see them unless the sender or recipient showed the messages to the government or some other third party.  Is that true?  Can the U.S. government monitor encrypted chat messages and if so, how?

The Chinese also use WeChat, which is not encrypted, but the data is stored on Chinese servers that I'm sure the U.S. government would never see . . . that is, unless they saw the messages on Wei or someone else's personal device located in the U.S.

Hmm . . . just how far can the U.S. government go to monitor someone's electronic devices?

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I would expect that efforts were made to do all of these things.

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It's possible that the NSA has technical means of accessing WeChat's backend, but if so, I would expect that to be a closely-held secret, and I wouldn't expect indictments to include information that could lead to the discovery of that secret.

But there are other ways such information could be obtained. If information in the indictments is derived in part from WeChat transactions, such data may have been obtained from an unencrypted backup to iCloud or Google Drive, for example.

In addition, Kaspersky last year divulged that the last few generations of Apple chips include a hardware backdoor that Apple has not publicly documented. This backdoor was used in what Kaspersky has dubbed "Operation Triangulation." For more on this, see episode 955 of the Security Now podcast:

https://youtu.be/fJHzq4YOv68?si=QAXKSWVtaQYRyvLX&t=2080